Best alternative for Adobe Creative Suite

As mentioned, GIMP is about the only free app that can compete with Photoshop. But it's rather clunky and takes time getting used to. After closing down the home business (and just recently retired) we let the full CC subscription go, but held onto the $10 per month Photoshop subscription. There just isn't anything else out there I would use for photo editing. And I tried all of those that were worth looking at. Affinity Photo was closest, but it won't run a couple of third party add-ons I use with PS.

Illustrator also has a lot of competitors. I tried virtually all of those, too. For free, there's Inkscape (which doesn't yet work right in Ventura). But it's built on old code, and it looks and behaves like it. There's the much more modern and free Vectornator, but it currently has lots of insurmountable bugs. Affinity Designer was the best of those I tested.

The only free page layout app I could find worth using is VivaDesigner. You're very limited feature wise with the free version, but it looks and behaves much like InDesign. It will also read the InDesign file format. For saving, if you choose Export > Document, you can save your document as a compatible InDesign markup .idml file, which any real InDesign user should be able to open.

MacGimp is not bad for graphics. Low priced shareware http://www.lemkesoft.com/ GraphicConverter is great. Photoshop Elements is a slimmed down Photoshop that isn't free.

There really isn't a. free suite that covers all features http://www.libreoffice.org/ has its own graphics and drawing built-in that isn't bad for someone who does not need a lot of features either.

Free means you get what you pay for and if you don't want GIMP, then there are the powerful, non-subscription, yet still reasonably priced Affinity products with free trials.