Pixel Art Tile & Map Editors

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

LDtk is a level editor with auto-tiling rules, entity definitions and a clean JSON format with loaders for most engines.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the browser.

Pro Motion NG is inspired by Amiga Deluxe Paint and used in commercial game studios. It has a detached-window interface, deep palette and tile tools, and an animation workflow tuned for sprite production.

Pyxel Edit is a smaller pixel art program focused on tile editing: paint tiles once and every placed copy updates, then export the tileset and tilemap for your engine. It also handles simple animation.

Tiled is a flexible tilemap editor supporting orthogonal, isometric and hexagonal maps, with importers for most engines.

Tilesetter takes a handful of hand-drawn tiles and works out the rest: corners, edges and transitions are generated into a complete auto-tiling tileset, which it can then export along with a map. It is aimed at the part of tile work that is repetitive rather than creative.