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You may remember Freepik as an image catalog. But over the past few years, it has grown into a comprehensive creative AI suite and amassed over 100 million monthly users. He spent a lot of time trying to punch above his weight, challenging industry titans like Adobe. Now, launching an overhaul of its program at CES 2026Freepik’s AI approach is ready to stand out amid a sea of creative AI tools and tackle the daunting task of convincing professional creators to adopt generative AI.
There has been a flood of creative AI over the past few years. Creative companies like Adobe have equipped their programs with AI makeoverwhile tech companies are getting into creative AI work with models like Sora And Nano Banana. Generative media has become an integral part of AI development, and Freepik represents a unique character among a multitude of options.
Freepik has many professional-grade AI tools, including a collaborative workflow called Spaces.
Freepik executives adhere to the deep and familiar belief that AI is simply the latest creative tool and will not replace workers. But the company faces an uphill battle convincing professional creators not just to use AI, but to use it in every step of their work — something Adobe and others have eschewed in favor of highlighting specific and practical use cases. To do this, Freepik has redesigned its platform to be an “all-in-one” place, with numerous editing tools to help coerce AI output to accommodate the detail-oriented work that professional creators produce. The result is impressive, with the most comprehensive professional-grade editing suite I’ve ever 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 on a variety of projects.
“Different companies have different contexts, so we really evolved the product [by] looking at what they needed,” Abela said. “Our user interface is very tailored to them.”
Freepik vs. Adobe, Midjourney and more
Freepik and Adobe certainly have a lot in common. Both used stock catalogs to train AI models, thereby paying the creators. Freepik’s focus on detail-oriented editing tools aims to attract professional creators who can’t use unpredictable, hallucination-prone AI generators in their work. It offers a multitude 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 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. Paid Freepik subscribers may benefit from limited commercial protections for AI output. For professional creators, this means you’ll need to make sure Freepk meets all strict legal requirements.
But while Adobe tries to maintain a somewhat moderate attitude toward AI, offering AI tools among many other options, Freepik is going all-in on it. Freepik is aimed at professionals who are ready to integrate AI into their entire workflow, not creators who use AI for the odd task or brainstorming session. This will not be the case for all creators: there are growing concerns about The pervasive role of AI in creative work — but for those who want to use AI, Freepik is an interesting alternative to Adobe.
The community gallery and templates are perfect for brainstorming and sparking ideas.
If you’ve used AI creation software before, Freepik will have many familiar elements. To me, it felt a bit like different parts of Midjourney, Figma, and Adobe’s Firefly had been thrown into a blender. You can create 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 as you would with Adobe’s non-AI tools. But Freepik has one of the most comprehensive editing suites and workflows I’ve seen, with the benefit of never having to worry about using the right object selection tool.
Learn more: My secret weapon for CES 2026? This new portable AI note-taking pin from Plaud
Collaboration spaces
Spaces is one of the newer additions and is great for visualizing workflows in one place.
Imagine an endless web. You can add specific nodes and link them together into a visible workflow. In one node you can add three different reference images, and in the next you can write a prompt to combine them into a single image. Then you can animate this image into a video. You can create a network of workflows that your entire team can 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 early in the process, like replacing a reference image, you can rerun the entire process with a single click and watch the entire chain adjust as needed. It’s an easy way to try different ideas and customize content without having to manually replicate workflows. Adobe previewed a similar feature, called Project graphicto his annual conference last fall, but it hasn’t been released yet.
As generative media models have evolved, so have the ways creators use them. We went through phases of bulk and custom image generation with tools such as Halfwayand now we have moved to an a la carte approach, selecting AI models for specific tasks based on their personalities to an à la carte approach, selecting AI models for specific tasks based on their “personality”. Now, collaboration-focused AI spaces, like in Freepik and Adobe’s Firefly boards, are growing to bring together all the elements of AI creation. Beyond giving creators more ways to use AI, it highlights how AI has become normalized and integrated into creative work.
To find out more, see our guide to Photoshop AI and the best AI video generators.
