VectorCraft Review (2026): Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

VectorCraft is the Illustrator member of ArtCraft's seven Craft apps, a vector illustration app written from scratch in Rust and released in early October 2026. Its README describes it as "an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator" and, as of 10 October 2026, labels it alpha. The repository had 8,692 GitHub stars on 14 October, and version 0.10.0 shipped on 12 October.

The project publishes its own parity figures, which is unusual. As of 10 October: about 88% of Illustrator 2026's menu items, tools, effects and formats exist; 92.5% of menu items do something; feature depth is about 75%; and it rates itself about 65% ready for a mainstream illustrator's real work. Those numbers come from the team's own code compared against Adobe's documentation, so read them as the developer's map of the gaps rather than an independent score.

The drawing tools are the pitch: Pen and Direct Selection, Pathfinder and Shape Builder, gradients and gradient mesh, live blends, appearance and transparency, type with styles, artboards, a perspective grid, envelope distort and a live Revolve in 3D. The README claims bidirectional Hebrew and Arabic layout and says its boolean operations on curves are exact. An MCP server and a JSON control channel let an AI agent draw, edit and export, which is a capability Illustrator lacks without scripting.

File support covers SVG, PDF and PDF-compatible .ai including PDF/X, EPS, DXF and EMF/WMF, with raster export to PNG, JPEG and WebP and even PSD output; Affinity files open and place but cannot be written. The limit that decides professional use is in the README's own gap list: reliable exchange of Illustrator's native .ai files is not there, because Illustrator's private editing data is not written. Also missing: 3D beyond the first Revolve, 28 of 57 raster effects, vertical CJK composition, scripting and generative AI. Native builds exist for macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, plus a browser version. No independent hands-on test had been published by 14 October 2026.

How it was built, and how to read the numbers. ArtCraft's founder Brandon Thomas, formerly CEO of Storyteller.ai, says the Craft apps were written in Rust with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 as clean-room reimplementations from public documentation, with no Adobe code, icons or presets. The parity percentages quoted above are the project's own, measured by its team against Adobe's documentation; no outside party has verified them, and the project itself distinguishes between a feature that exists and one that behaves like Adobe's. We have not installed the app. Download only from github.com/storytold or getartcraft.com, because lookalike download sites appeared within days of launch. ArtCraft's paid plans, from $8 a month billed yearly, buy generative credits for the company's separate AI studio and are not needed to run any Craft app.