ArtCraft Releases Free Open-Source Adobe Alternatives – FilmCraft for Premiere Pro, EffectCraft for After Effects, Written in Rust With AI

Software News

by Nino LeitnerToday

Subscribe to News - Software

Developer Brandon Thomas and his company ArtCraft have released seven free, open-source applications modeled on Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps, including FilmCraft as a Premiere Pro alternative and EffectCraft for After Effects users. According to Thomas, the apps were written in Rust with the help of an AI coding model, and his motivation was Adobe’s cancellation fee. Let’s take a closer look at what the video tools can and cannot do at this stage.

The suite consists of PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign) and PdfCraft (Acrobat Pro, called PrintCraft in Thomas’s first announcement). All seven are dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, run natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, and are available as installers and source code from ArtCraft’s website and GitHub. Thomas, who previously served as CEO of Storyteller.ai, the company behind the FakeYou voice platform, describes himself as a software developer with 15 years of experience and roughly a decade of Rust work. He says he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to write the code, and that the apps are “clean-room” reimplementations containing no Adobe code. ArtCraft itself labels them alpha software, and Thomas has said he did not intend to make the repositories public as early as he did.

A response to Adobe’s cancellation fee

We have previously reported on Adobe’s $150 million settlement with the US Department of Justice over its subscription practices. The government alleged that Adobe hid the early termination fee on its annual plans billed monthly and made cancellation difficult. The settlement splits into $75 million in civil penalties and $75 million in free services for customers, and the proposed order requires Adobe to disclose the fee clearly and offer easy ways to cancel. Adobe denied any wrongdoing.

Thomas names that fee directly as the reason he targeted Adobe, saying he had “stumbled over the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.” His wider claim is that AI coding tools will allow small teams to build near-identical open-source versions of paid software, summed up in his statement that “software is over.” In his first announcement, he promised “100% parity within a month.” After Hacker News commenters pointed to missing features, he revised that to 99% parity within months rather than years.

ArtCraft started out as an AI image and video tool, which lets users compose shots from images, 3D meshes and posed characters before rendering them with generative models. According to Thomas, its paid token business funds development of the free apps, and he is offering bug bounties and stipends to outside contributors. The project has also grown beyond Adobe. ArtCraft’s website now lists 12 Craft Apps, including WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, which ArtCraft positions against Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as SoundCraft and CADCraft. Thomas has named AutoCAD and SolidWorks as further targets.

FilmCraft editing and color tools

FilmCraft is the most relevant of the seven for our readers. The editor offers Source and Program monitors, a multi-track timeline, three-point editing, ripple, roll, slip and slide trims, J/K/L trimming, markers, nesting and unlimited undo. Time is calculated on integer ticks, which the project says keeps 23.976 and 29.97 drop-frame timecode exact.

Color work takes place in a Lumetri-style panel with basic correction, eight creative looks, RGB and hue-based curves, color wheels, HSL secondaries and a vignette. Grading is processed in linear light, and the scopes are computed from the graded image. Adobe has meanwhile reworked color grading in Premiere itself. The README lists 93 video effects, around 30 transitions and 26 blend modes, rendered through a GPU compositor. On the audio side, there are BS.1770 and EBU R128 loudness meters, a track mixer with sends and submixes, and Read, Latch, Touch and Write automation.

Codecs and interchange

The codecs are written by the project itself, without FFmpeg. FilmCraft decodes ProRes from 422 Proxy up to 4444 XQ and exports ProRes 422 HQ, H.264 with AAC, DNxHD and DNxHR, MXF OP1a and OP-Atom, PNG sequences and WAV. AV1 can be decoded, but not exported, and HEVC export depends on hardware encoding.

FilmCraft uses its own project format and cannot open Premiere Pro projects. Timelines move between the two via Final Cut Pro 7 XML, and the app also supports FCPXML, OpenTimelineIO, CMX 3600 EDL, AAF and OMF 2.0.

Current limitations

FilmCraft currently rates the app at about 86% feature breadth, measured against Premiere Pro 26.5.2, and at about 56% “ready for real work,” which the maintainers call their “honest estimate.” The project lists its biggest gaps as speed on large footage, no import of Premiere Pro projects, no plugin hosting for VST3, Audio Units or OpenFX, limited delivery codecs (H.264 in software, H.265 only through hardware encoding, and no AV1 export), less testing on Windows and Linux, and few AI features. Camera RAW is not supported. ArtCraft’s product page lists FilmCraft at version 0.6.0, up from 0.4.0 when the apps first appeared.

For camera-original footage, this means that RAW material and heavy files currently fall outside what FilmCraft handles on its own, particularly on Windows and Linux machines.

EffectCraft for motion graphics

EffectCraft is the youngest app in the suite, and offers compositions, layers, keyframes, 306 effects, layer styles, expressions, 3D cameras and lights, a render queue, Lottie import and export, and trained models for rotoscoping and face tracking. It describes nearly every After Effects feature as present, but not yet verified to behave like After Effects.

EffectCraft cannot open .aep or .aepx files, After Effects plugins do not run, and render results differ from Adobe’s in places. The project also notes basic interaction bugs on Linux and Windows. Adobe is taking After Effects in its own AI direction, as we covered with the After Effects AI Assistant beta.

Designed to be controlled by AI agents

Every function in FilmCraft is a command that can be triggered from the user interface, a command-line tool, a JSON control channel or an MCP server. The README has counted more than 650 of these commands and says the trailer and grades in its screenshots were produced by an AI agent operating the app. PhotoCraft and EffectCraft follow the same approach. This is comparable to the MCP-based AI assistant integration in DaVinci Resolve 21.1.

Clean-room claims and the Adobe question

Some social media posts described the project as “decompiled” Adobe software. The repositories describe a different method. FilmCraft’s README states that the app was written from public ITU-T, ISO and IETF specifications and contains no Adobe code, icons, presets or LUTs. The project’s rules for contributors and AI agents go further: “Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside Adobe application bundles,” and “Observe behaviour by using the app.” Reference screenshots of Premiere Pro may be kept locally but must never be committed or shipped. Each project carries a statement that it is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe.

The clean-room claim has not been independently verified, and how much of the code the AI model wrote rests on Thomas’s account. At the time of writing, Adobe has not commented publicly on ArtCraft, and has not responded to press requests for comment.

The ethical question

Adobe’s subscription practices have cost the company a great deal of goodwill among filmmakers, and the cancellation fee settlement shows that the frustration is not imagined. That does not settle whether rebuilding its applications this way is fair. FilmCraft and EffectCraft follow the layouts, panel names, menu structures and keyboard shortcuts of Premiere Pro and After Effects, and the contributor rules describe a process of studying Adobe’s running software and reproducing its behavior. In US law, interface behavior has long been treated as hard to protect.

Legal and ethical are not the same question, though. Workflows that Adobe’s designers and engineers refined over decades are now being reproduced in weeks, by a company that funds the work through a paid generative AI service.

The role of the AI model raises a second question. Earlier this year, the maintainer of the Python library chardet used Claude to rewrite it and moved it from the LGPL to the MIT license, arguing the result was a new work. Free Software Foundation executive director Zoë Kooyman said at the time that using a model trained on the code it is asked to reimplement is not a clean process. Adobe’s source code is closed, so that argument does not transfer directly, but the models behind tools like this were trained on large amounts of public material, which can include documentation, tutorials and descriptions of the very software being recreated. Whether “clean room” means the same thing when the developer is a language model is not yet settled.

There is also a question of sustainability for anyone tempted to switch. A suite of 12 applications maintained largely by one developer and his AI tools, funded by a separate business, is a different proposition from a commercial product with a support contract, however frustrating that contract may be.

Price and availability

All Craft Apps are free, with installers for macOS, Windows (x64, x86 and ARM64), Linux and FreeBSD, plus a self-hostable browser build. Each release ships with SHA-256 checksums. Interest has grown quickly: by October 11, PhotoCraft had passed 40,000 stars on GitHub, and at the time of writing FilmCraft had around 10,600 stars and 4,200 forks. For more information, please visit the ArtCraft website.

Where do you draw the line between a legitimate open-source alternative and a copy of someone else’s work, and would you use FilmCraft or EffectCraft once they mature? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!