Open Source Software

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

Blender is the free 3D suite, and it turns up constantly in low-spec work: modelling and texturing low-poly assets, rendering 3D scenes down to a pixel-art sprite sheet, and building the turnarounds that hand-pixelled animation is traced from. Its add-on ecosystem covers most of the rest.

Godot has a dedicated 2D renderer with pixel-snapping, nearest neighbour filtering and viewport scaling options that make low-resolution games straightforward.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

Blockbench is a free and open source editor for low-poly models with pixel art textures. Models can be exported into standard 3D formats, to be shared, rendered, 3D-printed, or used in game engines or games line Minecraft. Modeling, UV mapping, texturing with pixel-art tools, rigging and animating, can all be done in the program.

Blockbench has a clean and beginner friendly interface, but also offers lots of customization and advanced features for experienced 3D artists. Plugins can extend the functionality of the program even further.

Pixel Composer builds effects, animations and generated art from node graphs, so a change to one input flows through the whole result.

GrafX2 was made for DOS and has been ported everywhere since. It has tools no other program does, constraints for retro platforms, and an antiquated interface.

LÖVE is a small, well documented Lua framework with nearest-neighbour filtering and canvases that make pixel-perfect rendering easy.

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.

Krita is intended for digital painting, but its pixel brush presets, indexed color filter and animation timeline make it a capable pixel art tool once configured.

Moebius is an ANSI art editor from the Blocktronics scene, with collaborative editing, character palettes and 16-color and iCE color modes.

LibreSprite continues the last GPL version of Aseprite as a community project. It keeps the familiar layers, animation timeline and palette tools, and adds its own scripting and a browser build.

A multi-purpose image editor designed as a free replacement for Photoshop. It can be configured for pixel art with the pencil tool, indexed mode and nearest neighbour scaling.

A basic web-based editor made to be simple and intuitive, which can load any palette from the Lospec palette list. It is no longer in development and may contain bugs.

Petmate edits PETSCII images with the C64 character set and colors, and exports to formats the real machine can load.

Asemode is an Aseprite extension for character-cell drawing and textmode animation. It lets you paint glyph stamps directly on the canvas with native Aseprite tools, primary and secondary clicks, stamp transforms, and transparent cell backgrounds to layer textmode over pixel art. Each textmode layer can use its own bundled or custom TrueType font, and artwork can be imported and exported as portable .textmode.json files.

It covers the usual pixel art tools (pixel-perfect pencil with a stabilizer, shapes, paint bucket, gradient with dithering, lasso and magic wand selections, symmetry, a tile preview for seamless textures) along with layers, groups, blend modes, layer effects (outline, drop shadow, glow) and reusable components: a sprite drawn once can be placed on any board, and its copies follow it.

Palettes belong to each file: classic presets, the colors used in the drawing, palettes the user keeps, or .hex and .gpl files. Shade and lighten step along the palette’s ramps. A reference image can sit under the drawing to trace over, and the eyedropper picks its colors.

For isometric work it has a 2:1 grid that tools snap to, 2:1 lines, box, cylinder and pyramid tools shaded from the palette, extrusion of flat shapes into volumes, shapes drawn on walls or on the ground, staggered tile previews and images laid onto a face. A file can hold several boards side by side.

Exports: PNG at 1× to 32×, SVG with one path per color and the layers kept as groups, .aseprite files, tilesets for game engines (PNG sheet with a Tiled tileset and map), and the drawing as code (React, CSS, JSON or ASCII).

Its strongest areas are isometric pixel art and work that ends up in design tools or code: components and multiple boards for icon sets and UI assets, and SVG that pastes into Figma as vector shapes. It suits game artists making sprites, tiles and isometric scenes, designers who need pixel icons, and people trying pixel art without installing anything. It has no animation yet, and works best with a mouse or trackpad; tablet support is in progress.

Docs: baipix.app/docs

Bfxr adds new waveforms, filters and a mixer to the sfxr formula, and runs in the browser.

Bitsy is a tiny editor for making small worlds: a few rooms of 8x8 tiles, an avatar that walks around them, and short conversations with the things in them. The limits are the point - there is no scripting to speak of and two colours at a time - and a finished game is a single HTML file.