DesignCraft: a free, open-source Adobe InDesign alternative

Looking for a free alternative to Adobe InDesign? DesignCraft is one option. Its README describes it like this:

Page layout and publishing; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe InDesign, rebuilt in pure Rust.

It's made by the ArtCraft team, licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0, and published for macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, plus a web build. The latest version is v0.6.0.

What it does well

According to the README:

• Familiar: InDesign's layout, tools, menus, panels and shortcuts: spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches and text wrap.
• Typography: a Knuth–Plass paragraph composer, dictionary hyphenation, optical margin alignment, columns and a baseline grid. Line breaks are identical on screen and in PDF.
• Open formats: a documented native format, IDML import and export, and PNG, PDF (PDF/X-4, PDF/A-2b) and EPUB export.
• No subscription, no licence server and no telemetry.
• Agent-native: a JSON control channel and an MCP server.

How far along it is

The README lists DesignCraft's stage as pre-alpha (see its ROADMAP). It doesn't publish a percentage in the README; details are in the project's parity and gaps documents.

What's still missing

The full, ranked list is in the project's docs/gaps.md.

Should you switch?

Try DesignCraft if you want a free, open-source page layout and publishing app that feels familiar to Adobe InDesign users, runs on Linux or in a browser, or can be scripted. For client work, test your own files first. The project describes itself as early-stage software.

• How to install DesignCraft
• More free alternatives: the Craft suite

Adobe InDesign is a trademark of Adobe. It is named here only to describe what DesignCraft is modeled on.