Can This Free Tool Replace All Adobe Apps? (2024)

Would you still subscribe to an expensive Adobe plan if you could get all you needed from free software? Let’s compare Linearity design software to Adobe Creative Cloud to see if it can replace Adobe.

What's Included in the Free Linearity Subscription?

Linearity—previously Vectornator—is a freemium design software. There are two separate programs available together: Linearity Curve, the illustration and vector drawing app, and Linearity Move, the paired animation software. Both are available for Mac and iPad OS and are targeted towards casual and hobbyist designers and animators.

Within both Move and Curve, you can integrate files from other software, like Figma, Adobe, or Sketch. Like the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, you can animate, create social media posts and digital ads, illustrate, and create branding and marketing assets.

Free Starter plan users are limited to editing only their three most recent projects. There are no collaboration tools, app support is non-priority, and export formats and resolutions are limited—Free users cannot export in SVG or PDF and are limited to resolutions of 1024 x 1024 pixels.

The Pro plan is $9.99 per month for a yearly plan or $14.99 for a monthly one. The Pro plan allows for everything in the free plan with the benefit of unlimited projects, more export options, collaboration tools, and priority support.

Can Linearity Replace Adobe Apps?

Is Linearity as good as all Adobe apps combined? Can your entire Adobe workflow be moved into Linearity Move and Curve?

Image Manipulation

Adobe Photoshop is the go-to program for image manipulation. Including its integration of AI tools, Photoshop has earned a rightful place at the top for digital design software and image manipulation capabilities.

Linearity Curve’s image manipulation options are quite limited in comparison. Although you can use Auto Trace to turn a raster into a vector and edit with Node editing tools, there aren’t tools to directly edit a raster image or photograph.

Linearity has layers and blend options, so although you can’t manipulate raster images, you can still edit and merge images in various ways. Linearity also boasts a decent background removal tool for separating your image’s subject.

For image manipulation, Adobe Photoshop wins against Linearity.

Animation

Adobe offers After Effects and Premiere Pro for video and animation, as well as the ability to animate in Photoshop. Linearity Move is an animation tool that works hand-in-hand with Linearity Curve.

With Linearity Move, you can animate vector graphics as well as raster images, which puts it on par with both Photoshop and After Effects for its animation offerings. Linearity Move for iPad is a great animation tool, whereas Adobe doesn’t have a native iPad animation app.

The ability to switch between iPad and Mac for animations is helpful. You can also easily access your assets from Linearity Curve using Linearity Cloud—both on and offline.

You can’t add audio to your animations in Linearity Move at the time of writing. It looks like it will be a feature in the future, but until then, you can create incredible silent animations with the Auto Animate tool and manual editing features.

Linearity Move offers all you need for animating for free, especially for hobbyists, and its ever-improving tool may eventually be as powerful as Adobe After Effects. Although it’s less powerful, I’d place Linearity Move on par with the animation offerings of Adobe After Effects and better than the animation tools in Adobe Photoshop. This one’s a draw.

Video

Unfortunately, Linearity Move is only focused on animation rather than video design. In most situations, Adobe Premiere Pro generally comes out on top for video editing tools.

If you want to use Linearity and keep a free workflow that includes video editing, CapCut is similar to Premiere Pro and is a great free option.

Adobe wins this one.

Vector Drawing

Linearity’s biggest selling point is that it offers vector design and drawing tools. This is comparable to Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Fresco—one of Adobe’s free apps—but Linearity comes out on top as a free design app available on both Mac and iPad.

For easy vector design, Linearity Curve provides the standard and expected tools you’ll need: Pen; Pencil; Node tool (like Illustrator’s Direct Selection tool); Brush; Shapes; and Shape Builder. All these tools are equally found in Illustrator for computers and some—but not all—are found in Adobe Fresco for iPad.

Using Linearity across both Mac and iPad creates a seamless workflow where you can draw and edit your vectors from wherever is best for you.

You could replace your vector drawing Adobe workflow with Linearity and have the benefit of cross-platform use of the same program.

Layout Design

For layout and publishing design, Adobe offers InDesign. You could also use Adobe Express for digital publishing like online posters, PDF documents, or social media layouts.

You can easily design print documents using Linearity Curve. The layout tools are similar, allowing for great layout design for various uses. There are masking tools for placing images, text tools, layout tools, and layers among many more.

If you’re comparing Linearity Curve to InDesign for layout design, Adobe InDesign comes out on top for its more intuitive tools. However, if you’re comparing Linearity Curve to Adobe Express, they’re comparable to one another from a design aspect.

You could replace your Adobe layout design workflow with Linearity, depending on your use case.

AI Features

In the growing world of AI tools, graphic design software is expected to have at least a few AI features. Adobe software implements AI using Adobe Firefly, including integrations such as a vector recolor tool, text effect generation, and AI generative vectors to name a few.

While Adobe’s AI features are cool, many of them seem trivial and more for fun rather than to aid in serious graphic design. Adobe Express has a bunch of AI tools; you can have fun testing them, but they may not all provide helpful results.

Linearity has a few AI features that are more practical and time-saving rather than novel and fun. Linearity Curve’s background removal tool uses AI with great success; its only downside is that the selection is difficult to edit if the tool does make a mistake.

Linearity Move’s Auto Animate feature utilizes AI to apply animation to your assets. This can save time on animating your social content or GIFs, and you can still edit the animation result to fine-tune it.

Auto Trace is also an AI feature found in Curve. Most similar is Adobe Illustrator’s Image Trace function which allows you to change images from raster to vector. Auto Trace can convert raster sketches, photography, or illustrations into beautiful, smooth vectors in an instant.

While Adobe software provides more AI tools across the board, Linearity’s smaller offerings seem more helpful in their use cases. Most designers don’t rely solely on AI features, so it’s safe to say you could replace Adobe with Linearity for AI use.

Overall, the free version of Linearity offers plenty that can replace Adobe. If you’re looking to cut down on subscriptions and cost, it’s worth a shot to replace Adobe apps with Linearity Curve and Move. If you feel limited by the Free plan’s three-project limit, Linearity’s Pro plan is much more affordable than Adobe’s cheapest subscription. Unless you’re a professional designer who needs Adobe capabilities, Linearity makes the perfect tool to replace most Adobe apps.