The Best Photoshop Alternatives in 2026

Adobe Photoshop has long been the industry standard for photo editing and digital art. However, its subscription model and steep learning curve have led many users to seek out alternatives. Whether you're a professional photographer, a digital artist, or just someone looking to touch up photos without a monthly fee, there are excellent options available. Here are the best Photoshop alternatives you should know about.

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo by Serif is widely considered the strongest direct competitor to Photoshop. It offers a fully-featured, professional-grade toolset for photo editing, retouching, and digital painting. The best part? It's available for a one-time purchase with no subscription required. Its performance is stellar, and it can open and edit PSD files flawlessly, making the transition from Adobe nearly seamless.

Photopea

Photopea is an incredibly powerful web-based photo and graphics editor. Built to look and feel almost exactly like Photoshop, it runs directly in your browser without requiring any installation. It supports PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD, and CDR formats. It's an ideal choice for quick edits on any computer, and the base version is entirely free to use (supported by ads).

GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the classic open-source alternative to Photoshop. Available completely free of charge, it boasts an extensive set of tools for photo manipulation, original artwork creation, and graphic design. While its interface has historically been criticized compared to modern commercial software, it is highly customizable, and its community has created a massive library of plugins and scripts.

Pixelmator Pro

For Mac users, Pixelmator Pro is a beautifully designed, native macOS image editor. It deeply integrates with Apple technologies like Metal and Core ML, providing blazing-fast performance and AI-powered features for upscaling, color matching, and background removal. Like Affinity Photo, it operates on a one-time purchase model and offers a very user-friendly, uncluttered interface compared to Photoshop.

Krita

Krita is a free and open-source painting program designed primarily for concept art, texture and matte painters, illustrations, and comics. While it does have photo editing capabilities, its true strength lies in digital painting, making it the perfect Photoshop alternative for illustrators and artists. It features an incredibly rich brush engine and animation tools.