Back when Aldus Pagemaker was still a thing, Quark Express was touted as the better alternative. It appears to be a subscription based product, now, which might explain its absence from the chart of alternatives.
.
Didn’t Adobe buy Aldus?
1 Like
Affinity Photo is also marketed as a lightroom replacement. It doesn’t do “asset management,” but AFAIK neither does RawTherapee.
I’m not sure that BoxySVG falls into the category of Illustrator replacement. Perhaps if you were using Illustrator as a “companion to the really useful Adobe apps like Premiere and Photoshop”. (I notice Pr is missing from the chart entirely Perhaps DaVinci Resolve, perhaps Final Cut Pro…)
I know quite a few people who were using Draftsight as a alternative to Illustrator… but Dassault has decided to kill its free version, so that’s out. It’s now in the category of “mildly expensive subscription software”.
Also, if you use a mac, be aware that some of the listed products have really crappy mac ports. Oh sure, you can use X11, but X11 isn’t Quartz.
1 Like
PageStream, what what?!
OK, but we need further color coding for whether the app is available in Windows or in Mac.
These things have to contact the mothership every 30 days.
So if Adobe goes belly-up, or if for whatever reason you go off-grid, they cease to function:
But, from Adobe’s POV, you never owned the product in the first place.
(You were sharecroppers on its land.)
2 Likes
Uh…exsqueeze me, where is Quark Xpress? it still lives. Indesign aspires to Xpress. Xpress is the mature desktop publishing well-source that Pagemaker never caught up with and Adobe undercut by giving early Id versions away.
I have thousands of hours on both Id and Xpress, Mac/PC, and have taught both at post-secondary. Also a FOSS user.
Quark: No subs; $95–$450 (ed-comm)
Adobe: feeding shareholders and a complete jerk to deal with.
2 Likes
I think it’s because QuarkXPress burned so many bridges behind it that older users are not willing to ever trust them again, never ever ever. I still have a burning hatred of their dongle policy, and how they tried to force all users to switch to Windows despite the Mac community being their most loyal customers.
I think the main reason why there is no true third option between Quark and Adobe is because professional print layout software is simply not that big a deal any more. New businesses no longer worry about catalogs and newspaper inserts as much these days.
3 Likes
To be fair, it’s usually $975, but is currently on sale for $450.
Quark was the go-to layout software when I was in design school and the defacto standard when I worked in publishing and newspapers; I spent a jillion hours with it and probably still have all the hotkeys memorized. But as @fnordius says, when they tried to ditch Mac users, raised their prices to insane levels, and declared they’d never be compatible with anything else, InDesign was welcomed with open arms. I also remember their ill-fated “Interactive Designer” product for website design that used a proprietary format and needed its own browser plugin to view media.
3 Likes
I had hoped never to think of that. It was supposed to kill both Macromedia Director CD-ROMs and Shockwave at the same time. shudders
2 Likes
A Quark rep actually came to the design firm I used to work at to give us a demo. After showing off its rudimentary tools, and saying that it’d be the new standard, someone said “So, you need a brand new plugin to see this media. What will people see if they don’t have the plugin?” and the guy said, “Oh, a blank screen. If they don’t have our plugin, it’s their fault,” and laughed. I think that’s about when people started walking out.
6 Likes
Ah. “QuarkXpress+advantage” is a red herring.
1 Like
You never had to admin a quark server, just saying since you didn’t mention it and you would if you had. Total Quark suckage. I have hateful memory of the company and its policies. The working environment was solid for me. My point is that it wasn’t included in the Adobe alternates.
2 Likes
1 Like
So do I…
I thought that was odd too. DaVinci from Black Magic is probably the closest alternative to Premier Pro that I can think of.
1 Like
I’m using HitFilmExpress. For my limited use, it replaces Premiere & AE.
There’s a Pro version that I may pay for if I ever have to edit anything longer than 5 minutes.
Odd they didn’t mention Pixelmator or Pixelmator Pro. If you’re jonesing for PS but not the price, try those. Yes nothing (not even GIMP, that’s a laugh) will come close to the feature set of PS but Pixelmator (OSX only I think) is very close and cheap and pay once. And it can export to PS, and the results look pretty good.
+1 on Capture One, heard good things about Darktable.
Lightroom I do still use their pay-once version - v6 - but Adobe in their stupidity I think have made future updates CC only which means at some point I will have to switch. Something with LR compatibility and a similar feature set would be good…I need spotting, curves, lens distortion profiles, ORF & RW2 compatibility (Olympus and Lumix), brushes/gradient masks, shadow/noise reduction and sharpening…and a decent panoramic stitch would be good, only worked once for LR 
Inkscape is good and have created things in it, it’s fiddly compared to Illustrator though.
1 Like
Looking further it’s NOT a good list, from the apps I use regularly…
Audition - Audacity is OK but nowhere near Audition/Cool Edit. Closest is:
REAPER (free/cheap)
Prosonus Studio (there is a free version)
Pro Tools (ditto)
Never liked Hindenburg but…
You have loads of free decent DAWs for Linux etc, - Ardour being one.
Photoshop - as a comment on the site said, there isn’t ONE replacement for it, so as well as the ones mentioned there:
Pixelmator Pro ? Hello? taps screen
Sketch - a lot of web and UI concept peeps use that. I have, it’s like Fireworks (remember that?), not bad.
NOT GIMP - used it many times, found it utterly irritating and useless. Not even close. Some people love it, but then again some people love vi/vim. They are wrong 
AE - one of my primary tools:
Resolve could replace Premiere, but not AE, that’s pretty laughable
Blender, the 3D stuff maybe - but then just use C4D? I guess it’s free, but…
Motion. Why no Motion?
Nuke. If I remember correctly Nuke is industry standard and free, or has a free version?
(Don’t think any tool could replace AE actually)
Illustrator:
Inkscape is a good call, I’ve used that as a replacement, much more fiddly than Illustrator, but not as bad as GIMP.
Dreamweaver:
Aptana is OK but buggy. All IDEs are crap for web dev, use a decent editor like Sublime Text. Learn to handcode, it’s faster.
Premiere:
Resolve. Has a decent free version with some rather odd restrictions but you can edit on it, and grade.
AVID - buggy and expensive but hey, one price. Another industry standard.
Final Cut - well until Apple bolloxed it up with X.
Since we’re talking about free/low-cost alternatives to things, I have a vinyl plotter and would love to find an alternate program that doesn’t cost every year.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
