iArtbook vs Paintrix Studio

Price

Paintrix Studio is free with every tool included, while iArtbook is free to download with paid upgrades.

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.

Paintrix Studio is free to download, and every brush, layer, tool and export is unlocked. Pro costs $4.99 a month and unlocks one thing: reopening projects you saved earlier, so new work is always free to start and finish in one sitting.

Platforms

Both run on iPad and iPhone. Only iArtbook runs on Mac.

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

Paintrix Studio is one app for iPad and iPhone with the same features on both, and one Pro subscription covers every device on your Apple Account. There is no Mac, Windows or Android version.

Brushes

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.

Paintrix Studio has 60 brushes in nine families: Oil Paints, Watercolor, Pencils, Charcoals, Pens, Spraypaint, Water Brushes, Basic and Manga. Oil brushes leave raised impasto and bristle grooves and drag the paint already on the canvas, and the ten Manga brushes include a G-Pen and Maru that thin and swell with your stroke speed. Apple Pencil pressure, tilt and hover work out of the box, with squeeze to undo on Apple Pencil Pro. You can save brush presets, but not import custom brushes.

Comics and manga

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

Paintrix Studio has a dedicated Manga / Comic canvas with 7 page sizes, from manga and B4 pages to comic strips, double-page spreads and vertical scroll pages for webtoons, and 23 ready-made panel layouts you can mirror. Panel borders sit on a locked layer you can unlock and edit, and the Manga brushes add dot screentones, hatching and stipple to the G-Pen, Maru, Fineliner and ink pens. It is all free. Lettering and speech balloons are not built in.

Layers and editing

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.

Paintrix Studio: Layers are unlimited and free, with clipping masks, alpha lock and live adjustments on every layer: brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, vibrance, temperature, tint, bloom, and drop and inner shadows. Selections cover rectangle, ellipse, lasso and two magic wands, the transform tool can flip, rotate and distort all four corners, and Smudge, Pinch, Bubble and Liquid Mode run on the GPU in real time. There are no layer blend modes.

Drawing tools and extras

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.

Paintrix Studio: Drawing aids include mirror mode with up to 12-way radial symmetry, Quick Shapes that keep your stroke's pressure and taper, linear, radial and angular gradients, 14 paintable materials such as gold, marble and wood, and a reference image layer. Draw Together lets two people paint on one canvas in real time from iPad or iPhone, and every painting records a timelapse you can export as video. There is no text tool, animation or PSD export.