Animator Plus vs Simple Trace Pro
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Animator Plus
Create professional-quality animations with a powerful yet intuitive drawing and animation tool. Offers extensive features for drawing, frame management, and exporting your creations in various formats.
- Keyframe animation
- Timeline editing
- Drawing tools
- Unlimited layers and frames
- Export to MP4 and PNG
- Onion skinning
- Customizable brushes
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Animator Plus is a powerful drawing and frame-by-frame animation studio built natively for iPad and iPhone. Sketch, paint, and bring stories to life on a buttery-smooth Metal-powered canvas — with pro brushes, a full animation timeline, layers, sound sync, and one-tap export to MP4, image sequences, PNG, or JPG. Whether you are a hobbyist doodler, a storyboard artist, a cartoonist, or an animator chasing that classic hand-drawn look, Animator Plus puts everything you need into one focused, beautifully refined workspace. PRO BRUSHES TUNED FOR APPLE PENCIL • Studio Pen — crisp ink lines with subtle pressure response • Pencil — true graphite feel with tilt-based shading • Pressure Pen — thickness scales with how hard you press • Marker — flat, opaque coverage for blocking color • Fountain — calligraphic chisel for elegant strokes • Airbrush — soft sprays that build up gradually • Tapered Line — four variants for classic animation strokes • Eraser, Smart Fill Bucket, Lasso Select Full Apple Pencil pressure, tilt, and azimuth support. Adjust per-brush size, opacity, hardness, flow, and smoothing. • CLASSIC FRAME-BY-FRAME ANIMATION Flip on Animation Mode to unlock a full timeline. Insert, duplicate, copy, paste, and reorder frames in a tap. Set Frame Hold to pause specific frames for any number of ticks. Tune playback from 1 to 60 fps. Onion-skin previous and next frames as ghosts to align inbetweens with confidence. • STROKE-BY-STROKE PLAYBACK Watch your artwork redraw itself, one stroke at a time, at 1x, 2x, or 4x speed. Perfect for time-lapse reels, tutorials, and process videos. Undone strokes are skipped automatically. • POWERFUL LAYERS Stack, rename, hide, lock, blend, and clip layers independently. Every animation frame keeps its own layer stack so foreground action and static backgrounds stay perfectly organized. • SHAPES, TEXT, AND TRANSFORMS Drop perfect lines, rectangles, ellipses, triangles, stars, and hexagons. Add editable text overlays. Use Lasso Select to grab strokes and move, rotate, scale, or recolor entire sections in one gesture. • REFERENCE TOOLS AND ROTOSCOPING Turn on square, dot, or isometric grids for precise layouts. Import a reference image from Photos and dim its opacity to trace or sample. Import a video clip and Animator Plus extracts the frames automatically, letting you rotoscope on top. • SOUND ON THE TIMELINE Import an audio clip, trim the in and out points, and adjust volume. Sound plays back in lockstep with your animation so timing and lip-sync land first try. • EXPORT EVERYWHERE Save your art as transparent PNG, JPG, image sequence, or MP4 video. Push files to the Files app or straight to your camera roll. Projects sync across devices via iCloud Drive. • REFINED FOR EVERY DEVICE Layouts adapt automatically between iPad and iPhone. Customize the accent color, brush smoothing, background color, and grid style from one tidy Settings panel. Whether you are sketching a storyboard, illustrating a children's book, prototyping a cartoon, or producing a finished animated short, Animator Plus gives you the tools to draw, paint, animate, and ship — frame by frame. Thanks for your support. Visit nitrio.com for more apps for your iOS devices.
Simple Trace Pro
Practice drawing and illustration by tracing photos and images. Load pictures from your camera roll and use Apple Pencil to refine your line work. Save your traced creations as JPGs or transparent PNGs.
- Trace photos and pictures
- Practice illustration and painting
- Load images from camera roll
- Apple Pencil support
- Adjustable transmittance
- Zoom functionality
- Save as JPG or transparent PNG
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Simple Trace makes it easy to trace photos and pictures by hand. The concept is to be able to practice painting. Once you've loaded the image from your camera roll, it's easy to get started with Apple Pencil. By tracing the original picture, you can practice basic drawing such as how to draw lines in the illustration. Feature - Change of transmittance - Zoom in and out of the drawing area - Images can be saved as jpg, Pro version can be saved as transparent png - No ads in Pro version
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Simple Trace Pro at $0.99 against Animator Plus's $8.99. Simple Trace Pro also leads on update cadence (every 2 weeks vs every 23 months) and iOS requirement (14.5 vs 17.6). On review sentiment, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Animator Plus costs $8.99 and Simple Trace Pro $0.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Animator Plus ships an update every 23 months, Simple Trace Pro every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on September 19, 2026 and September 9, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Animator Plus | Simple Trace Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $8.99 | $0.99 — better |
| Rating | — | 3.0 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 0.0% of reviews | 0.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | — | 2 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 23 months | Every 2 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPad | iPad |
| Requires iOS | 17.6 | 14.5 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 2 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Heng Jia Liang | Kazuaki Matsuda |
Customer experience
Animator Plus
Simple Trace Pro
In-app purchases
Animator Plus
No in-app purchases
Simple Trace Pro
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Animator Plus free?
Is Simple Trace Pro free?
Do Animator Plus or Simple Trace Pro have ads?
Which is updated more often, Animator Plus or Simple Trace Pro?
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