Procreate vs Paintrix Studio

Price

Procreate costs $12.99 upfront, while Paintrix Studio is free to download.

Procreate costs $12.99 once on the App Store, with no subscription and no in-app purchases. There is no free version or trial, so you pay before you draw.

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. Only Paintrix Studio runs on iPhone.

Procreate is made for iPad only. On iPhone you need Procreate Pocket, a separate $5.99 app, and Procreate does not list versions for Mac, Windows or Android.

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

Procreate ships with more than 300 brushes and Brush Studio, which exposes over 100 settings per brush. It imports Photoshop .abr brushes as well as Procreate brushes, and third-party Procreate brush packs are sold all over the web.

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

Procreate has Page Assist for laying out multi-page comics and a Halftone filter, and many artists add third-party panel templates and screentone brushes.

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

Procreate: Layers come with layer masks, clipping masks and 25+ blend modes, and the number of layers depends on your canvas size and device. Adjustments such as Curves, Gradient Map and Gaussian Blur are applied directly to a layer rather than kept as separate adjustment layers.

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

Procreate: Drawing aids include QuickShape, symmetry, 1, 2 and 3-point perspective and isometric guides, and vector text. Procreate also has frame-by-frame animation with Animation Assist, 3D painting on imported models, and a timelapse you can export in 4K.

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.