ArtCraft: 13 free Adobe and Office clones built with Claude. Which ones you can actually use today

In less than three weeks, a small company called ArtCraft put free desktop apps on GitHub that copy the tools most creative people pay for every month: Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, Word, Excel, Figma and six more. Its apps page now lists 13 of them. They're open source, written in pure Rust, and were built with heavy help from Claude Opus. The biggest one, PhotoCraft, passed 67,000 GitHub stars in 18 days.

You'll see headlines saying this killed Adobe. It didn't, and the people who made it don't claim it did. The more useful story for anyone who builds with Claude is how it was built, which apps are worth opening today, and one design choice that most of the coverage skipped.

This isn't the end of Adobe. It's a public demo of what a small team plus Claude can ship in under a month.

What ArtCraft actually is

ArtCraft is led by Brandon Thomas, an Atlanta-based developer. The project calls the suite "Crafting Apps": 13 native apps, each a free, open-source rebuild of a well-known paid program. All 10 public repositories I checked through GitHub's API use the Apache-2.0 licence, which lets you use, change and ship the code, including commercially.

The apps run locally on your own files. Most of them also compile to WebAssembly, so they can run in a browser tab without an install. Here's the full list, what each one copies, and the status label the project gives it:

Read that last column twice. Only three apps carry the "Early alpha" label, and the other ten say "In development". Thomas himself describes the whole suite as alpha software. That framing is honest, and it's the one to keep in mind for the rest of this piece.

Is it legal to clone Photoshop?

Each README describes its app as a "clean-room reimplementation". In plain terms, the team rebuilt each program from public information and from what the original visibly does, rather than from Adobe's or Microsoft's code.

That covers copyright on the code. It doesn't settle everything. Software patents are a separate question, and nothing I found explains how ArtCraft has dealt with them. So the honest summary is legal-ish: solid ground on the code, an open question on patents. I'm not a lawyer. If you plan to build a business on top of one of these apps, ask one before you do.

The star numbers

GitHub stars aren't users, but they do measure attention. Here are the 10 public repositories as of October 18, 2026, read from GitHub's API, with the date each repository was created:

Together that's 157,003 stars. PhotoCraft alone has 67,287, and its repository was created on September 30, so those arrived in 18 days. The Office clones came a week later, and WordCraft still reached 14,313. I didn't get star counts for FigCraft, SoundCraft and CADCraft, so they're left out rather than guessed.

App by app: try today or wait

I haven't installed any of these apps. This verdict comes from the makers' own status labels, the limits they list, and how much damage a bug could do to the kind of work each app is for.

PhotoCraft deserves its own paragraph because it's the most complete. Its project page lists version 0.7.0 and says it opens and saves layered PSD and PSB files, with 134 of 135 real-world test files round-tripping byte for byte. It has 16 adjustment layers, more than 70 live filters, smart objects, layer styles, on-device subject selection, 8, 16 and 32-bit colour, RGB, CMYK and Lab, and ICC colour management. That's a serious list for an alpha. It's still not something to hand a paying client's file to.

The part builders should care about: agent-ready apps

Here's the design choice most coverage skipped. ArtCraft's principles say every app can be driven three ways besides the mouse: a command-line interface, a JSON control channel, and an MCP server. PhotoCraft also ships a headless CLI that the project describes as being for scripts and agents.

If you build with Claude, that changes what these apps are. Photoshop is built for a person at a screen. An app with an MCP server is built for a person and an agent working on the same files. In principle, Claude Code or any other MCP client could open a file, apply an edit, export it and move on to the next one without anyone clicking anything. Resizing a folder of product shots, merging a stack of PDFs or building a deck from a data file stop being macros you record and become tasks you describe in a sentence.

I haven't wired one up yet, so I can't tell you how reliable those channels are. But the direction matters more than this release. Most creative software treats automation as an add-on you pay extra for or script around. ArtCraft treats it as the starting point. And because it's open source, you can read exactly what an agent is allowed to do before you give it your files.

What it means if you build with Claude

Strip out the Adobe drama and look at the build itself. A small team led by one developer leaned heavily on Claude Opus, created its first repositories on September 30 and its Office batch on October 7, and by October 18 listed 13 apps. That's not 13 finished products. It's 13 serious starts, in Rust, with real file-format work in the best of them. Three things are worth taking from it:

• Cloning well-documented software got much cheaper. When the target behaviour is public and well known, Claude can carry a lot of the implementation. The hard part moves to testing. PhotoCraft's PSD claim is backed by a set of real files, which is the right instinct.
• Build the agent interface first. A CLI and a JSON channel from day one make an app testable by scripts and usable by agents. That's cheap to add at the start and painful to bolt on later.
• Attention isn't adoption. 157,003 stars in under three weeks is a launch, not a user base. These apps still have to survive real files from real clients.

The limits, plainly

• The makers say PhotoCraft and EffectCraft aren't a replacement for daily professional or client work yet.
• PhotoCraft has no generative fill, and plugins don't run.
• FilmCraft is slow on big footage and has no plugins.
• EffectCraft can't open existing After Effects projects.
• DesignCraft's layout for Asian languages isn't finished, so I'd treat Arabic and other right-to-left text as unproven until someone shows otherwise.
• Everything is alpha or in development. Expect bugs, and keep a backup of any file you open with these apps.

The makers also publish feature-coverage percentages for each app. They're self-assessed, so I've left them out.

Should you cancel Adobe?

No, not yet. If your income depends on Photoshop, Premiere Pro or After Effects, keep paying. Adobe's Creative Cloud All Apps plan runs around $70 a month, and that buys mature tools, plugins and the file compatibility your clients expect. What you can do today is install PdfCraft for PDF chores, try LightCraft if you shoot JPEG, and use VectorCraft for simple graphics. If you build tools, read the CLI and MCP docs. That's the part that will still matter after the star counts settle down.

The one-line version

ArtCraft is 13 free, open-source, Claude-built clones of Adobe and Office apps; three are worth trying today, none should replace paid tools for client work yet, and the agent-ready design is the real news.

Sources

Facts and prices checked October 18, 2026:

• ArtCraft — the Crafting Apps page (app list, status labels, principles: CLI, JSON, MCP)
• ArtCraft — PhotoCraft (version, PSD/PSB round-trip, feature list, headless CLI)
• GitHub — the storytold organization (repositories, stars, Apache-2.0 licence)
• PetaPixel — Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom using AI (Oct 7, 2026)
• CellCog — ArtCraft's open-source Adobe and Office clones (clean-room READMEs, Claude Opus)