Clip Studio Paint vs Infinite Painter

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.

Infinite Painter is free to download. The free version includes every built-in brush, brush editing and up to 5 layers, and a 7-day trial unlocks everything. The Pro upgrade is a one-time $9.99 purchase on the US App Store, with no subscription.

Platforms

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

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.

Infinite Painter is one app across iPad and iPhone, also runs on Apple silicon Macs, and has an Android version for phones, tablets and Chromebooks. Pro is bought separately through the App Store or Google Play.

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.

Infinite Painter has hundreds of built-in brushes with more than 100 settings each. It imports and exports its own brushes and sets, can sample lower layers when blending, and applies live color adjustments and filters to any brush.

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.

Infinite Painter includes screentone brushes, editable shapes and text layers, but it does not advertise comic panel layouts.

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.

Infinite Painter: In Pro it offers live adjustment and filter layers with more than 40 filters, masks on layers, adjustments and groups, and 30 blend modes, so you can change an effect later without repainting. The free version stops at 5 layers.

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.

Infinite Painter: Drawing aids include five perspective guides, a hatching guide, radial and kaleidoscope symmetry, smart shape detection, a gradient fill tool and editable text layers. It also has seamless pattern projects and CMYK print presets. It does not advertise animation.