You might remember Freepik as a stock image catalog. But over the past few years, it has evolved into a full creative AI suite and racked up over 100 million monthly users. It has spent a lot of time trying to punch above its weight, challenging industry titans like Adobe. Now, launching a redesign of its program at CES 2026, Freepik's AI-first approach is ready to stand on its own amid of a sea of creative AI tools and tackle the arduous task of convincing professional creators to embrace generative AI.
There has been a flood of creative AI over the past few years. Creative companies like Adobe have been giving their programs AI makeovers, while tech companies are dipping into creative AI work with models like Sora and Nano Banana. Generative media has become an integral part of AI development, and Freepik is a unique character amid a plethora of options.
Freepik has many professional-grade AI tools, including a collaborative workflow named Spaces. Freepik
Freepik executives espouse a full-throated, familiar belief that AI is simply the latest creative tool and won't replace workers. But the company faces an uphill battle to convince professional creators not just to use AI, but to use it in every step of their work -- something that Adobe and others have avoided in favor of highlighting specific, practical use cases. To do so, Freepik has redesigned its platform to be an "all in one" place, with many editing tools to help constrain AI outputs to fit the detail-oriented work that professional creators produce. The result is impressive, with the most comprehensive, professional-grade editing suite I've seen in an AI program.
Its new redesign was built with and by professional creators, co-founder and CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela told me in a demo. Freepik shaped its generative AI for its existing creative customers, who wanted ways to collaborate across a variety of projects.
"Different companies have different contexts. So we really evolved the product [by] looking at what they needed," Abela said. "Our UI is very tailored to them."
Freepik versus Adobe, Midjourney and more
Freepik and Adobe certainly have a lot in common. Both used stock catalogs to train AI models, compensating creators. Freepik's focus on detail-oriented editing tools aims to appeal to professional creators who can't use unpredictable and hallucination-prone AI generators in their work. It offers a slew of models, from OpenAI's Sora to Google's Nano Banana Pro and ElevenLabs' audio generation models, similar to Adobe's growing list of partner models.
Freepik's AI product terms say creators own the rights to AI-generated works and promise the company won't train its AI models on your content. Paying Freepik subscribers can get limited commercial protections for AI outputs. For professional creators, that means you'll need to ensure Freepk aligns with any stringent legal requirements.
But while Adobe is trying to maintain a somewhat tempered attitude toward 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 creator who uses AI for the odd task or brainstorming session. That won't be every creator -- there are growing concerns about AI's encroaching role in creative work -- but for those who want to use AI, Freepik is a worthy alternative to Adobe.
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