30 Open Source Software Alternatives To Commercial Software
There is probably an open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products. Why open source? By choosing an open source product, the user obtains a number of advantages compared to commercial products. Besides the fact that open source is always available for free, it is a transparent application, in that you are invited exclusively behind the scenes to view all source code and thereby to suggest improvements to the product. Furthermore, every product is covered by a large dedicated network, or community, who is more than willing to answer any questions, you may have.
List from osalt.com open source alternative – a quick guide to the best open source software.
Gimp 2.6
Probably the oldest and most well-known open source graphic application – GNU Image Manipulation Program or Gimp was started in 1995 and has since then grown to the status it has today. Gimp is a… Read more
If you feel at home in Photoshop, but need an open source alternative – Gimpshop is the way to go. Gimpshop is a hack made on top of the original Gimp project which changes all menues, dialogs, etc.,… Read more
Seashore, an open source image editing program for the MacOS’s Cocoa framework, stands somewhere between the old MacPaint and Photoshop. Its advantage lies in serving the basic image editing needs… Read more
Skencil is an open source interactive vector drawing application. It is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. If you are migrating from Adobe Illustrator – or… Read more
Synfig is an open source 2d vector animation program with focus on automated tweening. Synfig is made for artists and is great for cartoons. Its main feature for automated tweening make all motion in… Read more
Inkscape is an open source 2d vector graphics editor. Supports all of the standard drawing features your will find in similar commercial product. Curves (bezier), lines, freehand drawing including… Read more
Blender is a free 3D animation and modeling suite. It includes tools for modeling – fast subdivision surface and polygon tools, multi-resolution mesh sculpting, metaballs, NURBS, vector fonts, and… Read more
Cinelerra is a highly advanced and professional video editing, but still remains open source. Cinelerra solves three main tasks: capturing, editing and compositing. There is virtually no limit to the… Read more
Started as a fork of the Gimp project, the goal is to create a more professional graphical editing application aimed at the movie industry. One of the major differences from Gimp is that CinePaint… Read more
Cornice was originally developed to provide more or less the same functionality of ACDSee but on Linux. But since it was developed using Python program language – it is now available on virtually any… Read more
Dia is designed to be much like the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship… Read more
Greenshot is a screenshot tool, supports several image formats as well as saving part or all of a screen into a file within one second’s time. This program takes only a small amount of memory, a… Read more
Imgv is a versatile image viewer that support all common image formats – and allows you to easily browse through all of your pictures. Image data including exif information can be displayed on top of… Read more
Jahshaka brings the power of movie editing and effects to the open source environment. This free tool will offer almost the same features your will find in a profession/commercial editing suite…. Read more
Karbon14 is a vector drawing application part of the open source KOffice suite. Being a vector based drawing program everything drawn is store as geometric shapes allowing you to scale you drawing up… Read more
Kino is open source non-linear video editing at it’s best. Easily imports DV video through IEEE-1394 (firewire) and allow detailed editing and transition effect for both video and audio. The move… Read more
Krita is open source bitmap editing and drawing with the following advanced features: 16-bit image support, High dynamic resolution images, CMYK and even color management. As part of the KOffice… Read more
KToon is an open source 2d vector animation toolkit with focus on on the cartoon industry. All of the features you would expect of such a products is there: drawing tools, layers, keyframes, time… Read more
KWord 1.6.1
KWord is a part of the open source office suite KOffice. KWord is more than just a simple word processor, with its frame-based layout capability it can act like any commercial DTP tool and even… Read more
OpenLaszlo 4.0
OpenLaszlo is an open source development platform for web applications. It’s main target today is generating macromedia flash files (swf)and AJAX/DHTML for use on web pages and sites. OpenLaszlo is… Read more
OpenOffice Draw 3.0
Open Office Draw, part of the Open Office package, wasn’t designed to compete with high-end graphics packages but is an easy to use, effective drawing tool that makes it simple to create flowcharts,… Read more
Pencil 0.4.4b
Pencil is a program of creating of hand-drawn animation. When creating animations it uses four types of layers: vector graphics, bitmap, sound and camera. These layers and be added or removed… Read more
Pixie 2.2.3
Pixie is a RenderMan like photo realistic renderer. It is being developed in the hope that it will be useful for graphics research and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer. Pixie is an… Read more
Potrace is an open source tool for converting bitmap images or raster to vector drawings. Even though Potrace is only a command line tool – its output is of the highest quality. It supports the most… Read more
QCad Community Edition 2.0.5.0
QCad Community Edition is an open source edition of RibbonSoft’s CAD system. QCad is a 2D CAD application that aims at being simple enough for anyone to use – even users with no previous CAD… Read more
Qtpfsgui 1.9
Qtpfsgui is a tool for tone mapping HDR photography (high dynamic range imaging), which combines several photos of the same thing but taken at different exposures, resulting in a true representation… Read more
Scribus 1.3
Scribus brings open source award-winning professional page layout to Linux and *nix desktops, but also supports Windows and Mac OS. As a DTP tool it supports professional publishing features, such as… Read more
UFRaw 0.16
UFRaw or Unidentified Flying Raw – is an open source raw photo editor and converter. It is based on DCRaw (written by David Coffin) and can be used either as a standalone application – or as a… Read more
VirtualDub 1.7.8
VirtualDub is an open source video processor/editor. Even though it may not be able to do advanced editing like non-linear video editors – it has powerful features for processing your video clips…. Read more
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I'm the curator here at designshifts.com as well as being a web developer by day. I have a passion for design and love to share inspiration and tips and tricks with the community.