Home / Design & Creative Tools / GIMP

GIMP — open source alternative

Long-running open source raster image editor.

Strengths

  • Full feature set for photo retouching and painting.
  • Huge plugin ecosystem.
  • Totally free — no subscription.

Weaknesses

  • UI is dated and takes time to learn.
  • Non-destructive editing (layers/effects) is limited vs Photoshop.
  • Performance on very large files can lag.
License: GPL-3.0 Self-host difficulty: 1/5 Self-host onlyDesktop: Windows, macOS, Linux

Official site · Source on GitHub

Ad slot — OSS middle

GIMP is used as an alternative to

Canva

Drag-and-drop graphic design for everyone.

See all alternatives →

Adobe Photoshop

Industry-standard raster image editor.

See all alternatives →

Sketch

Mac-first interface design tool.

See all alternatives →

More open source in this category

Discover other projects tagged Design & Creative Tools on the category page.

Other open source projects in Design & Creative Tools

Penpot

Open source Figma alternative for design-dev collaboration.

License: MPL-2.0

Excalidraw

Virtual whiteboard for sketchy diagrams.

License: MIT

Krita

Open source digital painting and illustration.

License: GPL-3.0

Recommended reading

When self-hosting goes wrong: seven failure modes and how to avoid them

An honest retrospective on the ways self-hosted setups break — not in theory, but in practice — and the small habits that prevent most of them.

Will the open source project you depend on still exist in three years?

Bus factor, maintainer burnout, funding models, and the signals that separate OSS projects that survive from those that quietly decay.

From SaaS to self-hosted: a 30-day migration playbook

A week-by-week plan to move one service off SaaS and onto your own server without breaking your team's workflow.