Pixel Studio vs ToonSquid
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Pixel Studio
Create pixel art, animated sprites, and game assets with a comprehensive suite of drawing, animation, and color tools. Supports layers, frame-by-frame animation, and various export formats. Offers Apple Pencil support and a customizable workspace for efficient design.
- Layer-based pixel art drawing
- Frame-by-frame sprite animation
- Onion skinning for animation
- Customizable brushes and tools
- Palette creation and management
- Export as GIF, MP4, and sprite sheets
- Apple Pencil support
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Create pixel art, animated sprites and game assets on iPhone and iPad. Draw with layers, animate frame by frame, and export your work as images, GIFs or sprite sheets. Start with a small character or build a detailed scene. Pixel Studio brings drawing, animation and color tools together, with Apple Pencil support and a customizable workspace. DRAW PIXEL ART • Work with layers, built-in and custom brushes, shapes and gradients • Draw symmetrically and add shading with the Dithering Pen • Use Dot Pen for precise drawing with a cursor • Customize your grid, background and toolbar • Resize and rotate your canvas, with pixel art scaling and rotation tools ANIMATE YOUR SPRITES • Create frame-by-frame animations with Onion Skin • Export animations as GIFs or sprite sheets • Add music and export videos to MP4 WORK WITH COLOR • Create your own palettes or use built-in palettes and palettes from Lospec • Pick colors with RGBA and HSV controls • Extract palettes from images and apply palettes to your artwork SAVE AND SHARE • Use autosave and backups to help protect your projects • Work with PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, TGA and Pixel Studio Project files • Import Aseprite files • Share your artwork with the Pixel Network community UPGRADE TO PRO PRO is a one-time purchase. It removes ads and unlocks Google Drive sync, a dark theme, 256-color palettes, seamless texture tile mode, larger projects, unlimited color adjustments and MP4 exports, additional format support and extended Pixel Network storage. Google Drive sync requires PRO. Some export options and advanced features also require PRO. Sample images by lorddkno, Redshrike, Calciumtrice, Buch and Tomoe Mami are used under CC BY 3.0. Privacy Policy: https://github.com/hippogamesunity/PixelStudioHub/wiki/Privacy-Policy Terms of Use: https://github.com/hippogamesunity/PixelStudioHub/wiki/EULA
ToonSquid
This powerful 2D art and animation studio for iPad combines traditional frame-by-frame animation with keyframe animation for layer properties. It offers a robust layer system, customizable brushes, vector shapes, animatable effects, and symbols to bring your creative visions to life.
- Frame-by-frame traditional animation
- Keyframe animation for layer properties
- Flexible layer system with blend modes
- Customizable brushes with Apple Pencil support
- Vector shapes and path tools
- Animatable effects and inverse kinematics
- Symbol workflow for reusable clips
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ToonSquid is the powerful 2D art and animation studio for your iPad. Its flexible layer system allows you to combine the charm of hand-drawn traditional animation with keyframes that automatically animate layer properties over time. With a library full of beautiful, blazing-fast and fully customizable pixel and vector brushes, animatable effects, a smudge tool, animated text and vector shapes, bones with inverse kinematics, video and audio layers, camera movements, symbols and many more features, ToonSquid makes it easy to bring your vision to life. Traditional Animation - Create hand-drawn frame-by-frame animations - Control how long you want to show each drawing in the timeline - Draw in resolutions of up to 4k Keyframe Animation - Add keyframes to automatically animate layer and effects properties over time - Choose from an extensive list of customizable easing curve presets to create organic motion between keyframes - Easily loop your keyframe animation Powerful Layer System - Define the order and length of each element in your animation using layers and drawings and a flexible timeline - Organize your layers into groups for a clean workflow or to animate multiple layers at once - Use the camera layer to quickly define the visible portion of your animation in the export - Mask layers to other layers, even when their contents are animated - Choose from 27 industry-standard layer blend modes for beautiful compositing effects Fully-customizable Brushes - Draw gorgeous brush strokes with ToonSquid's state-of-the-art digital brush engine - Take full advantage of Apple Pencil's pressure and tilt sensitivity and the iPad Pro's 120Hz display for lag-free drawing - Use vector brushes to create brush strokes that are sharp at every zoom level - Edit the 60+ brush settings and import custom textures to create a brush library that is perfectly tailored to your art style - Blend your strokes together using the smudge tool - Draw in a variety of styles such as sketching, inking, wet mixing, pixel art, and more - Export and share your custom brushes with others - Import your existing library of Adobe® Photoshop® brushes Vector Shapes - Create custom shapes using the path tool by placing and editing each curve control point - Quickly add common vector shapes from the shape library - Import SVG files - Fill and stroke your shapes with beautiful gradients and edit them directly on the canvas - Animate the visible length of a path using its trim properties Animatable Effects - Create character rigs using bones and add inverse kinematics constraints - Create custom meshes to deform pixel layers when they are part of a bone rig - Animate perspective and warp effects - Apply adjustments, blur, pixelation, drop shadow, chroma key, halftone, parallax and more effects Efficient symbol workflow - Split your animation into separate clips that you can then reuse multiple times using symbols - Make edits to an animation clip and immediately see the changes in all of its symbol instances - Use frame markers to speed up your lip-syncing workflow Text - Add text layers and animate their appearance - Import your favorite fonts Color - Use ToonSquid's powerful color picker with plenty of different interfaces to choose the exact colors you need - Create custom color palettes and share them outside the application - Pick colors straight from the canvas using the pipette tool - Fill connected regions quickly with the fill tool Audio and Video - Add audio clips to your timeline and perform lip-syncing animations - Import videos, GIFs and images into your project and work with them through symbols Transform - Animate a layer's position, rotation and scale properties using keyframes - Build transform hierarchies to achieve more advanced movements - Edit your layer's motion path directly on the canvas Numerous Export Formats - Export your work in one of many common file formats such as MP4, MOV, GIF, PNG, JPEG, PSD, and more.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Pixel Studio at Free against ToonSquid's $9.99. Pixel Studio also leads on ratings volume (6.1K vs 1.3K) and device support (3 vs 1). ToonSquid's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 10) and ads (none vs shown). On rating, review sentiment, update cadence and iOS requirement 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
Pixel Studio is free to download; ToonSquid costs $9.99 up front. Pixel Studio sells 10 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per month. ToonSquid asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.7 for Pixel Studio against 4.6 for ToonSquid. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 6.1K and 1.3K respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 94% of Pixel Studio's written reviews are positive against 89% of ToonSquid's.
Pixel Studio ships an update monthly, ToonSquid every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 5, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Pixel Studio | ToonSquid |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $9.99 |
| Rating | 4.7 (6.1K ratings) — better | 4.6 (1.3K ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 93.7% of reviews — better | 88.6% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 6.1K — better | 1.3K |
| Update frequency | Monthly | Every 2 weeks — better |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 15.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 144 MB | 48 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Farida Yarullina | Keiwan Donyagard |
Customer experience
Pixel Studio
ToonSquid
User reviews
Pixel Studio
From 6.1K App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 👍 Easy to use
- 🎨 Great tools for pixel art
- 💡 Helpful tutorials
- 🔍 Detailed features
- 🌟 High-quality app
Room to improve
- 🐛 Occasional crashes
- 🔀 Confusing navigation
- 🔍 Difficult to find certain features
- 🖌️ Brush size issues
- 🎨 Limited color palette options
ToonSquid
From 1.3K App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 AMAZING APP!!!
- 🚀 This is an absolute LIFESAVER
- 👍 Super solid animation App!
- 👍 Great app just one suggestion
- 👍 Absolutely Amazing App
Room to improve
- 🐛 AMAZING APP!!! One recommendation tho.
- 🐛 Snapping
- 🐛 Crashes
- 🐛 Keyframing doesn't work
- 🐛 Randomly ill get a warning that i have low memory
Bugs and requests
Pixel Studio
Reported bugs
4 issues- Exporting animations not working as expected
- Unexpected behavior when merging layers
- Inconsistent performance on larger canvases
- Glitches with the reference image feature
Requested features
7 requests- Add custom brush options
- Improve layer management
- Implement a color wheel
- Add canvas resizing capabilities
- Introduce mirroring/symmetry tools
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- Enhance the animation workflow
- Provide a more intuitive file management system
ToonSquid
Reported bugs
7 issues- Keyframing doesn't work
- Randomly ill get a warning that i have low memory
- The lasso tool thing isnt working for me
- Bug
- Whenever I use the fill bucket tool my app will randomly crash sometimes
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- When I upload my animatic as a video file and play it, it works for a couple of seconds, but then the screen goes white
- The app keeps crashing on me in certain projects
Requested features
31 requests- Custom graphs
- Bevel Shading
- Drawing to drawing transform
- Record Audio
- Extract audio from video
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- Symmetry tool
- Skew / Shear feature for keyframes & symbols
- Blending modes and filters
- Ability to select & edit/copy multiple frames at once
- Ability to rotate selected lines with the selection tool
- Ability to draw rasterised brushes outside of the box perimeters
- Audio feature where you can turn videos into audios
- Pen tip icon like Procreate and FlipaClip
- Ability to adjust an entire layer's opacity
- When playing an animation from a specific point on the timeline, returning to that point on the timeline when you pause
- Easier time selecting and moving and then unselecting specific areas
- Being able to copy and paste selected areas
- Ability to turn on brush outline
- Ability to adjust the size of the workspace
- Liquify brush
- Rigging/bone system
- Ability to reuse assets in other projects
- Rigged deformations
- Ability to flip the entire canvas for drawing
- Folders for projects or "stacks" like Procreate for sorting projects
- Ability to import .svg files
- Ability to merge all the animation layers into one
- Ability to customize the shape of deformation tool
- Ability to make vector/flash animations
- Ability to merge layers
- Ability to change opacity for frame-layers
In-app purchases
Pixel Studio
- PREMIUM subscription$3.991 Month
- Sprite collection$0.99
- PROMOTION IN PIXEL NETWORK$0.99
- Disable Ads$1.99
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- PRO -50%!$5.99
- PRO PROMO -50%$5.99
- PRO CROSS -50%!$8.99
- PRO CROSS GIFT -50%!$8.99
- PRO$12.99
- PRO CROSS$17.99
ToonSquid
No in-app purchases







