Frequently asked questions

Thirteen desktop creative and office applications — VectorCraft, PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PdfCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft, WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft, FigCraft, SoundCraft and CADCraft — written from scratch in Rust by the storytold organisation, plus a launcher that installs them. Each one targets a specific paid app: Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, InDesign, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Figma, Pro Tools and AutoCAD.

Yes. Every repository in the organisation we index is published under Apache-2.0, which permits commercial use, modification and redistribution. You can clone the source and build it yourself with a current Rust toolchain.

No. The Craft apps describe themselves as clean-room implementations written from scratch, which is why they carry an Apache-2.0 licence rather than GPL or MPL. GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Darktable, FreeCAD and LibreOffice remain strong, more mature alternatives in the same jobs — we list them on the relevant app pages.

No. OpenCraftApps is an independent directory. The upstream project page is getartcraft.com and the code lives at github.com/storytold. We link to those; we do not speak for them.

Never. Every download button on this site opens the project's own GitHub release page or the direct release asset hosted by GitHub. That keeps the file authentic, and means when upstream fixes a bug the link is already current.

Licence, version, release date and asset names are read from the GitHub API and marked with a verification date. Release cadence here is fast — often weekly — so treat our figures as a snapshot and confirm on the repository before relying on them.

Two routes. Grab the Craft Launcher release and let it fetch the apps you enable, or download a single app directly: macOS universal DMG; Windows MSI for x64, ARM64 and 32-bit x86 plus a portable ZIP; Linux AppImage, deb, rpm or flatpak for x86_64 and aarch64, with deb and rpm for riscv64; and a FreeBSD x86_64 tarball. Most releases also carry a command-line build and a browser build. Each one publishes SHA256SUMS.txt so you can verify what landed on disk.

Possibly, as with any small open-source project: signing and notarisation coverage varies release to release. Verify the checksum against SHA256SUMS.txt instead of clicking through warnings blindly.

Yes — clone the repository and use cargo for the crates that build that way; some apps ship their own build scripts and workspace layout. Check the repository README for the pinned toolchain before you start.

Native interoperability with those formats is the stated goal of WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. In practice, test your own most complex files: fields and section breaks in Word, conditional formatting and charts in Excel, animation and embedded media in PowerPoint are where drift appears.

The hosted layer: cloud libraries, live co-authoring, comment threads, plugin and add-in ecosystems, macro runtimes such as VBA, and vendor-supported service levels. If those are load-bearing in your workflow, the honest answer is to keep them and use the Craft apps where the local tools are already good enough.

There is a browser target: every app's release now carries a browser build next to the installers (vectorcraft-web-0.13.1.zip and its siblings), and upstream keeps the wasm32 compile green in its own CI. What upstream does not publish is a hosted editor you can simply open in a tab — so this directory indexes the installable native app and lists the browser archive as the build artefact it is.

No. CADCraft is 2D drafting and documentation in the AutoCAD sense. If you need parametric 3D, look at open-source 3D modellers instead — different job, different project.

Apache-2.0 permits commercial use, modification and distribution, provided you keep the required notices. This site exists to describe the projects, not to grant you permissions — the licence text in each repository is authoritative.

Only to say what each open-source app is designed to replace. Those marks belong to their owners, and none of those companies is affiliated with, or has endorsed, this directory.