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Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

63 points by pacavaca ↗ HN
Adobe has sort of a monopoly on the creative tools market. Nobody seriously considers an alternative for their Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, etc, and for some people, these are truly the only products which can satisfy their sophisticated needs. However, there are more and more small (independent) creators of all kinds, who do not need all the uber features of the professional products but would rather appreciate an intuitive UI, cheaper price, and friendlier customer support. Every kid today is either a blogger, vlogger or web designer and it seems to me like quite a big market that would easily turn away from Adobe, had anyone created an alternative product with 40% of functionality that works flawlessly (!).

I recently had to interact with Adobe support, and my experience was quite terrible. I was also looking for a simple software to stitch together my GoPro videos but was left out with either free iMovie/Quick, which are too basic or a super-expensive Premiere. Both times I was wondering, how come there's only Adobe on the market, why nobody dares to compete with them. So, HN, what do you think, why?

P.S. I tried using Pixelmator (non-free), GIMP, OpenShot and a few more open-source editors - they don't stand the competition. On the other hand, I use and love Sketch, and would really appreciate Sketch-grade competitors for the above mentioned Adobe products.

89 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread
billconan
I like photoshop and haven't found a good replacement. when muscle memory is built up, it's really difficult to learn and switch to a different tool.

I have been searching for photoshop alternatives. but so far I haven't found any. For me photoshop is too expensive.

I have even considered to implement my own (I only need a portion of the photoshop features)

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

is what I found recently, it looks nice, but I can't get used to it.

pacavaca
Wow, Affinity looks pretty capable, I think worth trying out. Still, no real alternative for video editing...
ReverseCold
On Mac quite a few people use Final Cut.

Davinci Resolve is also getting better over time. Some people say it's already good enough for them to use daily, I think it's too buggy.

pacavaca
Final Cut is like $300 - a price of a new GoPro. Btw, I think that GoPro could be a great company to compete in the video-editing market. They already have a wide audience, and they just have to make their Quick editor more feature rich, while keeping it simple enough for average user. They also have money and are in desperate need of settling on a software market...
limeblack
You can get FCP10 for $15 on ebay(although the installation is a little sketchy). It is what I use on my non network connected Mac.
ReverseCold
$300 and DRM free by the way

You can copy the application (or airdrop) to any other Mac and it will work without and activation process or anything like that.

If $300 is a lot of money for your video editing software then you aren't the target market for software like this anyway. People at my school only have FCPx or premiere because of student discounts or because the school paid for it.

y_molodtsov
They actually have their own video editing app, but I can’t say it could compete with FinalCut.
isaiahg
I use Blender's built in video editor. It's got some rough edges but you get a full creative suite with it including compositing and vfx. Particles, filters, camera tracking, animate the video positions for any swipes or transitions you want. Considering the price, free, it's unbelievable what you get with it.
ocdtrekkie
I went ahead and jumped on Affinity myself, for everything I used Photoshop for, it works more than adequately. I won't pay a subscription fee for software I only use occasionally, so Adobe lost me when they went to Creative Cloud.
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mjrpes
I've used CS2 for many years, but the UI glitches with Windows 7/10 have gotten very annoying. I stumbled on Affinity a few weeks back and bought a $50 license after just a few hours of demoing it. It is very good. Much better IMHO than paint.NET and Gimp. There are a few features that I still really wish it would have, such as live export preview, to fine tune JPEG quality for web graphics.
smt88
Adobe has tons of competitors, but they're not always obvious because the market doesn't perfectly overlap.

For example, I used to buy Photoshop and Dreamweaver to do web design for static sites. Now I use SquareSpace instead.

There are lots of niche products that chip away at Photoshop, including web-based alternatives that are less powerful but "good enough" and more portable.

acidburnNSA
For "developing" RAW images (Adobe Lightroom), it appears that the FOSS, Darktable [1], is a serious competitor. It has a full array of non-destructive editing features including extremely fancy parametric mask and blending effects. It also has responsive photo management (works great on at least 10s of GB), import, tagging, etc. They recently released their first Windows build.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/

dingaling
Dark table, Raw Therapee and even dcraw-ufraw are all considered first-class tools for RAW work even amongst semi-pro market.

Lightroom is still a common choice for photo pros licensing other Adobe tools but I know some of them wio fall back to FOSS tools for particular tasks particularly in astro work.

mietek
The competition has been assimilated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Beach_Software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia

pacavaca
I would even be okay with Adobe buying a company, which serves an entry-level market and offering its products separately from their old behemoths. Kind of like Atlassian sells JIRA, but for those, who don't like it - they bought Trello.

P.S. Macromedia Flash was so cool in 2006 :)

stevekemp
Seeing those names reminded me of another, back in the day when I ran Windows all my editing was carried out in Paint Shop Pro - which still seems to exist, despite having been first released 27 years ago.
ivanstegic
We stopped using Photoshop and migrated to Sketch exclusively. New designers we interact with seem to be doing the same thing. One data point. YMMV.
thecupisblue
Sketch covers only 0.1% of Photoshop's features and it only serves that userbase.
starmftronajoll
Seems like the question would be to ask why nobody competes viably with Photoshop. Premiere is an odd example to single out — Avid and Final Cut, for instance, are full-featured and both have a substantial user base. The competition there is healthier than OP makes it out to be.

As for Photoshop, once it became the standard, it stayed that way by virtue of user inertia and the massive development resources it would take for a competitor to create a program in the same class. Photoshop is an extremely complex app and, on the whole, a very good one. It’s not without its frustrations, but nothing is.

pacavaca
Right, I would even narrow down my question to "why nobody competes Viably in a non-professional market". Both Avid and Final Cut are overkills for a ski-trip video editing, while simple things like iMovie and friends are waaay to stripped down.
sfifs
Perhaps because sufficient number of non professionals typically won't pay an amount of money that pays for a top notch development team. So in the non professional market, you have labors of love like GIMP and DarkTable
ghaff
For video editing could add Blender. There are alternatives for both casual use and professional users who are willing to put up with less fit and finish.
pacavaca
Right, but what about those "indie" content creators, popping up everywhere these days: YouTubers, Instagrammers, independent musicians and clip-makers, poor startup founders, needing to create a 1-minute marketing video twice a year... All those, I think, would spare $50-$100 for a good piece of software but not more than that. And if someone would analyze how they use professional products, I'm sure, it would converge to some stable ~30% subset of features big products offer
sfifs
If your content makes you significant money, you'll be willing to invest/pay. Return from even one piece of content will typically very comfortably pay off software pricing. My wife and her business partners run a completely bootstrapped startup and they do pay (often others rather than make content themselves) for wherever is critical for revenue generation.

If your content doesn't generate revenue or revenue generating leads, you have a hobby and need to decide whether to invest in the hobby.

Edit: in my last trip to China, I actually saw the mushrooming "mobile live video streaming influencer" industry and looking at their equipment (portable large battery powered klieg lights, audio gear etc.), it's pretty clear the influencers were investing.

y_molodtsov
Top Youtubers already use RED cameras, they’re ok with spending money :)
wgerard
I think you kinda answered your own question:

> P.S. I tried using Pixelmator (non-free), GIMP, OpenShot and a few more open-source editors - they don't stand the competition.

It's really hard to do it right, and even if you do you're targeting just a single segment of the market (people who need more than iMovie but not everything that Premiere provides). I imagine more than a few people have looked into this and decided that isn't a good ROI for the amount of investment involved.

Also, don't forget that Adobe (used to, anyway, not sure if they still do) has really cheap student licenses so that aspiring designers/editors/etc. get hooked on their software and carry that preference over into their professional lives.

My guess is that anyone who really has a passion for this has a regular full-time job and works on something like GIMP in their free time.

kradeelav
I'm a designer that works both on an indie freelancer level and an agency/corporate level, so this feels apt for input!

Several reasons - you've got part of the answer right in that there are a ton of other smaller tools for the more specific sections of the market that can be broken apart and sectioned off. I personally deal with quite a bit of comics/illustration and there alone you have Corel Painter, OpenCanvas, PaintTool SAI, Manga Studio, Clip Studio, plus many of the newer ipad sketch programs that've popped up recently.

However - I think those markets get saturated and weakened too quickly by those newcomers that gain a foothold and then slowly start deteriorating due to lack of updates or shiny marketing. Photoshop gets underrated for sheer versatility in this case - it's less of a high priced transient brand (think Uber or BMW) and simply a functioning longstanding tool (a car, or a swiss army knife for that 'tool as a brand' metaphor) for so many kinds of design related issues that the ease of use is baked in. Software tends to have a maddening problem of quick degradation and a large slice of older designers tend to be very picky about their tools. Broke, too.

Additionally, for some of the larger corporations - there's lots of production chains that rely quite strongly on specific file formats to be exported or special color management, and most of these smaller programs simply can't handle that much depth without the team that Adobe has. (Don't ever talk to me about color management for factory packaging production.)

Finally, factor in the immense marketing team that Adobe has - designers are innately marketers, after all, and they've saturated most trendy design sites with pro-Adobe ads and likely have special deals behind the scene to keep their name relevant. Not a fan of that style of closed garden at all, so I skate by by using the most outdated version of PS (ie non subscription) I can find without crippling my workflow, and using others if I can.

kingnothing
If we're looking at a single program, like Photoshop, I can get the best tool in the industry for $20 / month. You have three hurdles to overcome...

1. What would you do better than Photoshop?

2. How would you price it to be competitive?

3. How will you convince users that your product is worthwhile?

pacavaca
So, let's take Pixelmator as an example. They easily bought me with their promise of a streamlined design and simple to use tools. Their demos looked so cool, that I've easily paid $40 (I think it was $40). Then, when I started using it, I realized it's missing some super-simple features (that people request on their forum) + it's not so stable, it freezes and crashes sometimes. (Also, can't remember the exact features that I was missing) So, now, even though I have a paid for Pixelmator, I still have to ask my wife to do simple edits in her Photoshop occasionally, which I hate using.

So, what I'm saying is that selling to me was not a problem at all, if only they could deliver a good product. I also used Sketch as an example of a product that works great: it's cheap, it probably misses tons of Corel Draw features, but it's simple, cheap, and perfectly serves needs of those, dealing with web/mobile design.

So, should there be a similar product for raster graphics and video? Also, NI on the audio production market feels to me as up for disruption.

joshAg
check out avid media composer for your videos. It's priced reasonably.
pacavaca
The website says $50/month == full creative suite price. It's probably a very reasonable price for a professional, who uses the tool every day and makes money on it, but for my needs, it's way overpriced...
joshAg
That's fair. Did you check out "Media Composer | First"? I think that's free
scarface74
Is anyone seriously investing in any commercial non SAAS software any more as a stand-alone product? No one is seriously competing with Microsoft Office either.
omarchowdhury
For UX/UI design, there's Sketch and Figma.
mhmiles
Was looking for this. I don’t think competition comes as a 100% feature complete alternative but rather as a splintering into more specialized tools.
y_molodtsov
Sketch and Figma are actually auite similar from PS, they were adapted for the particular task and simplified it, that’s why designers love it. Hard to do something like that fot the general application.
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maxxxxx
My experience is only with LightRoom and Photoshop and I have to say that their products are just very good. There is also a ton of learning material out there for Adobe products.

Hard to compete with that. Affinity photo is quite good but if I were a pro I would stick to Photoshop.

madenine
The time to take on Adobe was probably 10-15 years ago. At this point to oust them or even try to compete with them you would have have to create a feature for feature better product, and offer it at a lower price point. Your interface would either have to mimic adobe's to ease transition or be a significant improvement that its beneficial to switch.

As far as dialed down "40% functionality" - isn't that what Adobe tried with their "Elements" line dialed back versions of Premier/Photoshop at a lower price point?

I get the feeling it would be hard to roll out a "40%" product without a "100%" as well - or else you risk having the narrative around your product becoming "use this until you start taking yourself seriously - then learn a whole new software suite when you graduate to Adobe"

Idk. Lack of competition isn't great, but back when others were actively trying Photoshop was still king (thinking back to the 4.0/5.0 days)

besasam
>you would have have to create a feature for feature better product, and offer it at a lower price point.

Have you tried out Affinity? I'm not sure about the features yet, but it's definitely just as visually appealing at a fraction of the cost (and non-subscription).

kamphey
Many mobile photo editing apps compete with lightroom.

Snapseed, VSCO, Instagram

pacavaca
those are too basic, there's a lot of space in between Photoshop and Instagram...
Torn
For consumer (non-expert) ways to design great-looking graphics + materials in an easy drag & drop fashion, check out Canva.

For the more complicated things, Paint.NET on windows is pretty great (and still free). I've yet to find an equivalent that works as well for other OSes.

patwalls
Want to reiterate how great Canva is, and my anecdotal evidence that a TON of bloggers and people around the web use it.
hyperpallium
Adobe has been in the game for a long time, and they know how to play. For example, early on in postscript days, they had proprietary fonts... which they made free at about the right time to have reaped profits without fueling a competitor. A short-sighted company might have hung on; a non-profit might have given it away from the start.

- they allow photoshop to be pirated - removing fuel for competitors

- it's difficult (and uninteresting/not technically challenging) to make UIs easy to use; hence the gimp

- pdf is free-to-read, pay-to-write. They keep adding new features, so companies will keep buying it

- maybe I read too much into this: but I once noted that postscript/pdf are the only mainstream "vector" graphics on the market (well, splines, not vectors, but I just mean that they're drawn)... apart from flash, which (to me) it seemed could make inroads on publishing. Then... adobe acquired flash (macromedia), giving them a monopoly on vector graphics. They let flash languish, consistent with my view...

Adobe know what they're doing, to maintain digital standards/monopolies throughout the lifecycle.

samspenc
This. Plus network effects. Once you have people sharing files in Photoshop, Indesign and AE formats, everyone who's working with you has to adopt Adobe as well.

GIMP proves that it's possible to build a competing product that has all the features, but doesn't come with the same ease-of-use or shortcuts or support for proprietary file formats. Which means slow adoption, and ensures that it's hard to compete with Adobe in this field.

solarkraft
There are many products able to somewhat import psd, but due to its (perhaps intentional) complexity many fail to fully support it.

See Xee developer Paracelsus:

> Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday... I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/30/xee_photoshop_psd_c...

shaftway
Adobe pushed really hard on SVG (also vector based), before the Macromedia acquisition. They were part of the W3C group that designed the spec and they produced the most popular browser extensions to support it. The Macromedia acquisition was most likely in response to a lack of interest in SVG from the public.

Source: I worked on the SVG extension at Adobe.

Someone
”they had proprietary fonts... which they made free at about the right time to have reaped profits without fueling a competitor.”

Are adobe fonts free? They opened up the Type 1 font specification when Apple and Microsoft threatened to make them irrelevant because TrueType fonts were good enough (at least for consumers) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType#History)

”pdf is free-to-read, pay-to-write.”

I think you can legally create a PDF writer that supports most, if not all, PDF content without paying any license costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Intel...:

”Anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.”

hyperpallium
> you can legally create a PDF writer

I just meant Acrobat Reader was free, Acrobat writer was not. (People tried this with the web - browser free, server not - but it didn't work out.) Your point about 3rd party readers/writers is also consistent with sensible and long-term profitable management of a digital standard: your competitors promote your standard instead of competing with it.

ccajas
Possibly controversial opinion, but I think UI in most open-source software needs a lot of work. GIMP is one such example of it. Good programmers aren't necessarily good UI designers. For vector graphics, I use Inkscape for SVG editing and retouching, though. It is at least bearable to use for me.

This might be more due to my experience as a programmer, but I see the most success in creating good UIs in open-source code editors. Perhaps because as programmers, they are already better at judging what kind of things work and don't work for UI and UX in this kind of software, compared to digital paint tools, 3D modeling, etc.

blt
Photoshop is feature-complete, and the features are implemented well. For example, compare the speed of applying a 200px-radius Gaussian blur in Photoshop vs. Gimp.

To make an analogy with more hands-on trades: buying Photoshop is like getting the entire Snap-On tool catalog for $500. Buying Pixelmator is like getting 1/4 of the Craftsman tool catalog for $50. If you can spare the extra $450, you get a lot for your money.

Professional mechanics spend $xx,000 on Snap-On tools because they can justify the cost. Most DIY mechanics buy cheaper tools. But if the Snap-On tools only cost $500, why not get the best?

(edit: GIMP is like getting the entire Harbor Freight tool catalog for free.)

Also, most instructional material for image editing assumes Photoshop.

nugi
Slightly OT, however; Pros buy snap on because of convenience. Most know there are cheaper, better made tools available for the last 25 years. The tool trucks, and big lines of credit, and bling factor are their only remaining upsells. The 'made in usa' stamps are even disappearing from their tools as more come from tiawan and china. It is hard, if not impossible, to justify the markup without some huge ego stroking, tradition and deliberate lack of comparison shopping.
blt
True. Their lines of credit even feel somewhat predatory to me, especially wrt tool storage. I am not a mechanic though.
chasedehan
I really don't understand the amount of money spent on those tools. My cousin is a mechanic and has a $10K MAC tool box(similar to Snap On) - that's just for the box without a single tool. Apparently he has >$25K in total in his tool box. We really have it quite good in tech.
panic
> I was also looking for a simple software to stitch together my GoPro videos but was left out with either free iMovie/Quick, which are too basic or a super-expensive Premiere.

It sounds like your real question is, why isn't anyone making free or inexpensive tools with features like Premiere, so I don't have to pay for it? That's the problem -- everybody wants nice software but nobody's willing to pay what it would actually cost to write it.

pacavaca
Not really. My point was that there's a lot of space between MS Paint and Photoshop (iMovie and Premiere), etc, and there seem to be enough people, willing to pay half price for the half of features. I'm not saying I want it for free, all I'm saying is that $500/year (creative suite price) is way too much for occasional picture/video editing.
jinushaun
Frustratingly that mythical video editing app you’re looking for was actually a previous version of iMovie. Apple crippled iMovie with the release of iMovie 08, which removed a bunch of previous features and workflows in an effort to make it easier to post videos to YouTube. Apple made it easier to create simple videos, but incredibly difficult to make anything slightly more complicated. Editing clips synced to music became a frustrating game of Tower of Hanoi.

I thought there would be hope with switching to FCP, but then they did the same thing in 2011 with FCP X.

pbalau
Because you can do that with a bit of reading and gstreamer. And because designing and building a solution for every graphic/video designer out there is expensive. Adobe and Autodesk got the right idea, dont complain too much if people are pirating your shit, wait until they get used to your stuff, then give them a cheap way to be legal. I use Autodesk Inventor every so often, but 30 quid/month is not something that I feel in my pocket and they get a revenue stream out of that. Obviously, they kind of built the entire thing on charging lots in the past, but now, now I can afford that as a hobist.
jbarham
PhaseOne's Capture One is gaining some traction against Lightroom in the photography market, especially since Adobe basically forced Lightroom users to a subscription-only model.
josh_bondy
We are working to compete with Adobe (well not them specifically), less trying to beat them on feature count (nobody would), more taking the things that Photoshop is overkill for and making it easier/repeatable.

Competitors always seem to focus on a 'canvas' paradigm rather than what people are actually trying to get done, such as cropping to the same dimensions for web over and over again, or in your case stitching videos (sorry we don't support video yet).

We are still pretty early stage but the feedback has been great.

https://beta.laazy.io

pasbesoin
Bitmap graphics: Paint.NET . Yeah, Windows, but it works quite well. IIRC, I've read that, at least at one point, it ran under Wine. KDE's Krita just hit 4.0 . I haven't used it, but there are lots of nice comments about it floating around. In the Linux world, there's also Pinta that I've used a few times. On Ubuntu 16.04, out of the default repositories, it complains about this or that missing or not being signed/blessed/something -- or did, last I used it. But it works ok, at least for the quick and dirty tasks I had at hand at that time.

Vector graphics: Inkscape

Adobe support is, in my experience, truly horrible. I once spent a cumulative 7.5 hours on support calls before I finally got a front line call center employee to go back to their supervisor, after being given the wrong answer once, and prod them into paying attention and looking further and, lo and behold, generating the correct legacy license code I -- rather, the person I was helping -- was entitled to as an owner/licensee of the full-blown Creative Suite.

Basically, I knew more than the support supervisor about this problem. I just had to find someone in support with the interest and guts to push their supervisor to actually pay attention and execute the solution.

7.5 hours. For what should have been one 10 minute support call.

After that, I vowed that as for myself, at least, Adobe would never get another dime from me.

pacavaca
Right. And the sad part is that they can afford their support being this terrible - they simply don't care about a few hundred customers fleeing them. But on the user end - I and my wife were so frustrated by their support today so that you can see, I've even started this topic :D

P.S. the support question was not even about using their product but about buying

Eric_WVGG
I'm one of those sad dorks who bought into CorelDraw back in the late 90s. Yes, their packaging was tacky; yes, they marketed themselves poorly; yes, a dozen cd-roms full of shitty clip art and knock-off fonts was a poor way to court designers. Behind all that was a massively superior (to Illustrator) vector art software, and a bitmap editor that was easily a peer to Photoshop. Watching "Creative Suite" (I mean Cloud) features to finally catch up to Corel 1998 in 2015 has been excruciating.

Look at how Illustrator even today doesn't use shift-clicks consistently with either Mac or Windows; it works like an app from thirty years ago, because it is a 30-year-old app.

Artists learn a tool, and are more interested in what they can do with that tool than how the tool works. Thus, they have a uniquely poor ability to adapt. You can see that with the transition of film photographers to digital. Also 3D guys: I have a neighbor who was an animator in the eighties, he did a bunch of those animated logos for NBC and HBO and MTV (with physically carved models and fancy camera tricks); he's trying like hell to adapt to software, but he seems to be about a decade late to wrap his head around it.

jimmiejams
I used to work with a designer who lived and breathed CorelDraw. She could do everything she needed to in it, and preferred it over Photoshop. The rest of the designers used Photoshop and there was always some pressure for her to switch, but she was productive and that's all that really mattered. She used to have a few digs at them about how quick it was to do something (or even possible), but all in good fun.
kyriakos
I still feel like curve editing, point selection on Corel Draw is more intuitive than Illustrator. Corel got a lot of things right but didn't manage to get its products seriously considered by the publishing industry.
jsfunfun
www.HugoMM.com is a new Mac application in the LightRoom space