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 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.
The community gallery and templates are great for brainstorming and sparking ideas.
If you’ve used AI creative software before, Freepik will have a lot of familiar elements. To me, it felt a lot like different parts of Midjourney, Figma and Adobe’s Firefly were thrown in a blender. You can make annotations, similar to comments in Figma, and use them to run prompts on specific objects without changing the rest of the image. It also includes a community gallery, similar to Midjourney. You won’t have the same level of pixel-by-pixel control you get with Adobe’s non-AI tools. But Freepik has one of the most comprehensive editing suites and workflows I’ve seen, with the bonus of never having to worry about using the right object select tool.
Read More: My CES 2026 Secret Weapon? This New Wearable AI Note-Taking Pin From Plaud
Spaces for collaboration
Spaces is one of the newer additions, and it’s great for visualizing workflows in one place.
Imagine an endless canvas. You can add specific nodes and link them together in a visible workflow. In one node, you can throw in three different reference images, and in the next one, you can write a prompt to combine them into one single image. Then, you can animate that image into a video. You can create a web 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 animated AI video.
The best part: If you want to change something at the beginning of the process, like replacing a reference image, you can rerun the entire process with one click and watch the entire chain adjust as needed. It’s an easy way to try out different ideas and customize content without having to replicate workflows manually. Adobe previewed a similar capability, called Project Graph, at its annual conference last fall, but it isn’t out yet.
As generative media models have evolved, so have the ways creators use them. We’ve gone through phases of generating wholesale, bespoke images with tools like Midjourney, and now we’ve moved on to an a la carte approach, picking AI models for specific tasks based on their personalities on to an a la carte approach, picking AI models for specific tasks based on their “personalities.” Now collaboration-forward AI spaces, like in Freepik and Adobe’s Firefly boards, are growing to bring all the pieces of AI creation together. Beyond giving creators more ways to use AI, it highlights how normalized and integrated AI has become in creative work.
For more, check out our guide to Photoshop’s AI and the best AI video generators.
Source: CNET
