As a previous graphic designer, Adobe software has always been my go-to. Adobe is considered the industry standard for graphic design and digital illustration. There are loads of great open-source alternatives to Adobe creative software, but there are still issues with using open-source tools. However, there are many big issues with Adobe that push me more toward using open-source alternatives as standard, and these aren't the same issues found in open-source creative software. Open-source might be slower or require multiple tools for a suite, but it doesn't have these major problems like Adobe software does.

5 Pricing

The amount and the structure

Price is the main reason most people prefer to switch to alternative or open-source software rather than using Adobe software.

You get what you pay for with Adobe: Award-winning software developed by passionate teams of experts. But how much is too much to keep paying for these tools? Adobe raises its prices yearly, and if you’re a hobbyist, the prices aren’t sustainable.

Adobe offers student pricing for those in higher education, but those prices are still high when comparing Adobe with the Affinity Suiteand most especially to any open-source free tools.

While Adobe has some free tools — namely apps like Adobe Express and Adobe Fresco — there is no free desktop software, even with limited functions. This holds back anyone who is simply looking to learn a skill, those who wish to change into careers in the creative industries, or hobbyist creatives who don’t make money or use their creations in professional settings.

4 Unending AI features

It’s everywhere you look

I might sound like old woman shouts at cloud for this, but I think the unending addition of AI tools into creative software is encouraging designers to be lazier. Of course, if I think of this too hard, then computers and digital software are the bad guys too — graphic designers and editors previously created layouts with no computers at all. Maybe accepting AI is part of moving with the times.

Adding AI tools to creative software can be helpful. It can save time — a lot of time — performing seemingly basic tasks, such as selecting a subject to remove a background. But often, AI just encourages laziness and produces subpar results.

With some great hidden and traditional tools in Photoshop, AI isn’t always needed. The clone stamp and healing brush have worked wonders for years at removing objects from images, and plenty of times, it doesn’t take very long to achieve great results. You’ll find these traditional tools in most Photoshop alternative software.

Using generative AI fill or other features might provide a solution in seconds, but it often gives the designer less creative control, subpar results, and works as a quick fix rather than a good fix. Open-source software rarely has AI features, encouraging designers to fix and edit images with more attention to detail and control of the results.

3 Bloatware

Installing more than what you bargained for

When installing any Adobe software, it’s not just that one tool that’s now on your device. Firstly, for most of Adobe’s creative software, you need to install Adobe Creative Cloud on your system before installing your desired software. This is even the case if you’re subscribing to a solo app plan or a smaller plan like the Photography plan, and exclusively if you’re an Adobe All Apps plan subscriber.

Installing your chosen software introduces all the other required software and bloatware that comes with it. When the apps update annually, you’ll also have duplicates of software that include the previous year’s version alongside the new updated version, essentially taking up double the space on your system. Then there are beta apps and extra non-option apps like Media Encoder that come with certain programs as standard.

2 Lack of ownership

Digital artists don’t own their tools with Adobe

Alongside the pricing structure of Adobe tools, one of the biggest complaints about using Adobe is that you can no longer own the product yourself. You don’t even get a rental license unless you’re purchasing Adobe Elements software which has a 3-year license.

In a bygone era, you would buy a physical disk of your chosen program — I had Photoshop and Lightroom on disk for one year before this system was abolished, and Creative Cloud was introduced as standard. While Adobe products were expensive on disk, you only had to pay once, and you could keep an outdated copy for as long as you wanted before needing to pay for a new upgrade.

With Creative Cloud, you rent cloud-based software, and you’re tied into lengthy contracts which are practically impossible to break out of. It feels like there’s even no ownership of your files since Adobe keeps larger libraries of your cloud storage held hostage if you stop subscribing.

Adobe’s rental agreement keeps people using Adobe products longer than necessary, making it harder to switch to open-source but giving plenty of reasons to do so.

1 Background activities

It’s always running

One common frustration of using Adobe software — and especially common with Adobe Acrobat — is that it often tries to run updates in the background. This seems to happen regardless of whether you’re using a Windows or Mac operating system, with a few hacks to successfully switch it off.

Some users have reported games crashing every time Acrobat runs a background update. Others simply report how difficult it is to switch off, either temporarily or permanently.

Background updates can be helpful to ensure that the next time you run a tool, it’s running the latest version, but that should be in your control. Not everyone wants to update software, and some prefer to choose when the updates happen. Adobe’s automatic background updates can cause issues while running other programs.

Open-source is waiting for me, Adobe

Despite the fact that Adobe’s software is powerful, feature-rich, and widely considered the industry-standard tools in the creative industries, there are features that make me want to use open-source tools instead. With increasing price, ownership, and hidden bloatware being the main issues, it’s not going to take much longer before I say goodbye to Adobe for good. Open-source tools are improving all the time and there are tons of great comparable software for my needs.