Krita vs Paintrix Studio

Price

Both are free to download with every tool included.

Krita is completely free and open source under the GNU GPL, with no ads, subscription or paid tier. Development is funded by donations, and you can also buy it on some app stores to support the project.

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

Krita and Paintrix Studio do not share a platform. Only Krita runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and Chromebook. Only Paintrix Studio runs on iPad and iPhone.

Krita runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, plus Android tablets and Chromebooks, where the Android version is still in beta. It is not available for iPad or iPhone.

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

Krita ships with more than 100 brush presets built on several brush engines, from pixel and color smudge to bristle and particle engines. It imports Photoshop .abr brushes and resource bundles.

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

Krita includes comic page templates and a Comics Project Management Tools plugin for organizing multi-page projects.

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

Krita: Its layer system is one of the deepest anywhere: paint, vector, filter and fill layers, transparency and filter masks, dozens of blend modes, and color management with CMYK, LAB and HDR support.

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

Krita: Drawing assistants cover perspective, vanishing points and ellipses, and mirror tools, multibrush symmetry and wrap-around mode make patterns easy. Krita also has frame-by-frame animation, a text tool and a recorder for timelapses.

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.