Comparison

Inspire Pro vs Paintstorm Studio

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Inspire Pro

This powerful drawing and painting app offers a realistic and fast creative experience for iPad users. It features a proprietary engine for brilliant color rendering and stunning blending effects, with a vast array of customizable brushes and advanced tools.

Highlights
  • Proprietary Sorcery™ painting engine
  • 150 high-quality, customizable brushes
  • Full Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard support
  • Canvas size up to 16K (64MP)
  • Automatic canvas playback video recording
  • Full-featured color picker with saved palettes
Features
Read full description

Available exclusively on the App Store, meticulously designed to be beautifully powerful, and painstakingly engineered for iPad — Inspire Pro delivers an incredibly fast and realistic painting, drawing, and sketching experience that you can take with you wherever you go and use whenever inspiration strikes. Our proprietary painting engine Sorcery™ takes full advantage of the GPU to render brush strokes with brilliant 64-bit color, laser-sharp sub-pixel precision, and insanely fast speed. While the strokes of a wet oil paint brush look beautiful on their own, the breathtaking blending effects of a dry brush will absolutely stun you. Graze the canvas with just a bit of pressure to add a subtle blur to your artwork or use stronger pressure to actually mix existing colors on the canvas together to create new ones. Whether you are a budding artist, seasoned professional, or somewhere in-between, you will enjoy the simplicity and power of the most intuitive and compelling illustration app for iPad, Inspire Pro. Amazing Brushes • 150 high quality brushes to choose from, divided into 15 sets: Oil Paint, Airbrushes, Spray Paint, Paint Splatter, Graphite Pencils, Wax Crayons, Markers, Chalk, Charcoal, Pastels & Conté, Basic Shapes, Complex Shapes, Shape Outlines, Patterns, and Textures • All brushes can be used as a Wet Brush, Dry Brush (Blending), or Eraser • Over 20 different settings are available to customize brush strokes with powerful versatility and variation The Best Painting App for iPad • Sorcery™, the fastest 64-bit painting engine on the App Store • Full-fledged Apple Pencil support for pressure, tilt angle, orientation, and double-tap • Smart Keyboard support with over 20 context-sensitive keyboard shortcuts • Create a canvas of any size up to 16K (64MP) on iPad Pro • Dual-texture brushes • 64-bit color • All device orientations are supported all the time — switch from portrait to landscape painting with ease • 1000 levels of undo and redo are available • Touch and slide hotspots can be used to quickly change brush size, opacity, and pressure without opening a menu • The eyedropper tool can be used with a touch and hold gesture to select paint colors from the canvas • The canvas can be moved around, rotated, and zoomed in and out up to 6400% Canvas Playback Video Recording • Brush strokes are automatically recorded as you paint without any delay • You can play the video of your artwork being created stroke-by-stroke directly in the gallery • Exported videos are high quality HD at up to 1080p resolution Full-Featured Color Picker • Choose any paint color you can dream of with the intuitive color picker • HSB and RGB sliders accompany a large color circle, color square, and opacity slider • Your latest colors are saved to a palette automatically while you paint • You can also save your favorite colors to a palette with drag and drop Visit snowCanoe.com to check out more screenshots, videos, and artwork.

About

Paintstorm Studio

This app offers a professional digital painting experience on iOS devices, leveraging Apple Pencil for advanced control. It provides a vast array of customizable brushes, stroke correction, and intuitive tools for artists of all levels to create masterpieces on the go.

Highlights
  • Advanced brush customization
  • Stroke post-correction
  • Perspective-aware parameters
  • Dynamic and custom interface
  • Mask brush functionality
  • Photoshop PSD and ABR support
  • Apple Pencil integration
Read full description

Paintstorm Studio is the first iOS App designed not only for simple sketches, but professional digital painting of any level, genre and technique. Paintstorm helps you to discover the magnificence and unleash the full potential of Apple Pencil and brings you to a whole new level of drawing. Creating an art masterpiece has never been so mobile. A major feature of Paintstorm Studio is the array of brushes to choose from. We did our best so that you can easily and quickly adjust the brushes suitable to your painting style. Anyone who has ever painted knows it's hard to overestimate the painting tool and the importance of all the seemingly insignificant details. We tried not to miss any of them. Our goal was to create an intuitive, simple-to-use but at the same time functionally powerful tool that brings the process of digital painting to a new level, making it as comfortable as possible. - Full control of all brush options (Incredible possibilities for brush settings) - Bristle brushes of any form and kind - Stroke post correction (You can take an action on any option. Not only on the stroke thickness) - Parameters binding to the perspective - Dynamic interface (Global interface scale, panels scale, opacity, color) - Custom panels - Full controlled mask-brush (Each brush can work as mask for other brush) - Takes underlayer's color while blending - "Close gaps" function when you fill or select - Dirty brush mode - Stroke stabilizer - Usable color mixer - Different gradient strokes - Mirror drawing - Standart tools pack (Lasso, Magic wand, Crop, Fill, Gradient and etc) - Control of the random amounts - Photoshop PSD and ABR supported - Apple Pencil support (Pressure, Tilt, Direction)

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is price: Inspire Pro at $4.99 against Paintstorm Studio's $12.99. Inspire Pro also leads on update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 4 months) and review sentiment (81% vs 60%). On rating, ratings volume, ads and in-app purchases 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Inspire Pro costs $4.99 and Paintstorm Studio $12.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.5 for Inspire Pro against 4.4 for Paintstorm Studio. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 330 and 368 respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 81% of Inspire Pro's written reviews are positive against 60% of Paintstorm Studio's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, Paintstorm Studio every 4 months. The most recent releases landed on September 22, 2026 and September 6, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences · 7 level
Inspire Pro versus Paintstorm Studio: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterInspire ProPaintstorm Studio
Price$4.99 — better$12.99
Rating4.5 (330 ratings) — better4.4 (368 ratings)
Positive reviews80.8% of reviews — better59.6% of reviews
Number of ratings330368 — better
Update frequencyEvery 3 weeks — betterEvery 4 months
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationPaidPaid
DevicesiPadiPad
Requires iOS13.613.1 — better
Further details — not scored
Size284 MB103 MB
Age rating4+4+
DevelopersnowCanoeSergei Komarov

Customer experience

Inspire Pro

All ratings330 ratings
Positive89.1%
Neutral3.0%
Negative7.9%
Written reviews255 reviews
Positive80.8%
Neutral3.5%
Negative15.7%

Paintstorm Studio

All ratings368 ratings
Positive84.2%
Neutral4.3%
Negative11.4%
Written reviews178 reviews
Positive59.6%
Neutral9.0%
Negative31.5%

User reviews

Inspire Pro

From 330 App Store ratings

What we love

  • 👍 Realistic painting experience
  • 🎨 Variety of brushes and tools
  • 🎨 Customizable brushes
  • 🎨 Intuitive and easy to use
  • 🎨 Excellent color blending

Room to improve

  • 🐛 Crashes and stability issues
  • 🔍 Confusing interface at times
  • 💰 Expensive with in-app purchases
  • 🎨 Lack of layers feature
  • 🎨 Limited canvas size options

Paintstorm Studio

From 368 App Store ratings

What we love

  • 🚀 Powerful desktop-class features
  • 🎨 Excellent brush engine and blending
  • 📚 Highly customizable interface
  • 💻 Seamless desktop-to-iPad experience
  • 🖌️ Realistic painting simulation

Room to improve

  • 🐛 Crashes and stability issues
  • 🔍 Cluttered and confusing UI
  • 🔋 Performance and memory issues
  • 🔒 Lack of cloud/online integration
  • 📁 Limited file management and export options

Bugs and requests

Inspire Pro

Reported bugs

4 issues
  • Crashes on iPad Pro
  • Brush selection reverts to default
  • Playback feature not working as expected
  • Compatibility issues with older iPad models

Requested features

7 requests
  • Add layers feature
  • Improve brush selection and stability
  • Increase canvas size options
  • Implement palm rejection for Apple Pencil
  • Add more brush types and customization
Show 2 more
  • Improve playback and recording features
  • Integrate with more cloud storage services

Paintstorm Studio

Reported bugs

5 issues
  • Crashes on startup or when using certain tools
  • Brush lag and performance issues with large canvases
  • Unreliable autosave and file management
  • Unresponsive or glitchy UI elements
  • Incompatibility with older iPad models

Requested features

5 requests
  • Improved brush customization and management
  • Seamless canvas rotation and zooming
  • Expanded layer and selection tools
  • Better text and typography support
  • Integrated cloud/online sync and sharing

In-app purchases

None

Inspire Pro

No in-app purchases

None

Paintstorm Studio

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Inspire Pro free?
Inspire Pro costs $4.99, with no in-app purchases.
Is Paintstorm Studio free?
Paintstorm Studio costs $12.99, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Inspire Pro or Paintstorm Studio?
Inspire Pro is rated higher. Inspire Pro averages 4.5 out of 5 from 330 ratings, while Paintstorm Studio averages 4.4 from 368 ratings.
Do Inspire Pro or Paintstorm Studio have ads?
Neither Inspire Pro nor Paintstorm Studio shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Inspire Pro or Paintstorm Studio?
Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, and Paintstorm Studio every 4 months. Most recently, Inspire Pro was updated on September 22, 2026 and Paintstorm Studio on September 6, 2026.

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