Clip Studio Paint vs iArtbook

Price

Both are free to download, but they charge for different things.

Clip Studio Paint on iPad is a subscription. There is a 30-day free trial, after which you need a plan to save and export: PRO starts at $4.89 a month and EX, which adds multi-page comics and unlimited animation frames, at $9.69 a month on the US App Store. Plans are priced by how many devices you use.

iArtbook is free to download, and Pro is a one-time upgrade: $12.99 on iPad, or $7.99 for iPhone only, with no subscription.

Platforms

Both run on iPad, iPhone and Mac. Only Clip Studio Paint runs on Windows, Android and Chromebook.

Clip Studio Paint runs on iPad, with a separate app for iPhone, desktop versions for Mac and Windows, and versions for Android and Chromebook. Buying a plan requires a Clip Studio account.

iArtbook is one app for iPhone and iPad that also runs on Apple silicon Macs.

Brushes

Clip Studio Paint ships with brushes that mimic real art materials and lets you adjust brush shape, texture and paper quality in detail. Its Clip Studio Assets community offers thousands of artist-made brushes and materials.

iArtbook brushes can be dry, glossy or wet, with three kinds of wet paint, more than 50 settings per brush, and a library of over 1,000 textures to build your own. Calligraphy smoothing keeps lines clean even when you draw with a finger.

Comics and manga

Clip Studio Paint is the most complete comic tool here: panel frames, speech balloons, text, effect lines and screentones, with multi-page projects for print, web comics and webtoons in the EX plan.

iArtbook does not advertise comic panel or screentone tools; its extras are animation and a lesson mode for copying artwork.

Layers and editing

Clip Studio Paint: Layers support masks and clipping across multiple layers, non-destructive color adjustment layers and gradient maps. Liquify, mesh transformation and puppet warp let you fix proportions after you draw, and Color Match pulls colors from a reference image.

iArtbook: Layers are unlimited, with blend modes, masks and lossless transforms. Two color pickers, a color mixer and palette import and export round out the color tools.

Drawing tools and extras

Clip Studio Paint has posable 3D figures and 3D shapes for reference and perspective, perspective and symmetry rulers, Shading Assist for lighting, and frame-by-frame animation, with unlimited frames in EX.

iArtbook does frame-by-frame animation with unlimited frames and multiple animation layers, exporting to MP4, HEVC, GIF and APNG. Its lesson mode lets you copy any painting or sketch side by side to learn, and timelapse recording is on by default.