Why I Stopped Using Adobe Software

It’s one thing to dislike a piece of software. It’s another entirely when that software is a daily requirement for your livelihood. Choosing a tool that fails is unfortunate. Being forced to rely on it for survival while being unable to escape is something else altogether. That’s why I hold nothing but contempt for Adobe. In my view, they rank among tech’s most egregious offenders. Their products have degraded over time, and if you disagree, the message is clear: leave.

The problems begin with the pricing model. You can no longer purchase Adobe software outright and simply upgrade when necessary. Instead, you’re locked into a monthly or annual rental fee that feels extortionate for the creative industries that depend on it. As of now, Creative Cloud Standard costs $659.88 per year when billed monthly, or $82.49 per month if you go month-to-month. That’s the basic tier. The “Pro” subscription, which includes more generative AI tokens, is prominently displayed at the top of the sales page, while the standard option is buried at the bottom. Adobe often masks these costs with aggressive promotions, and seasoned users know a trick: threaten to cancel your subscription to bait customer support into renewing at the old rate. I’ve done it. It works.

Few software companies outside of Microsoft wield this kind of leverage over entire industries. Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, and After Effects are all critical infrastructure in their respective fields, despite widespread disdain for using them. The Creative Cloud app sits in your system tray like a sleep paralysis demon, while individual apps turn your laptop into a furnace and send your GPU fan into overdrive. Years of accumulated legacy code cling to these applications like barnacles.

There are exceptions. Adobe’s free camera app, Indigo, is decent, though resource-heavy. Audition was fine when I used it years ago. But Premiere? I relied on it for years, and it ran terribly while lacking basic features that would have saved me months of cumulative effort. After Effects was worse. Its layout is bizarre, and no one would design a motion graphics program that way today,most modern compositing tools are node-based, but After Effects isn’t. Yet it remains irreplaceable because nothing else works in its peculiar way. A friend who did compositing in After Effects saw the program’s failures take a serious toll on his mental health. He’s better now, but the strain aged him prematurely.

There’s also the Windows factor. For many, Photoshop and Creative Cloud are major barriers to adopting Linux. Adobe will never support Linux, and just as we need to break free from Adobe, we need to break free from Windows. But that’s a topic for another day.

The software running poorly while you’re forced to use it would be enough to earn Adobe’s ire. But add to that Adobe’s embrace of generative AI, which they’ve tied to the company’s future. Artists shouldn’t have to haggle with tech support for the privilege of renting subpar software at a discount. Knowing your payments fuel a machine that threatens your livelihood is an insult beyond measure.

Alternatives exist. I stopped paying for Adobe Creative Cloud a while ago out of sheer loathing. The biggest change was moving away from Premiere. For serious film and TV work, Avid remains the gold standard outside of indie productions because, despite its clunky, retro workflow, it’s been reliable for decades. But for indies, freelancers, and YouTubers, Premiere holds significant market share.

For that same demographic, DaVinci Resolve is a far better option. I can’t praise it enough. It’s essentially free to download and use, and the free version is remarkably feature-complete. Blackmagic Design consistently ships features I care about before Adobe does. I switched because Resolve handled subtitles seamlessly long before Premiere caught up. You can pay $295 once, or get a license free with a Blackmagic camera. I’ve been using the same Resolve Studio license for years without paying another cent.

Resolve exists in its current form because of Apple’s missteps. Apple once owned the go-to software for non-Avid video editing (Final Cut Pro 7) and color grading (Apple Color). In 2011, Apple killed Color and merged its tools into Final Cut Pro X, a completely rewritten suite that everyone hated, driving many to Premiere. DaVinci Resolve had existed since the early 2000s, but Blackmagic Design acquired it in 2009. It started as color grading software, gained market dominance, and in 2014 added a robust non-linear editor. They later incorporated Fairlight (a digital audio workstation with roots in 1979) and Fusion (motion graphics software tracing back to DOS). Pricing has changed, but the software has only gotten better.

Fusion fills a role similar to Shake, a node-based compositing program Apple killed in 2008 that was the industry standard before Nuke. When I switched to Resolve, I was thrilled to find its default keyboard layout matched Final Cut Pro 7, which I’d used since the first Obama administration. Resolve is software for those who never forgave Apple’s repeated transgressions. I love it. I do everything,audio recording with post-processing, motion graphics for my show Highlight Reel,directly in Resolve.

Other software is harder to leave. Photoshop is the toughest. GIMP has its fans, but it’s no commercial replacement. Affinity comes closest, offering robust alternatives to Photoshop and InDesign. Recently, Canva acquired Affinity and made new versions free. I don’t trust Canva, which has also embraced AI, but the only features gated off in the free version are AI ones. That’s a fair trade.

“Switching off Photoshop has been a lot more difficult. It took years,” illustrator Aurahack told me. “When my career shifted more towards illustration, I cut my CC subscription and learned Clip Studio Paint instead. It was around 2018, and the conversation about Adobe killing Flash was still going. I thought, ‘OK, fuck this. They’re exerting absurd monopolistic practices, my software is getting shittier and more bloated every year, it crashes constantly, and I’m still paying hundreds for this. I need to switch.’”

Like me, Aurahack fought decades of muscle memory. While Affinity’s InDesign replacement is nearly one-to-one, she understands it’s trickier for others because the software must serve many purposes.

“After about a month’s worth of daily use, I felt really at home in Clip Studio Pro,” she said. “It doesn’t do everything I need,it’s not image editing software,but with a combination of things like Photopea, Mosh Pro, and creative workarounds like using stock photography or embracing sketching over vector art, I’ve basically cut Adobe entirely out of my workflow.”

“It’s not a path that works for everyone,” Aurahack added. “I’m sympathetic to artists in other professional capacities who are locked into that ecosystem for business reasons. I’m very fortunate to exist in the freelance capacity that I do, but the end result still feels like my best expression of self. If anything, it forced me to get a little creative with how I approach my own versatility, and that mentality has done me nothing but good.”

Switching is difficult. But being rid of Adobe is bliss. Knowing your software is either free or bought once feels like solid ground after drowning. Our lives are full of petty thieves with access to our credit cards and, in Adobe’s case, our careers. Adobe has earned nothing but my deepest contempt. I hate you, Adobe, and I hope the whole company gets dragged to hell when the AI bubble bursts.