Clip Studio Paint vs Paintrix Studio

Price

Paintrix Studio is free with every tool included, while Clip Studio Paint needs a subscription for full use.

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.

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 Clip Studio Paint runs on Mac, 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.