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Alternatives to Adobe

Open-source, free and low-cost alternatives to widely-used Adobe software products, which have become increasingly difficult to get donated.

Adobe has a software donation program, but its guidelines are fairly restrictive their complex fine print may exclude many environmental organizations.  However, there are solid substitutes for most common Adobe products. This article summarizes some of the alternatives to the most commonly-used Adobe products.

Adobe Product

Use

Substitute Products
InDesign

Desktop Publishing

Quark XPress is InDesign's main competitor (such as it still has one). Quark makes Quark XPress available to nonprofits at a discounted rate of ~$300 (the software retails for about $1000). However please note, it is not available yet for those who use Mac OS X. http://www.quark.com/sales/desktop/purchase/nonprofit.html

Microsoft Publisher is suitable for very low-end desktop publishing projects (e.g. flyers, short newsletters), but is not widely used by professional graphic designers and print houses.

A promising, but still "immature" option might be Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing program. (http://www.scribus.net/). Scribus can run under Mac, Windows and Linux.

Photoshop

Image Editing

Adobe Photoshop Elements is Adobes consumer image editing product, and offers most of the features that nonprofits need to prepare images for the Web. Can be purchased at retail for <$100.

XnView is a powerful, reasonably easy-to-use image editing program that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's free for personal and non-commercial use. A great choice. http://www.xnview.com

Picasa is a free, beautifully designed, extremely easy-to-use image management and editing tool from Google. It's great for managing and touching up photos. Its resizing functions could be a bit better, though. http://www.picasa.com.

The GIMP is free, open-source photoediting software for Linux, Windows and Mac. It has a reputation of being somewhat difficult to use, but offers a fairly solid set of features at zero cost. http://www.gimp.org/

Acrobat

Creating PDF files

You may already have all of the PDF creation software you need!   Mac OS X includes the ability to create basic PDF files from almost any program that can print.  Similarly, Microsoft Office 2007 and above include a built-in "Save As PDF" option.

If the built-in capabilities of your existing operating system/application software aren't enough, then you might consider:

PDFCreator ($0) is a free, open-source PDF creation tool for Windows only. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

PDF995 ($0) is a free (but not open-source) PDF creation tool that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP only. http://www.pdf995.com/

NitroPDF ($99) is a very full-featured commercial PDF creation and editing tool for Windows only.
http://www.nitropdf.com

Illustrator,

Freehand

Digital illustration

Inkscape ($0) is an open-source alternative to Illustrator or Freehand for creating scalable vector graphics.  It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.   http://www.inkscape.org

 

Finally, its also worth noting that Adobe offers very reasonable upgrade pricing on most of its products. So, if you already own a legit-but-outdated version of an Adobe product, you can easily buy the latest version for a pretty reasonable price typically $75-$150 for most products.

Document Actions

Alternative to Illustrator, Freehand

Posted by Russell at Jun 24, 2007 08:58 PM
Hi all. There is a very good alternative to these two Adobe products - Xara Xtreme. http://xara.com/products/xtreme/. This is about $79 USD, and is comparable and compatible with Illustrator or CorelDraw.

Xara also makes other lower-cost graphic design and web design software that is of excellent quality.

Regards,
Russell

Xara for Linux is free

Posted by Russell at Jun 24, 2007 08:59 PM
Hi again. Worth noting that Xara for Lunix is free, and is functionally nearly identical to Xara Xtreme for Windows.

Russ

Xara

Posted by Abby at Apr 11, 2010 01:46 PM
Yes, Xara is free, but it is missing the photo editor and panoramic options to start. So I have to use Gimp and live with out the rest.

Xara

Posted by Frances at Dec 13, 2010 07:23 PM
Xara for linux is free but any work on it has been discontinued for many years. If you are looking for a high quality alternative for Adobe look at Xara.com The Paid for versions of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer and Designer Pro are well worth the money and even the Pro version costs way less than just 1 adobe program. They have all you need for working with photos, vectors and in the Pro version even websites! You can download a 30 day free trial from Xara and Check out Xara-Users.info to see what others are doing with these programs.

Alternative to illustrator

Posted by Tony Creamer at Jul 10, 2007 07:52 AM
Canvas is a wonderfully intuitive and powerful vector based software package that is a good alternative to illustrator and to autocad for those technical types. They can be found at http://www.deneba.com/

Adobe Alternative - try Docudesk

Posted by Joshua Banks at Nov 10, 2008 12:40 PM
Simply amazing! I have used deskPDF Standard for several years, primarily because the cost of Adobe Acrobat was prohibitive. I acquired Acrobat as part of an upgrade to CS3 not too long ago. I needed to create a PDF file from a complex 9-page document, and was disappointed that the Acrobat 8.1 version contained errors, BUT overjoyed to see that the deskPDF version was PERFECT! More expensive is not always better! I strongly recommend that anyone try docudesk.com for their PDF products.

PDF Creation

Posted by Alan Harper at May 30, 2009 10:16 PM
I use PDFPen for many simple PDF needs (adding/deleting pages, adding notes, highlighting text). It also has OCR capabilities that work pretty well. www.smileonmymac.com

I also own Acrobat 8, but I tend not to use it as it feels like I am firing up a hydraulic log splitter when I want to whittle a toothpick.

Alternatives on my blog

Posted by fruitgeek.wordpress.com at May 27, 2010 02:41 PM
I am writing a blog series on Adobe software alternatives- all will be free apps. Check it out @ http://fruitgeek.wordpress.com/[…]/

Alternatives to Adobe

Posted by Anonymous User at Mar 22, 2011 10:19 AM
A good alternative to Acrobat is Soda PDf. Cost me less the $40.

Alternative to Adobe

Posted by John Smith at Jul 22, 2011 04:25 AM
I will also suggest you a really cool alternative to Adobe Acrobat that is Classic PDF Editor. You create, view and edit any PDF file using this software. The conversion feature allow you to convert Microsoft Doc to PDF, XLS to PDF, PPT to PDF, PDF to Doc and PDF to Image. There are many other awesome features of PDF editing software and it cost me just $24.

Adobe Acrobat Best Alternative

Posted by Ehsan at Jul 22, 2011 05:24 AM
Thanks for your suggestion, well said its really cool alternative of expensive Adobe Acrobat. All of the above features working good. Highly recommended PDF software, you can read more or download it from http://www.classicpdf.com

Alternative to Adobe Reader and Acrobat

Posted by Andre at Oct 19, 2011 11:57 AM
best PDF viewer seems to be PDF-XChange Viewer. I used it rarely at the beginning but now I have much work with PDFs and I can appreciate all features. The software comes in two flavors, Free and Pro. These are on par with Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, respectively. This viewer comes in installable and portable versions, allows you to fill out PDF forms, and allows you annotate PDFs. You can also zoom and magnify text and export PDFs to image-file formats such as BMP, PNG, TIFF and JPEG. The text and image quality are excellent. It offers for Free most features (more that other alternative softwares). You can get advanced features such as page reorganization, extraction, signing by purchasing the Pro version. I love PDF-XChange Viewer and whole heartly recommend to try it.