ArtCraft's Open-Source Crafting Apps: Every Tool, What It Replaces and How Ready It Is

The ArtCraft apps are a set of free, open-source creative and office programs from the ArtCraft team, each a clean-room Rust rewrite of a well-known commercial tool. In about a week, between 30 September and 7 October 2026, the team's GitHub organisation published twelve of them, and several gathered thousands of stars almost at once. This guide lists every app, says which product it targets, and reports how ready each one is according to its own README.

All figures about readiness below are the maintainers' self-assessments, which they publish alongside their code. Enlisted lists each app with live data cards and links so you can follow them as they change.

How the family fits together

The ArtCraft team started with ArtCraft, an AI image and video studio, and then published the Crafting Apps. They share a set of conventions, which the READMEs repeat:

• Pure Rust, native on macOS, Windows and Linux (several also on FreeBSD), and compiled to WebAssembly so the same app runs in a browser.
• Clean-room: built from public specifications and observed behaviour, with every font, icon and image openly licensed. The READMEs say no proprietary code is included.
• Familiar layouts: the same panels, menus and shortcuts as the product they follow.
• Agent-native: every menu item and tool is a command, reachable from a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server.
• Dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0, except the ArtCraft studio. The ArtCraft name and logos are trademarks and are not covered by the open licence.

Seven apps appear on the ArtCraft website's apps page, and the remaining ones appear in the GitHub organisation.

The AI studio: ArtCraft

ArtCraft is a desktop and web studio for controllable AI image and video creation. It combines text-to-image and image-to-video with tools to stage scenes in 2D and 3D, pose characters and composite elements before generating. It connects to several model providers, including ArtCraft's own hosted models, and also lists support for Midjourney, Sora, Grok and World Labs.

Its licence deserves a careful read. The repository says ArtCraft is "fair source": the code is public, it is free for private personal use and modification, and you own what you generate. You may not sell the software, use its code to build a competing product, or remove its community and paid-model links from a fork. That is source-available, not an OSI-approved open-source licence, which is why Enlisted shows its licence as "Other". It is an app for people who generate media, unlike the rest of the family, which re-implements existing tools.

Creative suite

PhotoCraft: image editing

Aimed at Photoshop, with layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors, brushes, 16 and 32-bit colour, ICC management and PSD, PSB and layered TIFF handling. The README calls it early alpha and not yet a replacement for daily professional work. Read the full PhotoCraft vs Photoshop comparison.

VectorCraft: vector illustration

Aimed at Illustrator, with Pen, Pathfinder, Appearance, SVG, PDF and PDF-compatible .ai import and export. The project's self-assessment is that most features exist and a power user would still notice differences. See VectorCraft vs Illustrator.

FilmCraft: video editing

Aimed at Premiere Pro, with a multi-track timeline, trims, colour, effects, audio mixing, titles, captions and its own Rust codecs instead of FFmpeg. The README estimates readiness for real work at roughly half to 60 percent. See FilmCraft vs Premiere Pro.

LightCraft: raw photo development

Aimed at Lightroom, with a local-first library, non-destructive editing, masking and presets. The biggest limit is camera colour for raw formats other than DNG. See LightCraft vs Lightroom.

EffectCraft: motion graphics

Aimed at After Effects, with compositions, keyframes, many effects, expressions, 3D cameras, Lottie import and export and a JSON project format. It cannot open .aep files. See EffectCraft vs After Effects.

DesignCraft: page layout

Aimed at InDesign, with spreads, threaded text, styles and a Knuth-Plass paragraph composer, IDML import and export. PDF export is on the roadmap. See DesignCraft vs InDesign.

PdfCraft: PDF workbench

Aimed at Acrobat, with viewing, search, organising, combining, splitting, forms, comments, redaction and basic signatures. Reliable editing of existing text and broader OCR are missing. See PdfCraft vs Acrobat.

Office, engineering and audio

WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft

These three target Word, Excel and PowerPoint and read and write .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. They were created on 7 October and describe themselves as close to a first alpha. See WordCraft vs Word, GridCraft vs Excel and DeckCraft vs PowerPoint.

CADCraft and SoundCraft

CADCraft targets AutoCAD's 2D drafting workflow with DXF and DWG support. SoundCraft targets Pro Tools with an Edit and Mix window, automation and CLAP plug-in support. See CADCraft vs AutoCAD and SoundCraft vs Pro Tools.

Side-by-side tables

Creative apps:

Office, engineering and audio apps:

Licences and trademarks explained

The dual licence on the Crafting Apps, MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option, is among the most permissive pairs in open source. It lets you use, modify and distribute the software, including commercially, as long as you keep the licence notices. Apache-2.0 adds an explicit patent grant. GitHub detects the Apache-2.0 file in most of the repositories, so Enlisted's cards show that licence.

Two exceptions are worth knowing. The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos are trademarks and are excluded from the licence, which says they may be used only unmodified and only as part of the project, and that forks must remove them. Bundled fonts, icons and images keep their own open licences, each listed with author and source in an attribution file.

The ArtCraft studio follows a different model. Its fair-source licence allows free private use and modification, and ownership of what you generate, and it forbids selling the software or using its code for a competing business. If you plan to build a product on the code, read that file before you start.

How to read the claims

Three cautions apply to the whole family.

1. The scores are self-assessed. Percentages such as "ribbon commands covered" count wired menu items. The READMEs say themselves that wiring is not the same as behaviour, and that real-world files are the hard part.
2. The projects are days old. All repositories were created within a week, so expect bugs, missing features and fast change. Use copies of important files.
3. Star counts reflect attention, not readiness. Rapid growth shows interest, and it does not measure how well the software works.

On the positive side, the maintainers publish roadmaps and gap lists, ship installers for several platforms, use permissive licences and make the code easy to automate.

Where to start

Pick the app that matches the job you have, open a copy of a real file and check the result. Photographers can try LightCraft with DNG files. Writers can open a document in WordCraft. People who produce many PDFs can try PdfCraft for merging and splitting. For mature open-source tools in the same categories, see the open-source Adobe alternatives guide, the free Microsoft Office alternatives guide and the design category.