Originally Posted by
DanK
John,
I'm not advocating for Adobe (although I use their products), but I think their terminology has you confused.
"Creative Cloud" doesn't refer to cloud storage. It's their name for their subscription-based suite of apps and for the software app that controls it. The basic photography plan, which in the US costs $9.99/month, includes 20 GB of cloud storage. If you pay twice that amount, they give you 1 TB of cloud storage. However, you can use the Creative Cloud apps, like Photoshop, without using any of that cloud storage. I've had the Adobe subscription service since it started, and I have never once used any of the online storage. (I use Smugmug for most of my online display and Backblaze for my online backup.)
I haven't used other photo editing software for many years. I briefly used Paint Shot Pro, first when it was owned by JASC and then when it was bought by Corel), but that was a long time ago, so I have no recent experience with which to answer your question. In my circles here, the people who don't use Adobe use On1 or Capture One.
Dan