GIMP — Free Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

At a glance

GitHub repo

GNOME/gimp

GitHub stars

6,579 (checked 11 November 2026)

Licence

GPL (per the COPYING file in the repo)

Main language

C

Replaces

Adobe Photoshop

Paid price it replaces

$22.99/month (single-app, billed annually; Photography plan with Lightroom $19.99/month)

Best for

Freelancers, online shops and designers who mainly crop, retouch and export photos and do not need Photoshop's newest AI features.

Prices were checked on the vendor's pricing page on 11 November 2026 and may have changed since. Star counts are a snapshot from the same date.

What GIMP does

GIMP is a free raster image editor: retouching, photo compositing, digital painting and batch processing with scripts. It supports layers, masks and plugins, reads PSD files, and handles the everyday editing work of freelancers, online shops and designers — cropping, colour correction, cut-outs and web exports — without a subscription.

The comparison is Adobe Photoshop at $22.99 a month for the single-app plan billed annually (the Photography plan with Lightroom is $19.99 a month). Over a year, Photoshop costs about $276; GIMP costs nothing. The gap is real but specific: Photoshop still leads on the newest AI features, cloud documents and the deepest professional colour workflows. For most editing — product photos, social images, posters, retouching — GIMP is enough.

One honest note about the numbers. The GitHub repo GNOME/gimp is a read-only mirror; the main development happens on GNOME's GitLab. Its 6,579 GitHub stars understate how widely GIMP is actually used, because the community lives on GitLab. Download GIMP from gimp.org, not from the GitHub mirror.

If you know Photoshop already, switch GIMP to single-window mode and the interface feels familiar within an hour. For anyone paying $22.99 a month mainly to crop, retouch and export images, GIMP is the free replacement that has existed for over twenty-five years.

Why it is worth using for free

• Covers most real photo editing — retouch, composite, colour correct, export for web — for $0 instead of about $276 a year
• Layers, masks, plugins, scripting and PSD file support
• Free under the GPL, on Windows, macOS and Linux, with no subscription or watermark
• Single-window mode makes the interface familiar to Photoshop users

How to use GIMP

Download GIMP from gimp.org (the official builds; the GitHub repo is a read-only mirror of the GNOME GitLab project). Install it and open an image.

Try Crop, Heal and Levels on a photo first. If you come from Photoshop, turn on single-window mode under Windows > Single-Window Mode for a familiar layout.

Frequently asked questions