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 tightened up its software donation program, and is no longer donating software to most environmental organizations. (Adobe's new donation program now has quite complex fine print that you should read carefully to determine if your organization is eligible.)
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 |
|
PageMaker |
Desktop Publishing |
Quark XPress is PageMaker's main competitor.
Quark makes Quark XPress available to nonprofits at a discounted rate
of ~$500 (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/products/xpress/ 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 runs natively under Linux, and under Mac OS X's "X11" environment, and there is now a beta of their first official Windows release. |
|
Photoshop |
Image Editing |
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 coud 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/ GimpShop is a version of the GIMP with a friendlier interface that very closely resembles Photoshop. http://www.gimpshop.com/ Corel PaintShopPro offers most of the features of Photoshop, and Corel offers nonprofit licenses starting at $65. See the Corel website for product information and nonprofit licensing information. 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. GraphicConverter (http://www.lemkesoft.de/gcdownload_us.html) is a shareware program for Macs that does many of the same things as Photoshop. The demo version does almost everything useful; the full version is $30. |
|
Acrobat |
Creating PDF files |
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/ Win2PDF ($35) is a simple commercial PDF creation tool that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP only. http://www.daneprairie.com/products/win2pdf.htm Jaws PDF Creator ($99) is another well-regarded
commercial PDF creation tool. Supported on Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000 /XP
and Macintosh 8.5 through 9.x. http://www.jawspdf.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 |
|
GoLive, Dreamweaver |
Web Editing |
NVU is a simple, open-source HTML editor that is fine for basic needs. http://www.nvu.com. |
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.
Another software to consider?
Saw you had a list of substitute products for Adobe, and would like to suggest Amyuni (http://www.amyuni.com) ... it is very affordable and has powerful tools.
Thanks,
Michelle