Open-source Adobe Illustrator alternatives

Penpot is an open-source design platform for teams building digital products. It runs in the browser or on your own servers, and its emphasis is ownership of the design infrastructure, which appeals to organizations with strict compliance or governance needs. It is often considered an open alternative to proprietary design tools such as Figma.

The platform uses open standards including SVG, CSS, HTML and JSON, so design files are closer to the code that implements them. Real-time collaboration lets designers and developers work together, and CSS Grid and Flex Layout let teams build responsive interfaces that behave like real layouts. Native design tokens act as a shared source of truth between design and development, which helps with larger design systems.

Penpot also exposes an open API and plugin system for automation and integrations, plus an MCP server for connecting AI workflows with design and code. It is written in Clojure and ClojureScript under the MPL-2.0 license, and a hosted version is available at penpot.app for teams that do not want to self-host.

Graphite is a free and open-source 2D content creation application, described as a procedural toolbox. It started life as a vector editor and is growing into a general graphics tool that handles both vector and raster work, with a nondestructive workflow in which layer-based compositing meets node-based generative design. It is currently in alpha.

The editor's tools are friendly wrappers around a node graph at its core, and the project says its architecture resembles a game engine more than a typical creative application. Further capabilities on the roadmap include VFX compositing, desktop publishing, digital painting, motion graphics and photo editing. Topics tag it as a graphics editor, SVG editor and procedural drawing tool, and it is written in Rust.

Graphite is Apache-2.0 licensed and community driven. Its website offers a newsletter, and volunteers and donors support the work. Because it is alpha software, features and file formats may change, which makes it more of an interesting project to follow and try than a drop-in replacement for mature design suites today.

Inkscape is free and open-source vector graphics software that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists to create illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics, and it uses the open W3C SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard as its native file format.

Development takes place on GitLab, a platform that is itself open source and can be self-hosted, and the GitHub repository mainly points contributors to the Inkscape project website and the GitLab code repository. The project describes the editor as professional quality, and its tagline invites users to draw freely.

The Inkscape website is the place to find the full feature list, downloads and documentation, and the project also points users to its GitLab repository for source code and issue tracking.