Design & media · Updated October 2026
Photoshop is Adobe's raster image editor for photo retouching, compositing, and digital painting. If you would rather own your tools, here are 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, ranked by GitHub stars. Each one is free to use under its license, and you can read, change, and often self-host the code.
The most popular is Krita with 10.6k stars, and the most recently updated is GIMP, with a commit on Oct 21, 2026.
by KDE
Krita is a free and open source cross-platform application that offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital art files from scratch built on the KDE and Qt frameworks.
by GNOME
Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
by PintaProject
Simple GTK Paint Program
by viliusle
online image editor
By GitHub stars, Krita is the most popular open source alternative to Photoshop right now, with 10.6k stars, followed by GIMP and Pinta. The best fit depends on your setup, so compare their licenses, languages, and recent activity in the table above.
Yes. All 4 projects on this page are open source, so the software itself is free to use, study, and change. Some of them also sell a hosted version or paid support.
GIMP (last commit Oct 21, 2026), Krita (last commit Oct 21, 2026), and Pinta (last commit Oct 20, 2026) have the most recent commits. Licenses on this list include GPL-3.0 and MIT.
Krita
GIMP
Pinta
miniPaint