Ranking Every Drawing App

Ranking every drawing app ever? Are you mad? Yes. And it's impossible to rank EVER drawing app, but I can rank A LOT OF THEM. So that's what I'm doing today.

00:00 Intro
01:27 Photoshop
02:24 Adobe Illustrator
02:57 Adobe Fresco
05:23 Affinity Photo/Designer
06:31 Vectornator
07:17 Sketchable
08:09 Leonardo
08:58 Krita
10:04 Gimp
10:41 Sketchbook
11:43 Clip Studio Paint
12:41 Procreate
13:57 Heavy Paint
14:56 Art Studio Pro
15:39 My Pint
16:20 Ibis Paint X
17:21 Medibang
18:18 Corel Draw/Corel Paint
18:57 Infinite Painter
19:29 Artflow
19:48 Huion Sketch
20:59 Inkscape

-----------------------------------------------------

Twitter:

Instagram:

Drawing Tech Top 10 lists:

My Drawing and video gear:

[flaminashes]

How dare you forget the S+ tier MS Paint

[vizvik]

Krita being free and on the S-tier shows how advanced and capable software it is!

[lego_minifig]

I always respect open source software like Krita

[jamesedenart]

I'm genuinely surprised SAI wasn't even on the list. It felt like it came around when everyone was begging for better inking abilities than what photoshop could offer, and the stabilization tool was revolutionary at the time. I would have continued using SAI had CSP not come onto the scene as a "love child between SAI and Photoshop"

[ons]

S- Photoshop, Krita, Clip studio paint, Procreate
A- Illustrator, Affinity designer, Huion Sketch
B- Frescoe, sketchable, Leonardo, ArtstudioPro, infinity painter, Artflow
C-Vectornator, Sketchbook, Heavy Paint, Ibis paintX, Medibang
D- Affinity Photo, My pint, Inkscape
F-Gimp
Didn't make the list- Coreldraw/paint

[Miranda_Starheart]

Ibis paint also has a YouTube channel where they teach you how to use their features or tutorials on how to draw different things which is cool

[alzamonart]

Adobe Photoshop / Illustrator became the gold standard because for many years... they were the only game in town. My personal opinion: Photoshop was never intended to be used as a digital drawing/painting app, but photo retouching and manipulation. Again, since there weren't any apps that could compete with or surpass Adobe's offerings, they ended up being the industry default... but now in 2022 this is no longer the case, and with Adobe moving to a rather expensive subscription model, Affinity and CSP's single-purchase offerings are a solid, money-wise alternative. I personally dropped all Adobe programs in favor of these (and Procreate in my iPad Pro).

[love_mandyxo]

CSP is my fave. Medibang and Procreate were great until Medibang started constantly freezing and the selection tool in Procreate went wonky. Anything Adobe for me is overrated and overpriced

[tecinplace]

"There's also little things in Clip Studio like you can animate..."

bruh thats a huge thing

[nia]

Krita is amazing for being free. Great as an intro for beginner / hobbyist wanna try their hands at digital art, not ready to invest in drawing app quite yet. There are more powerful tools like CSP, Procrate, etc. but what Krita can offer isn't too wide a gap from those and has the audacity to be FREE!

[jordandunn]

Very surprised Paint Tool Sai wasn't on the list (and it seems I'm not the only one), but I can kinda understand why, too; the stablest version of the program is pretty outdated at this point, and while the 2.0 software is indeed in continuous development (site released a new technical preview last week), I'm pretty sure the whole team working on it is just one dude, and it's been ongoing for years. Sai was my first drawing program, and the first drawing program of most other artists I knew while I was learning. It's definitely in a weird space developmentally right now, but it heavily influenced how a whole generation of digital artists approach the medium. No other software I've tried feels quite like it, though CSP comes the closest, and if Paint Tool Sai released a major feature update tomorrow, I'd go back to that as my default program in a heartbeat.

[pavlice_]

the only thing I wanted from this list was for gimp to end up in the lowest possible tier and I was not disappointed

[gghh]

u missed out Concepts .. i think should do different categories for vector drawing and Raster drawing

[ForkedEye]

I'm still in love with Concepts. One of the best on my Surface Pro!

[andre-arthur]

Infinite Painter and Art Flow are my picks on my Android Tablet! I love the drawing experience and the clean UI! Really happy to see them developing good apps for Android

[chintex_]

I feel like art studio pro should be higher on this list for it's brush engine. When it comes to things like painting it's far superior to procreates.

[EPeltzer]

I have to give a deafening shout out to all the true open source free apps out there. This includes Krita Inkscape Gimp and Blender (omg Blender!) Once you spend a few years in the arts and using digital tools, you start to realize how many tools you need and what a terrific pain in the neck it is to keep up with subscriptions, upgrades, etc. Yes Krita and Blender have learning curves but there are free tutorials out there that are amazing. It pays off very quickly once you commit to learning these tools. The community is amazing. These apps are absolutely incredible, deep, capable, and pro level. And to know that they will always always be free and available on multiple platforms is just priceless. No one is going to slap a paywall or ads or device limits or subscription fees on them. And it's not just being a cheapskate. I have seriously tried and paid for many of the apps on this list. I pay for additional capabilities in blender and for digital models and materials and stuff like that gladly. But I always gravitate back towards the free open source tools. Even a tool like Inkscape well it doesn't seem very sexy does it? Maybe not oriented towards artists exactly. But it's precisely what is needed for most graphic design and not an ounce of fat and I can open up drawings from 15 years ago.

[alasseearfalas]

I recently started using Sketchbook again on my Android phone (it's May 2023) and idk if it's the new team managing the app or what, but it's fantastic now!! Infinite layers (something I couldn't find on any other free Android app), excellent brushes with some fun oil-like blending functionality, minimal interface that gets out of the way & I swear gets easier to navigate with every update, basic palette creation, and so on. I would absolutely put it in A tier now. It's not quite the powerhouse that Krita is, but for on-the-go art it's definitely one of the best options!

[tennessee]

The problem i find with Huion is that they limit the number of layers (based on the quality) ... I NEED LAYERS

[Escalusia]

Clip Studio Paint is by far the best I've ever tried. I got tired of how many tools SAI was missing, and that it rarely got updated. CSP did everything SAI did + photoshop (without all the hassle and big money). It's been amazing, easy and it's SO powerful. The fact that you can also record your drawing process too was amazing. It's also relatively cheap and it OFTEN goes on sale. Not to mention their massive tool and brush library created by other artists! It's amazing for illustration, comics and it's good for animating as well. It works amazing on iPad too, but it's not as "sleek" as procreate. However, what I love about that, is that I have to click so much less than procreate. I feel like I constantly have to open a tab and then click a thing and then scroll down.