What Is DesignCraft? The Free Open-Source InDesign Alternative

DesignCraft is a free, open-source page layout app that recreates the Adobe InDesign workflow. The ArtCraft team wrote it in Rust; it runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser, so you can try DesignCraft online — click Open sample magazine to see a finished layout.

What it does

• Familiar layout: spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches and text wrap.
• Beautiful type: a Knuth–Plass paragraph composer (plus single-line), dictionary hyphenation, word, letter and glyph-scaling justification, keeps, optical margin alignment, columns, baseline grid, tabs, rules and shading.
• Open formats: a documented native format, IDML import and export, and PNG, PDF (PDF/X-4, PDF/A-2b) and EPUB export.
• Fast: multithreaded rendering and instant undo snapshots.
• Agent-native: every menu item and tool can be driven over a JSON control channel and an MCP server in the desktop app.

Where it stands

DesignCraft is the youngest of the Crafting Apps and its own roadmap calls it pre-alpha. It is a great way to explore typesetting without a subscription, but keep InDesign or Affinity for client deadlines.

DesignCraft vs InDesign, Affinity and Scribus

InDesign is the industry standard; Affinity is now free with a Canva account; Scribus is open source but looks and works differently. DesignCraft is the only one that is open source, InDesign-shaped and runs in your browser.

Try it

Open DesignCraft Online, choose a page size or the sample magazine, and export a PDF when you are done.