ArtCraft vs Adobe & Office — the honest comparison

Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps runs about $60+/month. Office adds more. ArtCraft costs $0. Here is exactly what you give up — and what you don't.

Where ArtCraft outright wins

Price: $0 vs $700+/year. For students, hobbyists and indie makers this alone decides it.
Privacy: local apps, no cloud accounts, no AI-training checkboxes to hunt down.
Ownership: open source means no rug-pull. Your tools can't be discontinued out from under you.
Speed on modest hardware: Rust apps launch in a blink; Creative Cloud is famous for doing the opposite.

Where Adobe and Microsoft still win

Deep pro pipelines: Photoshop's retouching ecosystem, InDesign-grade print production, After Effects motion graphics — no free suite matches these yet.
Collaboration: real-time multi-user editing, comments and enterprise admin are cloud-suite features by nature.
File-format edge cases: obscure legacy formats and plugin-dependent files still need the incumbents.
Support & SLAs: businesses pay for someone to call. Open source gives you GitHub issues and community.

The verdict by user type

You are…	Recommendation
Student / hobbyist / indie maker	Switch fully. ArtCraft + a browser covers 95% of your needs.
Freelancer with client files	ArtCraft daily; keep one month of Adobe for delivery weeks if clients demand native files.
Agency / studio	Stay on Adobe for now; watch PhotoCraft and VectorCraft closely.
Writer / analyst / student presenter	WordCraft + GridCraft + DeckCraft replace Office for almost everyone.

Try it yourself

Reading comparisons only goes so far — the suite is free, so the cheapest test is a weekend. Start with PhotoCraft (the flagship) and the download guide.