Krita

Krita is not a general image editor that happens to have brushes — it is a painting application, built by artists working with the KDE community and funded through the Dutch-registered Krita Foundation. Its brush engines are the point, and they are genuinely excellent.

It is free under GPLv3, with no account, no telemetry and no subscription, which makes it the most accessible serious art tool available.

Brush Engines

Krita ships more than a hundred brush presets across nine distinct brush engines, and the customisation goes deep — a brush's behaviour can be shaped by pressure, tilt, speed and rotation in ways that let artists build tools matching their own hand. This is where Krita competes with and often beats commercial painting software.

Wrap-around mode for seamless textures and a full frame-by-frame animation workspace extend it into game art and 2D animation.

Colour Management

Krita supports HDR painting and proper ICC colour management, which matters for artists producing work for print or for high dynamic range display. This is unusual in free software and reflects the seriousness of the project.

No Vendor at All

GPLv3, no account, no cloud, no telemetry. Files are yours on your own disk, and the Krita Foundation is a Dutch non-profit rather than a company with an exit strategy. For artists who watched Adobe move to subscription, that permanence has value beyond the price.

Limitations to Consider

Krita is a painting tool, not a photo editor — photo retouching, RAW processing and compositing are much weaker than in Photopea or Capture One. It has historically had stability issues on some configurations, and PSD support, while present, is less complete than Photopea's. The interface takes time to configure to a comfortable working state.

Who Should Use Krita

Illustrators, concept artists, comic artists and anyone doing digital painting who wants professional brush capability without a subscription — and who values software that cannot be taken away or repriced.