Long before Adobe’s acclaimed Fresco hit the scene, Procreate served as the go-to digital art studio for creative professionals who wanted to illustrate, paint, and sketch on the iPad. Today, it's just as compelling. The app is easy to learn, provides just about every tool you need to bring your projects to reality, and continues to add innovative features over time. Moreover, it takes a direct stance against the use of AI in creative projects, which is a fresh idea in the wake of a creative software industry that seems to be pushing it as much as possible. We wish Procreate's interface were a bit more flexible, but its low one-time cost and accessible features that woo both casual and professional artists ultimately make it an Editors' Choice winner among graphic design apps.What Is Procreate?As mentioned, Procreate is a platform for drawing and painting digitally on an iPad. It lets you produce large, high-resolution, 64-bit color artworks. The app stands out, in particular, for its responsive feel and tools that keep you inspired to keep creating.Pricing: A Superb Deal for Artists Sick of SubscriptionsProcreate remains a bargain at a flat rate of $12.99 for the iPad. Companion apps are also available. Procreate Pocket for iPhone ($5.99) is well-optimized, but the screen surface of an iPhone is uncomfortably small for drawing, and you can't use an Apple Pencil on it. Procreate Dreams ($12.99) is a dedicated animation studio that helps you blend your digital drawings with audio, photos, and high-resolution video. You can add keyframes, edit videos, and work frame by frame, all in real time. I focus on the main Procreate app in this review.Procreate’s sole tablet-only competitor is the substantial Adobe Fresco, which is now free. You could realistically use both side by side, but if you need to choose, Procreate has several advantages. It lets you create brushes from scratch, feels faster, and is easier to learn. Similar Products Our Current Picks for The Best Graphic Design Software for 2026 Adobe Photoshop .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 5.0 Exemplary See It Read Our Review Adobe Fresco .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 4.5 Outstanding Get Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps for $59.99/Month at Adobe See It Read Our Review Adobe Illustrator .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 4.5 Outstanding See It Read Our Review Adobe InDesign .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 4.5 Outstanding See It Read Our Review Canva .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 4.5 Outstanding Starts Free at Canva See It Read Our Review Figma .cls-1{fill:#eb002e}.cls-1,.cls-2,.cls-3{stroke-width:0}.cls-2{fill:#7e011f}.cls-4{fill:none;stroke:#fff;stroke-width:5px}.cls-3{fill:#fff} 4.5 Outstanding Visit Site at Figma See It Read Our Review Adobe Express 4.0 Excellent Starts Free at Adobe See It Read Our Review CorelDraw Graphics Suite 4.0 Excellent $22.42 Per Month at CorelDRAW See It Read Our Review Affinity 3.5 Good $0.00 at Affinity Studio See It Read Our Review Other notable graphics apps are actually design apps and not exclusively for drawing and painting. Examples include Affinity (free, with an optional $144-per-year subscription that unlocks Canva AI integrations) and CorelDRAW ($549, or $269 per year). I'll keep an eye out for the forthcoming iPad version of Affinity to see if it warrants comparison.For Android systems, you can try the free, open-source Krita or Infinite Painter (free, with an optional $9.99 charge for access to premium features). For Windows tablets, take a look at Fresco.Platforms and System Requirements: You Need a Recent iPad and an Apple PencilAs of this writing, Procreate works only with Apple iPads running iPadOS 16.3 or later, and a 2nd-Generation Apple Pencil. To enjoy Procreate’s Hover, Squeeze, and Rotation features, you need an Apple Pencil Pro. If you tend to use large (up to 16k by 18k) canvases with lots of layers, you need an M-series iPad to ensure a lag-free experience. Savage Interactive (Procreate's developer) has no plans to introduce Android or Windows versions. Procreate doesn't offer automatic cloud storage or backup—except as an option for brush files. It stores art files locally, which you can access via the Gallery on the app's home screen. However, if you delete the app, you lose all your work. As a result, it's important to be aware of how much free storage you have on your device and to export anything important to iCloud, another cloud storage service, or an external drive. Getting Started and Ease of Use: Intuitive From the OutsetProcreate is available only through Apple’s App Store, so buying and installing the app is simple. It doesn't require any account setup.User ExperienceProcreate's interface is minimalist. It has just one tear-off menu for the color tools, which keeps the canvas clutter-free. Occasionally, though, I like the option to keep two menus open simultaneously, as in Fresco.The program has three main interface sections. First, the top right of the tableau houses the main Painting Tools: Color, Erase, Layers, Paint, and Smudge. Each tool has many options within dedicated menus. Second, the left-hand sidebar (you can optionally move it to the right-hand side) houses Modification Tools, such as brush size and opacity sliders, the square Modify/Eyedropper button, and undo/redo arrows. Finally, at the top left are the robust Editing Tools, which include Actions for sharing and interface settings; Adjustments for color and gradient maps; pro FX, such as Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Glitch, Halftone, and Liquify; the Gallery for managing work; Selections for selection modification and use; and Transform for scaling and warp meshing. Main interface (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Grids and GuidesIt’s always convenient to have a little scaffolding to support your efforts, and under the Actions panel, Procreate offers it in the form of Grids (2D, custom, isometric, and Perspective), Drawing Guide, and Drawing Assist (which matches your strokes to a Drawing Guide, thus removing tedium), as well as QuickShape, which snaps wobbly hand-drawn lines and shapes into perfection.Page Assist turns your Procreate canvas and all its tools into a multipage interface that allows you to create comics, books, or storyboards—and even open, edit, and export PDFs. Using the layers feature, you can also add a realistic paper texture to the background layer.All of these tools work cleanly and simply, so after just a little probing, you won't have any trouble using Procreate to its full potential.Learning and HelpProcreate helps along burgeoning artists who aren’t sure how to begin with a free Beginner Series. These step-by-step videos are an empowering introduction to all the basic skills you need to create art and animation. After that, you might explore the Learn to Procreate Series and, finally, the well-designed Procreate Handbook, which has a convenient search bar and content-navigation side panel.Core Tools: Everything Digital Artists Need for Creative ProjectsProcreate offers far too many features to cover here, but below are the ones I find most worthy of highlighting.AccessibilityApple gave Procreate a Design Award in 2022 for its accessibility features that suit people of diverse backgrounds, physical abilities, and languages. Its admirable suite of advanced accessibility features includes motion filtering for users with tremors, a color card palette with notifications for people who are blind or have low vision, and single-touch gestures to accommodate hand mobility differences.AnimationSimilar to Fresco, Procreate offers a competent tool (Animation Assist) for creating simple animations such as short loops and frame-by-frame or hand-sketched motion. It’s so gratifying to see your sketch move (think little flip-books in which you flip the pages to watch the animation) that I think Procreate makes a fine gateway for artists who want to try their hand at animation. If you want a more feature-rich animation program from Procreate, try the aforementioned Procreate Dreams app.BrushesOne major differentiator between Procreate and Fresco is the former's long-standing ability to let you create and save new brushes. Fresco allows you to modify existing brushes and save your settings, but you still can’t make them like you can in Illustrator or Photoshop. If you desire more than Procreate's 180 new brushes, 200 existing ones, and a profusion of third-party and user-created specialty options for adding texture, lettering, painting, and stamping, you can buy more from the App Store, Etsy, the Procreate Marketplace, and other online emporiums (such as Creative Market). Brush palette (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) If you're into editing or making new brushes, the app’s Brush Studio provides an impressive number of modifiable attributes and properties. You can test them right in the DrawingPad on the right side of the screen, as shown in the screenshot below: Brush Studio (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive PTY LTD) A huge improvement for more experienced illustrators would be much easier access to the brush blending modes (such as normal, color burn, hard light, multiply, and overlay). I flip between the normal and multiply options constantly during a project—it takes fewer steps to switch between them in Procreate than in Fresco, but it should be a one-step tear-away in both.Despite Procreate's enchanting selection of raster (pixel-based) brushes, nothing mystifies quite like Fresco’s Live Brushes, which are seriously authentic oil paint and watercolor emulators that interact with the pixels of Fresco’s virtual canvas almost magically. Fresco also offers vector brushes, whereas Procreate restricts vector layers to text only. (The 2027 roadmap doesn't mention any additional vector features, either.) For reference, vectors are infinitely scalable without resolution loss, whereas rasters aren't.Nonetheless, there is plenty to explore in Procreate’s brush lineup. Case in point, the paint color is the same across all the samples in the image below. Some brushes have color jitter or transference effects, which are customizable in the Brush Studio. Brush samples (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Rather than considering ways to make digital tools look and feel like natural tools, I like to think about the things digital tools can do that traditional ones can’t. An example is the following image, which I drew and lettered from scratch. Administering all those dots one at a time (as one would with natural media) would have been a major pain were it not for the stippling brush in my arsenal. Fish illustration (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Color As mentioned, Procreate’s only tear-off menu is for the Color settings. I prefer interfaces with tear-off options because it allows for quick experimentation without the constant reopening of a menu. The color interface is what you would expect from a higher-end graphic interface, except for the Cards, which are a much larger and more accessible version of traditional color squares. I also appreciate the ability to have more than one palette open at the same time. Color tear-off (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Enhanced Apple Pencil ControlsIf you have a compatible iPad and Apple Pencil, you get additional interactivity options via the Hover, Rotation, and Squeeze gestures.The Hover feature creates an informative, contextual cursor display even before the Apple Pencil hits the iPad's glass surface. Simply hover the Pencil tip just above the screen to see a preview of your selected brush's azimuth (smudger or eraser), size, shape, texture, and tilt. You can also use Hover in tandem with gesture controls to adjust any settings before you begin drawing.For speedy filling of boundary-edged spaces, one method is to hover above the active color swatch in the upper right-hand side of the screen and double-tap. Then, you can continue double-tapping to fill in whichever spaces you like with that color. Adobe Illustrator’s Live Paint tool works similarly. Just note that Color Drop via the Hover feature requires iPad OS 16.3 or later.Additionally, you can squeeze the Apple Pencil Pro to switch between tools, such as Eyedropper and QuickShape. A barrel roll gesture lets you control the brush shape orientation, color dynamics, and path features.TypographyYou can add vector type to your creations, but summoning the controls isn’t intuitive. You need to select Actions (the little wrench icon) > Add > Add Text, then tap the text to get options. Plenty of typeface choices are available, along with the ability to import other typefaces and fonts. As of this writing, if you use OpenType fonts, you’ll need to use Apple Font Book to locate special or alternate characters in the typeface you are using, then copy them into your text box in Procreate.I found a surprising number of controls, including baseline position, kerning, leading, and tracking. It's also possible to convert the text layer into a raster if you want to integrate it into your drawing and apply Procreate’s effects. Apple’s Scribble feature (which converts handwriting to text) works seamlessly with Procreate. This support makes naming files and layers a little less cumbersome. Typography tools (Credit: PCMag/Savage Interactive) New Features: Procreate Continues to InnovateDespite its one-time price, Procreate consistently gains fresh and exciting features. I outline the most intriguing ones below.Anti-AI ProclamationWhether text-to-image AI features are good, bad, or somewhere in between is ultimately a question for creatives to ask themselves. Procreate offers this statement on the matter: "Creativity is made, not generated." It outlines some core tenets, as well:"No generative AI: We deeply respect your hard-earned skills.""Your work belongs to you: We do not have access to your art, by design.""We take pride in privacy: Your activity is not tracked in our apps."If you want to stay as far away from AI in your art as possible, Procreate shares your view.A New Brush SystemIf you have more than a few hundred brushes, quickly finding the one you want can be a challenge, unless it's in the tab for recently used options. Procreate's new library system, which is accessible via the Brushes panel or a pinching gesture, can rescue anyone with an inflated brush inventory. On the left of the library pane is the new Procreate brush set, created by the iconic illustrator Kyle T. Webster, who moved from Adobe to Procreate. On the right is a library of older Procreate brush sets, and any brushes you imported from elsewhere (including Photoshop and Fresco). If you updated from an earlier version, any custom brushes will show up under the Classic Library.Painting on 3D modelsUnique to Procreate is the 3D Paint feature, something Adobe Fresco can’t match. If you import 3D models into your Gallery (OBJ or USDZ files with UV-attached maps) and open them, the 3D Paint interface appears with isolation layers for the model’s components. You can also use one of the Procreate's included models to try out this feature. Note that Adobe has a solution for 3D painting within its Substance 3D Collection, but it's not part of the mainline Creative Cloud plan.In 3D painting mode, the model itself feels like your canvas. In actuality, your painting becomes part of the 2D UV map (U is the horizontal axis, and V is the vertical one). A UV Map is a 2D version of your art. To picture what this means, imagine painting a scene on all six sides of a closed cardboard box (3D). Then, if you were to open, unglue, and lay the cardboard down flat (2D), that would be similar to a UV map of what you painted on the box.Below is the result of my test paint on a skateboard. Painting on a 3D model is gratifying, but I ran into a snag. Every time I rotated the board (on the X, Y, or Z axes), the reflection on the bottom of the board kept leaving a white artifact (circled) that deleted my artwork. (This is perhaps a user error, though I was unable to find a quick fix in the Handbook or online.) Do note the high quality of the deck’s surface (inset below): 3D painting (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Special Effects and Finishing FeaturesWith Procreate, you can easily recolor all or part of your work and balance HSB (hue, saturation, and brightness) curves and histograms with a touch of three simple sliders. Experiment with those adjustments to stylize your work. Gesture-based blurring keeps you from the drop-down menu doldrums, and with adjustable Gaussian, motion, and perspective blurs, you can add dimension and life to your masterpiece. Special effects (Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Savage Interactive) Plenty of adjustment effects await your exploration to help finalize your vision. Create an atmospheric glow with Bloom directly on your image or as a layer effect filter. Add a halftone or glitch effect to add texture and interest. If those aren't enough, Procreate features liquify distortion modes, such as Expand, Pinch, Push, and Twirl. And, if you wish, you can watch an instant replay of your entire project creation—a time-lapse playback from beginning to end.