Open-source Affinity alternatives

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.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a free and open-source image editor developed within the GNOME project. This GitHub repository is a read-only mirror of the official source hosted on GNOME's GitLab, where development, releases and issue tracking take place.

GIMP is widely known as a general-purpose raster graphics editor used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, and it can be extended with plug-ins and scripts. The input available for this entry was limited to the project metadata, which shows the code is written in C and released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. For downloads and documentation, use the official project resources rather than this mirror.

Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing program for laying out pages for print and digital documents. The GitHub repository is a community mirror of the project's official Subversion repository, which the Scribus team prefers for development and bug reports. The mirror is updated manually and is not supported by the team.

Complex text layout is a highlighted area. The program supports right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew, bidirectional text, Indic scripts, OpenType font features and a customizable hyphenation character. According to the README it covers more than 500 languages. Text frames can be linked directly, and loading and rendering long documents has been sped up.

Bugs and patches should go to the Scribus bug tracker rather than to GitHub pull requests. The project site provides a wiki, mailing lists, forums, IRC chat and a WebSVN browser. The application is written in C++.

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.