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You may remember Freepik as a catalog of stock images. But over the past few years, it has evolved into a full-fledged creative AI suite and has attracted more than 100 million monthly users. It has spent a lot of time trying to punch above its weight, challenging industry giants like Adobe. Now, launching the redesign of its software in Consumer Electronics Show 2026Freepik’s AI-first approach is ready to stand alone among a sea of creative AI tools and tackle the daunting task of convincing creative professionals to embrace generative AI.
There has been a flood of creative AI over the past few years. Creative companies like Adobe power their software with AI technology Makerswhile technology companies indulge in creative AI work with models such as Sora and Nano banana. Generative media has become an integral part of AI development, and Freepik is a unique figure among the plethora of options.
Freepik has several professional AI tools, including a collaborative workflow called Spaces.
Freepik executives embrace a familiar and clear belief that AI is simply the latest creative tool and will not replace workers. But the company faces an uphill battle to convince professional creatives not just to use AI, but to use it in every step of their work — something that Adobe and others have avoided to its advantage. Highlight Specific and practical use cases. To do this, Freepik has redesigned its platform to be an “all-in-one” place, with several editing tools to help fine-tune AI output to fit the detail-oriented work produced by professional creators. The result is impressive, with the most comprehensive and professional editing suite I’ve seen in an AI program.
Its new redesign was designed in collaboration with professional creatives, co-founder and CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abella told me in a demo. Freepik shaped generative AI for its existing creative clients, who wanted ways to collaborate across a variety of projects.
“Different companies have different contexts. So we developed the product by looking at what they need,” Abella said. “Our user interface is designed specifically for them.”
Freepik vs. Adobe, Midjourney, and more
Freepik and Adobe certainly have a lot in common. Both used inventory catalogs to train AI models and compensate creators. Freepik’s focus on detail-oriented editing tools is intended to appeal to professional creatives who can’t use unpredictable, hallucination-prone AI generators in their work. It offers a large number of models, from OpenAI’s Sora to Google’s Nano Banana Pro Eleven laboratoriesSound generation models, similar to Adobe’s growing list From partner models.
Freebec Artificial intelligence product terminology Let’s assume that creators own the rights to AI-generated works and promise that the company will not train its AI models on your content. Freepik subscribers can receive limited commercial protection for AI outputs. For professional creators, this means you’ll need to make sure Freepk complies with any strict legal requirements.
But while Adobe tries to maintain a somewhat moderate stance on AI, offering AI tools among many other options, Freepik is diving all in. Freepik is for professionals who are ready to integrate AI throughout their entire workflow, not the creative who uses AI for an odd task or brainstorming session. This will not be the case for all content creators, as there are growing concerns about it The creeping role of artificial intelligence in creative work — But for those who want to use AI, Freepik is a good alternative to Adobe.
The Community and Template Gallery is a great way to brainstorm and spark ideas.
If you’ve used creative AI software before, Freepik will have a lot of familiar elements. To me, it looked like various parts of Midjourney, Figma, and Adobe’s Firefly had been thrown into a blender. You can make annotations, similar to comments in Figma, and use them to trigger prompts on specific objects without changing the rest of the image. It also includes a community gallery similar to the Midjourney Gallery. You won’t have the same level of pixel-by-pixel control that you get with Adobe’s non-AI tools. But Freepik has one of the most comprehensive editing and workflow suites I’ve seen, with the advantage of never having to worry about using the correct object selection tool.
Read more: My secret weapon at CES 2026? Plaud’s new AI-powered wearable note-taking pin
Spaces for collaboration
Spaces is one of the newer additions, and is great for visualizing your workflow in one place.
Imagine an endless canvas. You can add specific nodes and link them together in a visual workflow. In one node, you can add three different reference images, and in the next node, you can write a prompt to combine them into one image. Then, you can animate that image into a video. You can create a grid of workflows for your entire team to see.
In this workflow, I uploaded a reference image, selected AI models, and ran the entire flow to create an AI animation video.
The best part: If you want to change something at the beginning of the process, like replacing a reference image, you can replay the entire process with one click and watch the entire series adapt as needed. It’s an easy way to try out different ideas and customize content without having to manually repeat a workflow. Adobe has previewed a similar capability called Project diagramIn it Annual conference Last fall, but it’s not out yet.
As models of generative media have evolved, so have the ways in which creators use them. We have gone through the stages of creating bulk and custom images using tools such as Mid-flightNow we have moved to a selective approach, where we select AI models for specific tasks based on their tasks Characters To take a selective approach, selecting AI models for specific tasks based on their “personalities.” Now, collaborative AI spaces are growing, such as in Freepik and Adobe’s Firefly panels, bringing all the pieces of AI creation together. In addition to giving creatives more ways to use AI, it highlights how AI is being normalized and integrated into creative work.
For more, check out our website A guide to artificial intelligence in Photoshop and Best AI video generators.