Photoshop vs. Photopea

[AndreiTudora]

There are delays in activating my Photoshop license within my company and I have exhausted my trial period, so I have found until then as an alternative: Photopea​

It seems to do the trick for the moment, but I would like some input from the more experienced users before working and commit-ing with it.

I'm sure it is not as good as Photoshop, but I would like to know:

1. What are the downsides to using Photopea?

2. Can you export to all PNG versions that you can in Photoshop?

3. Does Photopea display fonts like Photoshop does?

To be honest, I would only be using it for exports from an already finalized PSD file, so the differences in exportation are most crucial to me.

[melissapiccone]

You might get better answers from the other apps website... I've never heard of it and users here are actually using Photoshop.

[DaveJCummings]

I've never heard of Photopea. 

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

I've heard of Photopea, but like the others, since we have Photoshop we haven't spent any time with Photopea. I looked at it for 5 minutes and there are a few things that you can tell from that.

The main thing to understand about Photopea is that it runs in a web browser, so that's probably going to limit how much of your computer's RAM and CPU it can use. Although that might not matter if you're only using it for exports.

It looks very much designed for web developers. It seems to be missing a lot of features for other media like print and video. If you're concerned with PNG export, maybe that's fine. But its PNG export has fewer options than Photoshop, at least in the free version.

Photoshop displays text using its own Adobe composition engine, which is rather sophisticated. Because of that, Photopea probably does not display text exactly the same way. Also, Photopea appears to support web fonts only, probably because it runs in a web browser.

If this is for doing work for your company, then it sounds like the best judge of whether Photopea will work is by submitting some Photopea PNG exports to your company and see if anyone can spot anything wrong with them. Beyond that, if there's a Photopea forum on the web, that might be a better community to ask because you're more likely to find Photopea users who have used Photoshop, instead of Photoshop users who have used Photopea.

[kejun1225]

For casual use, Photopea is indeed great. But if you really need to do some super stunning image you should still use Photoshop.

[Scitte34407679xai2]

Photopea is better for having the same usage with no subscription. The difference is that photopea is free, you save things on your computer rather than through a cloud, and it runs on web. Photopea does not use enough processing for it to struggle on the web, nor does photoshop. Most people don't save on the cloud but if that's important (let's say for work), use a flashdrive, google cloud, onedrive, etc..