Kritavs
Procreate
Procreate: Optimized digital painting app for iPad with professional brush engine and extensive layer management.
Krita
Free and open-source digital painting software
As of 30 August 2026, Krita is free to use. Krita is a professional free and open-source painting program designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. Softwr lists it under Design. Krita is made by Krita Foundation, launched in 1999, available on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Overview
What Krita does
Krita is a professional free and open-source painting program designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. It offers advanced brush engines, layer management, and animation features, making it ideal for digital painting and illustration work.
What people use it for
- Digital painting
- Concept art
- Character design
- 2D animation
- Texture painting
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Krita.
- Not portable across Windows/macOS/Linux with consistent performance
- Performance limits on large projects with many layers compared to professional software
- Requires system administrator privileges for installation on managed systems
- Limited professional support compared to commercial alternatives
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Krita
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- KritavsClip Studio Paint
Clip Studio Paint: Professional illustration and manga creation tool with subscription model and advanced comic-specific features.
- KritavsAdobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator: Industry-standard vector graphics editor with extensive integrations and cloud collaboration features.
Capabilities
Features
Digital painting
Brush engines
Layer management
Animation
Vector tools
OpenEXR
Integration with OpenEXR
PSD files
Integration with PSD files
Graphics tablets
Integration with Graphics tablets
Third-party brushes
Integration with Third-party brushes
Open source transparency
Open source transparency security feature
Local processing
Local processing security feature
No telemetry
No telemetry security feature
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Krita free and open source?
Yes, Krita is completely free and open source software developed by the KDE community. It is distributed under the LGPL license with no licensing fees.
SourceWhat platforms does Krita support?
Krita is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can be downloaded from krita.org or installed via package managers on Linux distributions.
SourceWhat animation capabilities does Krita have?
Krita supports frame-by-frame animation with onion skin view, timeline management, and export to video formats for creating animated sequences.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Krita
- Company
- Krita Foundation
- Based in
- Global Open Source Community
Keep looking
Where to go from Krita
- Krita alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Krita pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Krita badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Design softwareThe full category
- Best Design softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Design software for
Compare Krita with
- Procreate
- Adobe Illustrator
- ArtRage
- Rebelle
- Procreate Dreams
- Corel Painter
- PaintTool SAI
- Inkscape
- Linearity Curve
- LottieFiles
- Framer
- Principle
- Subframe
- Vectr
- Womp
- Zeplin
- CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
- Recraft
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Krita, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Krita
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