I tried replacing Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat with free vibe-coded alternatives, and they're surprisingly good

Tired of Adobe's subscription practices, software engineer Brandon Thomas decided to build his own alternatives to Adobe's popular Creative Cloud applications. Thomas, armed with 15 years of software engineering experience and Claude Opus 5.5, set out to recreate seven Adobe applications, making them completely free and open source.

All seven applications are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux and are designed to look and feel similar to their Adobe counterparts. Thomas shared the project on Reddit, revealing that he had been frustrated with Adobe for years.

Among the seven applications, PDFCraft has gained attention as one of the top alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. PDFCraft offers a browser-based version and a desktop application, both of which process documents locally rather than uploading them to a server. The desktop version features over 80 tools for handling PDF tasks, including highlighting, annotating, filling out forms, merging and splitting documents, rearranging pages, adding signatures, and redacting sensitive information. PDFCraft also supports password protection and OCR for scanned documents.

While some features of PDFCraft are still in progress, it has proven surprisingly good for everyday PDF-related tasks. The tool is completely free, open source, and doesn't require users to upload potentially sensitive documents to random websites. Thomas has expressed his intent to continue using PDFCraft despite its early stage, highlighting the benefits of using open-source alternatives to expensive Adobe subscriptions.