VectorCraft is an open-source Adobe Illustrator alternative in Rust

A free vector illustration app that renders 20,000 shapes in about 27 milliseconds at full retina resolution is now the alternative that designers and marketing teams on an Adobe Illustrator subscription did not have last month. VectorCraft, the newest release from the ArtCraft open-source team, is a Rust vector illustration tool that the project pitches as a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, with an opt-in MCP server for coding agents and a JSON control channel. The GitHub repository was created on 30 September 2026 and had 9,525 stars by 17 October.

VectorCraft runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser through WebAssembly from the same codebase. The source is on GitHub under MIT or Apache-2.0 at the user's option, and the ArtCraft organisation on GitHub has 53,932 followers and 66 public repositories dating from January 2021. The project marks itself as alpha and under active development.

What the project claims about coverage

The README quantifies the comparison with Illustrator in a set of numbers, all stated by the project. It says about 88 percent of Illustrator 2026's menu items, tools, effects and formats exist in VectorCraft, 92.5 percent of menu items do something, feature depth is around 75 percent, and the project estimates 65 percent "ready for real work" for a mainstream illustrator, or 62 percent against the full Illustrator feature set. Treat these as the project's own weighting, since there is no agreed catalogue of Illustrator features to measure against, and the gaps for a professional, including reliable exchange of Illustrator's own .ai layer structure, are listed openly.

How the files move

The native format is .vectorcraft, a documented JSON. Reading and writing covers SVG, PDF and PDF-compatible .ai with PDF/X, legacy version 7 .ai keeping layers, groups and type, EPS, DXF, EMF/WMF, Print and Package. Raster export covers PNG, JPEG, WebP and Export for Screens, and SVGZ, templates, GIF, TIFF and BMP on open. PSD writes out and PSD/PSB open as their merged image. The project also opens Affinity Designer, Publisher and Photo files from Affinity 1, 2 and 3 natively, bringing in layers, groups, artboards, pages, curves, shapes, fills, gradients, strokes, clipping, masks, text and images, with what did not come in listed in the import warning. VectorCraft does not write Affinity files, and the project says so.

The MCP server and the agent angle

Every menu item, tool gesture, panel and dialog in VectorCraft can be driven over the JSON control channel and the MCP server. The practical shape is that an agent operates the real interface the project ships, not a parallel API that drifts from it. A marketing team that pays Adobe to produce logo variants, icon sets or ad posters from a template can script the operation on its own files and keep each export under version control.

The alpha label still matters. A design studio whose output is Illustrator .ai files for a print house or another designer cannot replace the writer yet, and the project's own list of missing parts says so. For a team whose pipeline ends at SVG, PDF or raster export, the gap is smaller.

Source

storytold/vectorcraft on GitHub, MIT or Apache-2.0 dual-licensed. The parent project is ArtCraft Crafting Apps.