Many the best free drawing software can also be used in conjunction with your pen, allowing you to create realistic brush strokes right on your iPad or laptop. These the best free drawing software comparisons are based on a variety of criteria, including capabilities, drawing features, pricing, integrations, file formats, output quality, ease-of-use, and more.
There are a few possibilities for the best free drawing software in this list as well. However, when it comes to drawing software, they are only the tools that I strongly suggest you use.
Top 10 Best Free Drawing Software
Adobe Express
Adobe Express is a fantastic drawing software for making websites, drawing, and doing graphic design. The software, which is used by both professionals and students, enables smooth cooperation between numerous project stakeholders. It also has a lot of social media integration, which makes it very beneficial for social media marketers.
It also has several versions that make it simple to create photographs or publications for a variety of purposes, such as web pages, social media websites, and videos. Video clips, images, voiceovers, and ornamental stickers can all be easily added. Any newbie may easily figure out how to use Adobe Express to create great designs thanks to the reduced learning curve.
Key Features:
- Thousands of photographs are available online, or you can use your own images from Dropbox, Google Photos, Lightroom, and other sources.
- Professional Themes: You may customize your theme with a variety of layouts, colours, and fonts, as well as icons, messages, and photographs.
- Automatic Synchronization: The projects you work on are automatically synced in real-time across all of your devices.
Pros:
- It comes with a freemium plan that includes all of the essential features.
- It also has a large selection of fonts and picture possibilities.
- You can share your photographs on social media or via email in real time.
- It allows you to browse the ‘Inspiration Gallery’ and learn about some of the best Express projects.
- It also offers free introductory webinar training.
- You may customize your photographs by removing Adobe watermarks.
The cost is as follows:
- It also has two premium options of drawing software, Individual and Team, in addition to the free version.
- They have monthly fees of $9.99 and $19.99, respectively.
- It provides unique strategies for businesses based on quotes.
Adobe Photoshop
When it comes to creating photos and graphics, Adobe Photoshop is the unquestioned industry standard. Photo editing, digital painting, graphic design, and animation are among the activities that it is best suited for. It comes as part of Adobe Creative Cloud and offers a robust range of drawing software creating mobile apps, intricate graphics, pictures, 3D artwork, and more.
It can also do things like video editing and art reproduction. In a nutshell, Adobe Photoshop allows you to bring any idea to life. Lens blur, object selection tools, an image warp feature, and other features are among its highlights.
Key Features:
Adobe Sensei is an AI tool incorporated into Photoshop that allows you to create quick and precise choices of drawing software by drawing simple shapes around the object in question. New Gradients, Patterns, Swatches, Layers, Styles, and Shapes — tool includes intuitive presets such as new gradients, patterns, swatches, layers, styles, and shapes.
Enhanced Transform Warp – You now have more choices for adding control points and dividing your image into a grid that you may customize according to your needs. Pulled String Mode — This feature allows you to change the direction of your painting in the middle of a stroke.
Pros:
- It comes with three-stroke smoothing capabilities.
- For smooth sharing, Adobe Photoshop integrates with a variety of third-party programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Skype.
- It has a 3D picture creator and a curve paint tool.
- It comes with a free 7-day trial.
- It allows you to create unique scenarios, animations, and passport and stamp-sized pictures by combining images.
- It also provides a discount for students.
- It’s one of the most popular products for both Apple MacOS and Microsoft, and it’s part of Adobe Creative Cloud.
The cost is as follows:
- The ‘Single app’ and ‘Creative cloud all apps’ pricing options are available from Adobe Photoshop.
- Each month costs $20.99 and $52.99, respectively.
- One photography plan costs $119.88 per year and is paid annually.
CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a popular graphic design and drawing software for both amateur and professional use. While its USP is vector-based design, it can be used for a variety of tasks, such as creating logos, cards, and brochures. Corel has a suite of products that are tailored to a certain purpose, making it highly functional and relevant in the respective fields.
The good news is that it’s simple to use and has a user-friendly interface. It also includes platform-specific versions to ensure that the software can fully utilise the hardware. With Corel products, you also have a lot of customization options for effective graphic creation.
Key Features:
It allows you to produce highly thorough technical documentation with exact specifications. With this AI-assisted tool, you can produce vector images directly from vector sources, saving time. This tool allows you to quickly sketch out your ideas using a pen-enabled device.
Pros:
- It comes with a 15-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- No matter whatever format you pick to export your drawing, the tool always gives flawless color consistency, which makes logos and brochures stand out.
- It contains a great Gaussian blur tool as well as a lot of interactive sliders.
- You may use CorelDRAW to accomplish efficient font filtering.
- The design space can be easily adjusted and is highly adjustable.
The cost is as follows:
- CorelDRAW has two pricing options.
- The first, which costs $669, is for the entire version.
- It also offers an enterprise plan for $198 per year.
- Start using the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite right away.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector drawing and editing drawing software utilized by millions of designers, web developers, video game developers, book illustrators, billboard advertisers, and brand managers. It has the ability to create designs that are pixel-perfect.
Professional artists and graphic designers can quickly create gorgeous graphics using templates and presets that are freely available. In fact, it has over 80 million built-in templates, pictures, movies, and photos to help in online drawing and graphic design.
Key Features:
- Extensive Font Styles: To create the perfect drawing, you can choose from over 16,000 distinct fonts.
- Make highly personalized and dynamic webpages using this feature.Shape-builder.
- Free form Mode: You can create the forms and sizes of any drawing and draw inspiration from other images in this mode.
Pros:
- It provides a free trial period as well as multilingual customer care.
- It has outstanding vector drawing capabilities as well as an SVG export option.
- Pixel-perfect designs, matte paintings, dynamic symbols, and unique designs are all possible.
- Customer service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week with this tool.
- “Perspective Drawing Enhancements” is another option.
- The iPhone app for Adobe Illustrator Draw has a variety of editing capabilities.
The cost is as follows:
- Individuals can subscribe to the Illustrator for $20.99 per month on an annual basis.
- It’s available as part of the creative cloud in distinct options for enterprises, students & teachers, and schools & institutions.
- Start using Adobe Illustrator right away.
Vectr
Another amazing drawing software on this list is Vectr. Its vector graphics design capabilities are one of its most important features. This is a strong tool that is also quite easy to use. It is appropriate for professionals such as graphic designers, web developers, social media marketers, and illustrators.
It works with a variety of operating systems, including ChromeOS, Linux, Windows, and Mac, so you don’t have to worry about device compatibility. Vectr also has a simple user interface and all of the required tools for basic drawing and editing, such as shape tools, organized elements, pen tool, and pathfinder.
It does, however, miss some of the more advanced capabilities found in higher-end products. The good news is that a paid subscription plan with additional functionality is now available for great professional use.
Key Features:
- Scalability: You can scale photographs to any size without losing quality using this tool.
- It also aids with the creation of high-quality logos, cards, and presentations, among other things.
- Real-time Collaboration: It allows you to collaborate with colleagues in different locations in real-time.
- Vectr is incredibly adaptable. It will always sync and store your work, whether you use it online or download it on your PC.
- It gives you access to a variety of unique shapes and designs, such as arrows, calendar icons, clipart, and more.
Pros:
- You can download it to your computer or use it immediately online.
- You may use it to import and modify SVGs and bitmaps, as well as use them as your background.
- It offers a simple user interface with quick access to pens, shape tools, and text tools.
- A simple image tracing feature is included in the software.
- It comes with a large collection of starter tutorials and user instructions.
The cost is as follows:
- It is completely free to use and has no hidden charges.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a popular cross-platform drawing software that works on Macs, Windows, and Linux computers. Because of its user-friendliness, it is well-liked by students, creative artists, and graphic designers. Inkscape also comes with a robust, transparent, and consistent user interface, as well as a number of tips and tutorials to help you get the most out of the software. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is used to create and design banners, logos, and other vector-based media.
Key Features:
- Node Editors: These editors give users more control over vectored shapes, objects, and graphics.
- Object Creation Functionality: This feature expands the capabilities of standard tools like the pencil, calligraphy, and shape tools, allowing users to express themselves more freely.
- Object Manipulation Functionality: It allows users to move, scale, skew, raise and lower objects, and create image layers to create hierarchical trees.
- SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics): This tool’s USP is that it uses SVG as its native format.
Pros:
- As an open-source tool, it allows for extensive modification to meet the demands of the user.
- It supports a variety of file types, including PNG, OpenDocument Drawing, DXF, sk1, PDF, EPS, and PostScript.
- It supports kerning, letter-spacing, line-spacing, and other text-related features.
- Color picker tools and a gradient editor that can create multi-stop gradients are included in the tool.
- Bitmap tracing is also possible.
- Customer service is available in a variety of languages.
- For beginners, the tool includes a wealth of materials in the form of videos, lessons, books, manuals, and FAQs.
The cost is as follows:
- The digital art software Inkscape is available for free.
Krita
Krita is a best free drawing software created by artists to provide a comprehensive drawing tool for novices. Digital paintings, manga, and animations are the best uses for the tool. It has a high level of performance and a large number of features.
Additionally, it provides users with a variety of drawing software for blending, rendering, smoothing, mirroring, morphing, colour mixing, layering, and other tasks. Its functionalities are compatible with both computers and tablets.
Key Features:
- Layer Management: This tool assists artists in organizing, grouping, and combining drawings.
- Brush Creation: For a more seamless experience, the tool allows you to create unique brushes digitally.
- These brushes can also be tagged using a unique tagging method.
- Layer Visibility Choices: You can delete or remove any part of a drawing using these options.
- Wrap-around Mode: This option aids in the development of intricate patterns and textures.
Pros:
- PSD and HDR support is available in their painting software.
- It comes with a large color pallet and more than 100 professionally created brushes.
- With Fill Brush Circle and Fill Brush Block, artists can effortlessly create silhouettes.
- It has nine brush engines built in and over 30 dockers, giving it a lot of versatility.
- The Airbrush Pressure brush can help you create great contrast in your photos.
- Before you begin, you can scratch around and practice drawing with the unique ‘Ink Ballpen’ feature.
The cost is as follows:
- Krita is an open-source painting or drawing software that is completely free to use.
GIMP
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source image editor. It works with a variety of operating systems, including GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows, and others. It’s one of the greatest free drawing software programs since it allows users to alter the source code, which makes it highly customizable.
Graphic designers, photographers, and artists will benefit the most from it. GIMP’s capabilities make it simple to fine-tune photographs and photos, and it includes complex functions such as filters and layer masks. It also has animation packages and plugins that are both downloadable and pre-installed. Gradients, colour tweaks, cropping, noise reduction, and customizable brushes are just a few of the fundamental functions.
Key Features:
- GIMP has a number of tools for high-quality photo alteration, such as retouching, restoring, and creating artistic composites.
- The command ‘Open as Layers’ allows you to map one image directly into a layer of another image.
- Scripted Image Manipulation—The tool supports scripting in languages such as C, C++, Python, PERL, and others.
Pros:
- GIMP has a lot of color management options that help you get high-fidelity color reproduction on both digital and printed mediums.
- It’s easy to use and has a really intuitive interface.
- Filters, Bezier curves, and animation are among the functions available.
- Noise reduction, cropping, automatic image enhancement, and color adjustment tools are all possible with the tool, which also includes features like vignetting and barrel distortion removal.
- From the picture tabs, you may see important drawing information in the form of informative thumbnails.
- There’s a fantastic ‘full screen mode’ that lets you view and modify drawings on your entire screen.
The cost is as follows:
- It’s completely free.
PaintTool SAI
PaintTool SAI is a simple drawing software that allows you to express your creativity in a variety of ways. It has a user-friendly interface and is appropriate for professionals such as graphic designers, website designers, and students. Many of the features of Adobe Photoshop are available in this tool, albeit at a lower cost.
Furthermore, if a low-resolution image is imported into the software, the drawing software minimize distorted visuals or illustrations. The user-friendly tool also provides fully digitized support and is compatible with a wide range of platforms, including laptops, desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Key Features:
- It has a large color palette with a variety of shades ranging from light to dark for each color.
- You can also change the image’s saturation and lamination levels.
- Layer Tools: Layer tools provide users with more versatility.
- They may also assist you in combining and transferring drawings, as well as deleting certain areas of an image.
- Users may turn brushes into erasers, allowing them to eradicate specific image sections that would otherwise be impossible to remove.
Pros:
- Intel MMX technology is supported by this tool.
- It has comprehensive data security to keep it safe from bugs and other unexpected terminations.
- With 16-bit ARGB channels, it allows for precise compositions.
- You can create anti-aliased drawings and see mini-versions of them.
- It also offers a 31-day free trial period.
- Using one of the picture layers’ pin buttons, you can lock two image layers together and move them around.
The cost is as follows:
- It offers a free 31-day trial at first.
- The premium software license costs $50.81 per license after that.
ArtRage
ArtRage is a feature-rich, intuitive, and simple drawing software that is designed to bring out the best in any artist. It has a wide range of applications, and you can use it to create icons, logos, graphics, T-shirt designs, and video game concepts, among other things. It provides both professional and beginning digital painters with a digital canvas for oil painting, watercolours, and pencil sketching.
Look no further than ArtRage if you want to create amazing graphics that look like paintings. It has a number of transformation drawing software, as well as cloning, selection, gradient, and pattern fill choices. It’s one of the few smartphone apps for digital painting software. Its mobile software includes, among other things, editing capabilities, graphics design tools, and drawing aids.
Key Features:
- This tool allows artists to digitally blend and mix colors and textures.
- Cloner Tool: You can use the cloner tool to duplicate or clone any existing image and its characteristics for further editing.
- Users can utilize the tool to replicate real-life interactions between watercolors, water, and paper.
Pros:
- It allows you to assess the depth and wetness of your paints and add grids for proportional drawing.
- It makes it simple to import and export files.
- You can create your own digital brushes and share them with your coworkers.
- It also has pattern and gradient fill options for recreating the look of charcoal.
- It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee as well as a variety of manuals and lessons.
The cost is as follows:
- Its most recent version, version 6, costs $79 per license.
- There are three further versions: ‘Lite,’ ‘Android,’ and ‘iOS.’
- They’re available for $29.90, $4.99, and $4.99, respectively.