Freemium Software

The pixel art editor

Gribble is a pixel art and animation editor that runs in the browser (gribble.app) or as an Android or iPhone app. One account syncs projects between all devices.

Website: gribble.app
Android: Play Store
iOS: App Store

Layers with opacity and 15 blend modes. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, frame tags and playback.

Every stroke is recorded, so a finished artwork can be exported as a timelapse.

The community features includes a global gallery with museum frames, a profile page, followers, likes and achievements.

Tools

Brushes, eraser, bucket, dither gradient, color picker, global color picker, ellipse tool, square tool, line tool, square select, lasso select, magic wand, dither, shading, outline, gradient, symmetry, smudge.

Features

Autosave, cloud-storage, timelapse, image/GIF imports, image/video/GIF/code/spritesheet exports, unique 9-patch mode and export, palette lock, alpha lock, themes, pixel perfect, 512x512 grids, palettes, gribble files (.grbl), artwork forking.

Resprite is a pixel art and animation editor for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, built around a touch interface without losing the tools a desktop editor has: pixel-perfect lines, alpha lock, dithering patterns, custom brushes, gradients and symmetry. It imports and exports GIF, sprite sheets, PSD and APNG.

Core Editing & Selection Tools

Drawing Tools: Includes Brush, Eraser, Flood-fill, Gradient, Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, and Pipette.

Pixel-Perfect Algorithm: Applies to drawing tools to ensure single-pixel-wide lines without unwanted extra pixels.

Selection: Supports copying, cutting, moving, pasting, rotating, and flipping selected image sections.

Layers: Supports layer management for organizing artwork elements.

Animation & Reference

Frame-by-Frame Animation: Includes dedicated tools for creating frame-based animations.

Onion Skinning: Displays overlay previews of preceding frames relative to the active frame.

Reference Images: Loads gallery images onto the canvas for comparison while drawing.

Color Palettes

Preset Palettes: Includes built-in palettes based on hardware profiles like Atari 2600, NES, and Game Boy.

Custom & Imported Palettes: Supports custom color palettes as well as importing palettes from Lospec.

Import, Export & Compatibility

File Import: Opens Aseprite project files (.ase, .aseprite) alongside standard raster formats (.png, .jpeg, .gif).

Export & Upscaling: Exports animations and images to formats including MP4 video, standard raster formats, or local storage/social sharing, with upscaling options to prevent interpolation blur on standard displays.

GameMaker is a 2D-first engine with a built-in sprite editor and room editor, used by many of the best known pixel art games.

TIC-80 is an open source fantasy console in the PICO-8 mould with a larger screen, several scripting languages, and built-in sprite, map, sound and music editors.

Pixel Studio is a pixel art editor that runs on desktop, phone and tablet with the same project open on all of them. It covers layers, animation with onion skinning, tilesets and palettes, and reads and writes Aseprite files, which makes it a practical way to keep drawing away from a desk.

Asset Forge makes models by kitbashing: drop blocks from its kits into a scene, snap them together, recolor them and export the result as a model or as rendered 2D sprites.

Avoyd edits and renders voxel scenes with billions of voxels, with a custom smoothing algorithm and imports for Minecraft maps.

GDevelop builds games out of events - conditions and actions picked from a list - rather than code, which makes it a common first engine. It handles tilemaps, 2D lighting, physics and multiplayer, exports to web, desktop and mobile, and the underlying engine is open source.

Features include layers, frame-by-frame animation, onion skinning, indexed colour, custom palettes, selections and PNG export. The free version supports canvases up to 128 × 128 pixels, three layers and six animation frames.

An optional Pro upgrade increases these limits and adds workflows including editable Aseprite import and export, sprite sheets, animated GIF and WebP export, seamless tiled drawing, symmetry and dithering.

Spritefold rearranges character sprites into the sheet layout RPG Maker MV and MZ use: three frames by four directions per character, up to eight characters per sheet.

It starts from a common layout (4-frame walk strips, LPC walk rows or RPG Maker order) or a custom grid where you pick which cell plays each frame, and previews the walk at RPG Maker's default speed. 32 px art can be padded to 48 x 48 or scaled 2x. The right-facing row can be the left row flipped. It reads PNG, GIF and WebP and exports PNG with transparency.

It runs in the browser. The free version on its itch.io page exports one character at a time; the paid version, an HTML file that also works offline, adds batch export of a whole pack, eight-character sheets, saved mappings and object sheets.

SunVox combines a pattern tracker with a modular synthesizer, and runs the same on desktops, phones and the web.

Unity is a general-purpose game engine with a well-worn 2D pipeline: a sprite editor and atlas packer, a tilemap system with rule tiles, 2D lights and shadows, and a large asset store. It is heavier than the dedicated 2D engines, and in return it goes anywhere.

dotpict is a phone app for drawing pixel art, built around a community that posts and comments on what it makes. The canvas is deliberately small and the tools are few, which suits short sessions and daily practice more than long production work.