Krita

Krita is a free, open-source painting program built by and for digital artists, with brush engines, animation tools and a canvas designed for illustration, concept art and comics. Illustrators, students and animation hobbyists use it as an alternative to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint. The application is licensed under GPL v3, so the full program costs nothing on every platform.

What the free plan gives you

The current release is Krita 5.3.3, dated 29 July 2026, with installers and a portable build for Windows, a macOS build, a 64-bit Linux AppImage and an Android version on Google Play, plus community-maintained Flatpak and Snap packages. You get the complete feature set: hundreds of brush presets and a customisable brush engine, layer styles, vector and text tools, colour management, frame-by-frame animation with onion skinning, and PSD import and export. There is no account, no watermark and no trial period.

Where the free plan stops

There is no paid tier of the software itself. Krita also sells the same program through the Microsoft Store, Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Mac App Store, where you pay for the convenience of automatic updates and the money supports development; the download page does not list those prices. The practical limits are the ones the software has: the Android build is less polished than desktop, and heavy photo-retouching workflows are better served by GIMP or Affinity Photo.

Who it suits

Anyone who draws or paints digitally, from a beginner with a cheap tablet to a working illustrator, can use Krita as their main tool without ever paying. If you want to support the project and get one-click updates, the store versions are the way to do it, but they add nothing you cannot get from the free download.