The man who gave away free copies of Photoshop has gone after Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Brandon Thomas, whose ArtCraft studio built free stand-ins for Adobe’s creative apps, put three Microsoft Office look-alikes on GitHub in the weeks between late September and early October 2026. They are called WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, and anyone can download them.
Tom’s Hardware reported that Thomas built them with Claude. Kaptentekno added that the apps are written in Rust and that most of the GitHub commits credit Claude as a co-author. The studio’s earlier work included PhotoCraft, a free alternative to Photoshop.
Three apps, none finished
WordCraft takes on Word and handles .docx, .odt, .rtf and PDF files. It covers 93% of ribbon commands, Track Changes, citations and mail merge included. GridCraft stands in for Excel, opens .xlsx, CSV, TSV and .ods files, and offers PivotTables, Flash Fill and 17 chart types. It swaps VBA for its own scripting system. DeckCraft replaces PowerPoint with 11 layouts, eight built-in themes, Morph effects and Presenter View, and works with .pptx, PDF and images.
None is ready to take over from Microsoft’s suite. Kaptentekno put WordCraft in alpha at about 60% complete, GridCraft in pre-alpha at about 50%, and DeckCraft at about 55%. Tom’s Hardware reached a similar verdict: most of the apps are still far from what they imitate.
The gaps go beyond features. Microsoft 365 also bundles email, collaboration tools and account and device management, which businesses use to control who can reach their data. ArtCraft has built nothing comparable yet, so large companies cannot switch. Someone who opens a document now and then might.
Clean-room, and free to copy
ArtCraft says it used a clean-room method: public file-format specifications and observed behavior, with no Microsoft or Adobe source code, icons or templates. Kaptentekno noted that copyright law in the European Union and the United States generally supports that approach, since it protects the expression of code rather than function or file formats, though copying protected code, visual assets or trademarks would still break the law. The apps are dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, with no subscription fees, license servers or telemetry. They come with no intellectual property indemnification.
Thomas wants all of them to run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and browser builds through WebAssembly already exist. Tom’s Hardware named cross-platform parity as ArtCraft’s main selling point, and said Thomas, a software engineer with 15 years of experience, answered critics of “vibecoded” software by saying he does know how to code. The outlet also reported that the studio’s Discord community is growing fast, with users asking for more tools, CADCraft among them.
Sources
- ArtCraft Releases Free and Open-Source Microsoft Office Alternatives
- Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next | Tom's Hardware
