8 best free photo editors in 2025

8 best free photo editors in 2025

Adobe Photoshop is the Kleenex of photo editing: so ubiquitous it’s both a noun and a verb (and has been in the dictionary since 2008). When talking about photo editing, people say, “Just Photoshop it!”

Photoshop is the industry standard for a reason—it’s excellent—but there are plenty of great free Photoshop alternatives to help you ditch the subscription. I first used Photoshop over 20 years ago when you had to buy it on a CD-ROM in a physical store (can you imagine?).

Based on my long-term experience with Photoshop, plus weeks researching and testing alternatives, these are the eight best free photo editing apps.

The 8 best free Photoshop alternatives

  • Canva for maintaining brand consistency across remote teams

  • Pixlr E and X for an authentic Photoshop experience

  • Fotor for AI object removal

  • Photopea for using custom Photoshop brushes

  • Photoroom for product photos and social media

  • Krita for artists and illustrators

  • PhotoScape X for RAW photo editing

  • MyEdit for pro-level AI effects

What makes the best free photo editor?

How we evaluate and test apps

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.

Photoshop is both a professional photo editing app for photographers and a digital painting app for artists. The free Photoshop alternatives on this list primarily focus on photo editing, but I’ve also included some geared toward designers and artists.

Not to mention: AI. It seems like AI photo editing tools get all the love these days, helping turn anyone with a smartphone into a wannabe Henri Cartier-Bresson, but Photoshop still leads the pack with its combined photo editing, art creation, and advanced AI features.

Based on my experience, here’s what the best free photo editing software offers:

  • AI features. All apps let you adjust brightness, contrast, and crop or add a filter. To be truly in Photoshop’s class, an app needs the latest AI advancements to speed up your workflow.

  • Ease of use. The basic layout and design of Photoshop haven’t changed much in 30 years. Why? It’s intuitive, and it works. The best free photo editor will make it equally as easy.

  • Non-destructive editing. An “undo” button is great, but the true gold standard is layers.

  • The ability to add text and design elements. Beyond photo edits, today’s tools also need to include graphics, trending fonts, and templates to make creating social media content easier and faster.

  • 100% free. We’re trying to not pay for Photoshop here, right? There are several high-end, paid Photoshop alternatives out there, but this roundup will focus on free options, so you can edit like a pro on a student budget.

This year, I tested 49 apps before choosing the eight best to feature here. When evaluating each of them, I tested everything I usually use Photoshop for, including color-grading, toning, cropping, retouching, masking, blending modes, creating social media graphics, and adding text. I also tested the unique special effects or features of each app, including AI capabilities.

Find the best free Photoshop alternative for your needs below, based on over 35 hours of hands-on research.

The best free photo editing software at a glance

Best for

Standout features

Pricing

Canva

Maintaining brand consistency across remote teams

Huge library of high quality templates for all graphic, video, presentation, and document needs

Free; $15/month for individual premium plan and $10/month/user for teams

Pixlr

An authentic Photoshop experience

Beginner-friendly UI for text-to-image AI and advanced edits

Free; Premium plans range from $2.49 to $16.99/month for additional features

Fotor

AI-powered object removal

Excellent and easy-to-use object removal, generative AI video, images, and presentations

Free; Premium plans range from $8.99 to $19.99/month for additional features and AI credits

Photopea

Using custom Photoshop brushes

Completely free, highly capable Photoshop alternative

Free; $8/month to remove ads

Photoroom

Product photos and social media

Background replacement and scene generation for standout product photos and social media posts

Free up to 250 exports; $12.99/month for premium plan, including 3 users

Krita

Artists and illustrators

Detailed digital reproduction of brushes for illustrators and digital painters

Free

PhotoScape X

Professional RAW photo editing

Auto-editing features on par with Adobe, pro-level photo editing on a budget

Free; $49.99 one-time for additional features

MyEdit

High quality AI effects

Daily AI credits useful for occasional generative AI needs, easy to use 

Free (3 AI credits daily); premium plans range from $10 to $18/month for additional AI credits and features


Best free photo editor for maintaining brand consistency across remote teams

Canva (Web, iOS, Android, Mac, Windows)

Canva, our pick for the best free photo editor for maintaining brand consistency across remote teams

Canva pros:

  • Best mix of design tools and easy-to-use AI features for all types of content creation

  • Template library for social media posts, slide decks, stock photos, and more

Canva cons:

Canva is more of a graphics and social media content tool than purely a photo editor, but it still has the photo editing tools most users need, like color and contrast adjustments, highlights, shadows, cropping, and more.

Canva has been adding new AI features since 2023 with no signs of slowing down. As a capable “all-arounder” photo and graphic editing app, Canva helps you edit your own photos, remove or add objects with AI similar to Photoshop’s Generative Fill, and use your photos in over 20,000 professionally-designed templates.

Besides photo editing, you can fully generate AI images and copy in Canva Documents, create a presentation from text prompts, and make a website. Beyond images, you can also generate AI text-to-video content—no camera required. This is huge for social media content and an affordable alternative to purchasing stock photos or videos.

Despite garnering negative press in late 2024 for increasing the price of its team plan by 300%, Canva’s pricing remains competitive in the photo editing category. In my opinion, it still represents excellent value, considering all the tools and capabilities it offers for both beginner and advanced users.

Marketing teams, especially remote ones, will also find Canva invaluable for Brand Kit, which saves your logo files, fonts, colors, and custom templates. Everyone can produce on-brand social, marketing, or business content quickly and easily across all departments and skill levels—plus collaborate efficiently with feedback comments within designs and custom workflows.

Honestly, Canva just works. The web app is excellent, but I also feel right at home creating content on my phone or iPad. I personally feel their template library is the most aesthetically pleasing and truly has options for every content format and vibe. I appreciate knowing that for whatever I want to create, Canva will have a great template to start from.

And with Zapier’s Canva integration, you can automate your design workflows. Build automated systems across your apps, like automatically creating designs based on form submissions or uploading assets based on spreadsheet entries. Learn more about how to automate Canva, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Canva pricing: Free; the Premium plan is $15/month for individuals or $10/month per user for teams (minimum 3 users). Discounts available for non-profits and K-12 educators. You can also take a look at these Canva alternatives.

Best free Photoshop alternative for an authentic Photoshop experience

Pixlr E and X (Windows, Web)

Pixlr, our pick for the best free Photoshop alternative for an authentic Photoshop experience

Pixlr pros:

Pixlr cons:

Pixlr is split into two web (or Windows) apps: Pixlr E and Pixlr X. Personally, I find the split somewhat confusing and wish the two apps could be merged into one. Pixlr E is meant to be the “more complex photo editor,” and Pixlr X is the “AI-focused, beginner-friendly” app.

If you’ve used Photoshop before, the Pixlr E web app (or Windows version) will feel right at home. It’s got all the familiar icons along the left side, the same menu layout across the top, and a right-side panel with your editing history and layers. Pixlr does an excellent job of “duping” Photoshop’s layers feature by including all the same options, including blending modes and opacity settings. You can even right-click to bring up the secondary actions menu, just like Photoshop.

In Pixlr E, you can do advanced photo editing, such as color balance, curves adjustments, and all the filters and effects Photoshop has, including AI noise reduction (requires 1 AI credit to use). You can also use digital painting tools, like the brush, paint bucket, pen, and masking tools.

Pixlr X’s interface is simplified and set up to be a little simpler for beginners to use, though it still allows you to edit photos with basic color correction and cropping tools. The main reason for using Pixlr X vs. Pixlr E is for its advanced AI features, such as generative fill and expand, where you can use AI text prompts to expand your photo’s canvas or replace an object with something else. These AI features do require paid credits, but I have to say I was especially impressed with the generative expand results on my toucan photo above, where I asked Pixlr to change my 3:2 photo to a 9:16 ratio, perfect for social media sharing.

Will the background expansion Pixlr created stand up to rigorous FBI-level image analysis? No. A super close inspection reveals unnatural blurring in the top left corner and too-smooth tree bark. But this is a powerful tool for quickly reformatting your photos for different social media platforms and other non-life-or-death circumstances.

You can also generate AI images with Pixlr X, as well as sharpen photos, remove backgrounds or objects, mask (cut out) a person or object, and add stickers or text.

It’s easy to switch between Pixlr X and E as they both save projects in a combined library, so you can pop a photo into Pixlr X for a quick retouch, then switch back to Pixlr E for more advanced editing again. (Be advised: It saves into your temporary cache folder only, so cleaning your browser cache will delete them. For anything you want to keep, download it as their PXZ format, and save to your hard drive.)

Pixlr E and X pricing: Both are free to use; the premium plan, which includes both apps, ranges from $2.49 to $9.99/month for 1 person, or $16.99/month for teams up to 5 users.

Best free Photoshop alternative for AI object removal

Fotor (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Web)

Fotor, our pick for the best free Photoshop alternative for AI object removal

Fotor pros:

Fotor cons:

Fotor is like a beautiful combination of Photoshop and Canva: all the advanced features you want for editing with one-click simplicity. I was especially impressed with Fotor’s AI object removal, which it calls Magic Eraser. Just brush over the thing you want to remove (I left my tripod in view in the photo above 🤦‍♀️), and voilà, it’s convincingly gone. You don’t even have to be exact about it: a one-second big swoosh around the item still results in perfect removal.

Other tiptop AI features include text removal (such as logo wordmarks or packaging), background removal and replacement, generative expand, upscaling and sharpening, and many portrait touch-up tools, like skin blemish removal, makeup enhancement, and filters. You can also use text-to-image prompts to generate realistic-looking photos and video clips.

My one beef with Fotor is the befuddling decision to lock several industry-standard features behind a paywall for its paid plans only. Features like adjusting the color saturation in a photo and one-tap enhancement. I understand wanting users to upgrade to premium plans, but these editing features are available in the native iOS camera roll app, so they’re not exactly revolutionary.

The obvious power of Fotor lies in its AI capabilities, both for portrait photo retouching and everyday photo editing. These features aren’t free, but after considering the cost of other apps, I believe Fotor still represents a good value for how darn tootin’ easy it is to get excellent results with their AI tools—especially for the $8.99/month plan, which comes with 100 monthly AI credits.

Fotor pricing: Free; premium plans are $8.99/month for additional features and AI credits, or $19.99/month for Brand Kits and more AI credits.

Best free Photoshop alternative for using custom brushes

Photopea (Web)

Photopea, our pick for the best free Photoshop alternatives for using custom brushes

Photopea pros:

  • Familiar Photoshop user experience and tools

  • Plugin, brush, and template library with free one-click installation

Photopea cons:

Photopea is fully browser-based and, like Pixlr, is an accurate reproduction of Photoshop’s layout, icons, and menus. Photopea is unique in several ways: you can open many types of files, from raw photos to Figma files, PDFs, and more, and unlike in Pixlr, you can save projects to Peadrive, Photopea’s built-in cloud storage, or connect your Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Plus, you can export work as PSD files (Photoshop’s native format) so you can continue working in Photoshop, if desired, or pass the file onto someone who needs that format.

While Photopea is an excellent free Photoshop alternative, it’s especially crucial for anyone who uses brushes in Photoshop. You can import ABR format custom brushes into Photopea and use them just like you would in Photoshop—something no other app on this list can do. Photopea also allows you to create Smart Objects and paths and shapes for vector-based work, too.

It’s refreshing to find an app that includes all its editing features in the free plan. Optionally, you can upgrade to premium to get rid of ads and to access credits for unlimited access to Photopea’s new AI features, including accurate one-click background removal and Magic Replace, which is like Photoshop’s Generative Fill. Select an area, type what you want to replace it with, and Photopea’s AI power makes it happen. (Free users can still use background removal once per day!)

Photopea also features a template library with one-click, free installation of many mockups, brushes, actions, patterns, plugins, and more for endless creative potential.

With a simple, familiar Photoshop interface and access to all its robust editing tools for free (except AI object replacement), built-in cloud storage, brushes and plugins, and multiple import and export options, Photopea is an excellent Photoshop alternative for beginners and professionals alike.

Photopea pricing: Free; the premium plan is $8/month

Best free photo editing app for product photos and social media

Photoroom (iOS, Android, Web)

Photoroom, our pick for the best free photo editing app for product photos and eCommerce

Photoroom pros:

Photoroom cons:

If you sell products online, you need Photoroom. While you can use Photoroom’s excellent background removal and swapping features for any creative purpose, it excels for eCommerce product photos and social media content creation.

Besides holiday and promotion themed templates and convenient resizing options for popular social media platforms, Photoroom offers retailer-specific features, such as realistic-looking product mockups and listing size formats for Etsy, eBay, Poshmark, Amazon, Shopify, and many other popular marketplaces.

My favorite feature is the instant background swap. When you upload a product photo, Photoroom automatically scans it and accurately removes your existing background in less than a second—and you can swap in any of their flatlay or scene backgrounds.

Being able to work flexibly with product photos makes it easy to create multiple versions for all the places you need it in. For example, remove the background from a product photo, save it with a white background for Amazon, then with a flatlay scene for your own website, and place it in a social media post graphic with just a few clicks.

For even more efficiency, make the same edits to up to 20 photos at once in the web app, or save your own editing templates in both the web or mobile apps to speed up your workflow.

Retailers will also appreciate the ease of creating grid posts to show various color options for a product, collages for creative product displays, and Photoroom’s large selection of graphic and font elements to create eye-catching marketing content.

So while Photoroom isn’t a traditional photo editor for adjusting things like exposure and color (though you can still make these edits with it), it’s a niche Photoshop alternative for those wanting a fast and easy way to create product photos or social media content.

For even more time savings, connect Photoroom with Zapier to automatically remove the background of every photo you put into a specific folder or record. Here are a few example workflows to get you started.

Photoroom pricing: Free for up to 250 exports; $12.99/month for unlimited exports and additional features for up to 3 users

Best free photo editing app for artists and illustrators

Krita (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Krita, our pick for the best free photo editing app for artists and illustrators

Krita pros:

Krita cons:

Photoshop has been around for over three decades, and it may surprise you to know Krita has been around almost as long: 25 years. Those who prefer native apps instead of browser-based ones will love Krita, which is 100% free and open source.

Krita’s sidebars and interface are set up mainly for artists and illustrators who are creating their own artwork. You can fully edit photos in Krita as well, though the process is clunkier than in other apps as color options are somewhat hidden in the Filter > Adjust menu. However, Krita’s free noise reduction filter is excellent, and the results are definitely on par with Photoshop and other leading photo editors. (I recommend keeping it at 25% or under for the most natural-looking results.)

For all types of artists, Krita has everything you need, from fluid and lifelike sketching and painting brushes, to masking, advanced selection options, path drawing, multiple workspace options for painting, animation, VFX, and more—plus the ability to create raster and vector artwork. I love the art-first layout of Krita compared to Photoshop: when you open the app, your brushes and options are in a grid at the bottom right, making it much faster to switch between tools while working.

While Krita lacks one-click AI features popular in other apps, such as background removal, it has many advanced capabilities, like enabling you to code your own automated tasks in Python, and it can open and save PSD format files so you can work in Photoshop at work and Krita at home. When combined with a connected desktop drawing tablet, Krita is a powerful drawing app that can handle professional workflows.

Overall, Krita’s feature set makes it better for artists than photographers, but it can still take care of any graphics or photo editing task. The best part? It’s completely free and open source.

Krita pricing: Free

Best free Photoshop alternative for RAW photo editing

PhotoScape X (Windows, Mac)

PhotoScape X, our pick for the best free Photoshop alternative for RAW photo editing

PhotoScape X pros:

  • Robust, professional-level photo editing for all formats, including RAW

  • Excellent and fast batch editing

PhotoScape X cons:

  • Some tools professional photographers would want, such as curves and lens correction, are only in the Pro version

PhotoScape X is a professional quality Photoshop alternative for photographers, especially those shooting RAW format files. In my opinion, it’s the perfect mashup of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom in terms of features and interface. I love the workspace menu at the top to toggle between viewing photos, editing a single photo, editing a batch of photos, optimizing for print, removing background, and even easily creating GIFs.

While you can add graphics, stickers, and text to your photos, PhotoScape X’s strengths lie in its fast and powerful RAW photo tools. Everything a photographer could want is here: color correction, cropping, chromatic aberration removal, skin retouching, noise reduction, and much more. All the menus and controls feel intuitive for a professional workflow and equally as easy for beginners to master.

The only downside to PhotoScape X is that some features I consider to be relatively basic are only available in the Pro version, such as curves, levels, black and white conversion, saturation, and a few others. If these are dealbreakers for you, the paid version is still affordable at a one-time cost of $49.99, compared to Photoshop’s subscription model.

I was impressed by the one-click Magic Color auto-editing feature, similar to Photoshop and Lightroom’s Auto Color. It does a great job of adding saturation, bringing up shadows, and adding a bit of color punch—perhaps too punchy for some, but I’m a Fujifilm Velvia shooter, so I love it.

Batch editing is also excellent in PhotoScape X for quickly processing identical color, cropping, resizing, or other attributes. You can’t fine-tune the edits per photo in the batch, but this still saves a ton of time for those situations when you need to make the same edits to every photo in a set.

PhotoScape X doesn’t have cutting edge generative AI tools, but it has what I call “quiet AI” features: accurate auto-color, auto-levels, HDR conversion, and other subtle-but-impactful everyday edits photographers can achieve with one click, saving tons of time.

PhotoScape X pricing: Free; unlock additional features with a one-time purchase of $49.99

Best free Photoshop alternative for pro-level AI effects

MyEdit (Web)

MyEdit, our pick for the best free Photoshop alternative for pro-level AI effects

MyEdit pros:

MyEdit cons:

MyEdit is no joke for easy-to-use and surprisingly great AI results for free. For example, putting adorable yellow Paddington Bear boots on that Canada goose took me a few clicks and less than two minutes. Is it good for society that such a thing is possible with AI, or that I spend my time this way? I’ll leave that to the philosophers, but it was pretty fun.

You can create designs from your own photos and add graphics and text, or generate custom social media post templates with AI text prompts. But MyEdit’s best use, in my opinion, is for AI features like generative expansion and fill, text-to-image generation, upscaling, background removal, and product photo scene creation.

Lots of other photo editing tools have these AI capabilities but often only in paid plan options. Similarly, you need AI credits to use certain features in MyEdit, but unlike others, MyEdit gives you three free AI credits and one watermark-free download every day. Unlike a time-limited free trial, you can get professional AI results indefinitely for free—as long as you either only have occasional need for AI, or you use it a lot and are really, really patient.

Of interest to content creators, you can also edit audio with MyEdit, including text-to-speech generation that’s perfect for YouTube video voiceovers, sound effect generation, and tools to improve audio quality. Overall, MyEdit is a neat package of powerful, free AI tools for modern photo editing workflows.

MyEdit pricing: Free for 3 daily AI credits; premium plans range from $10-$18/month for additional AI credits

Which free Photoshop alternative should you use?

The right free Photoshop alternative for you depends on what you need most. Do you need generative AI to create graphics and photorealistic scenes out of thin air? Do you need pro-level noise control and coloring tools for your photography? Do you need done-for-you templates you can easily customize for social media or your website?

Since these are all free, you can try out the ones that seem like they might be a good fit for you until you find the shoe that fits.

There are so many more free or affordable Photoshop alternatives out there that didn’t make this list. A few I tested and recommend for specific types of users include:

Want the latest, best AI advancements? Take a look at this list of the best AI photo editors.

Related reading:

This article was originally published in April 2018 by Jackie Dove. The most recent update was in January 2025.

by Zapier