Capture One does sell perpetual licenses, so I guess it depends on how often you upgrade. Regardless, I tried Capture One and Lightroom Classic side by side, a

Capture One does sell perpetual licenses, so I guess it depends on how often you upgrade. Regardless, I tried Capture One and Lightroom Classic side by side, and I liked Capture One a lot better. Even though it is more expensive for people who intend to upgrade regularly, it is worth every penny in my opinion, but I also think a lot of people will be able to get along fine on the freeware license. Capture One handled importing new batches of photos surprisingly better than Lightroom Classic, which actually locked up for long periods of time, and all sorts of other operations seemed faster, as if the underlying engine was not ancient. I don't remember all the details as I did this comparison about a year ago. I did not consider Lightroom CC to be a valid option for various reasons. I also strongly appreciate being able to have a perpetual license, instead of being forced to subscribe for the rest of my life if I want to be able to continue accessing all of my RAWs with the adjustments I make, and not just the exported photos. The one thing I disliked about both Capture One and Lightroom at the time is that neither supported proper, end-to-end HDR workflows. I have HDR displays. The RAW files contain a stunning amount of dynamic range. Even the common iPhone captures HDR photos (and I don't just mean HDR processing that gets stuffed into an 8-bit JPEG, I mean an actual HDR photo in 10-bit HEIF with an HDR curve). I want to be able to edit and view my RAW photos with extended dynamic range, not be limited to viewing an 8-bit SDR image while editing, and not be limited to exporting crappy 8-bit JPEGs that are missing so much dynamic range (or gargantuan TIFF files that have limited use cases). Adobe has started adding some HDR stuff this year, and that's the only thing Adobe offers that Capture One lacks that I'm even remotely interested in. Incidentally, I'm also upset that Chrome removed JPEG XL, which promises to be a common format with proper HDR support.