Inspire Pro vs Looom
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
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.
- 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
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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.
Looom
Create hand-drawn animations with a playful, instrument-like interface. This robust app focuses on loopable animation, offering a dynamic, non-destructive workflow for both beginners and professionals. Explore lines, shapes, and colors in a delightful environment designed for learning and experimentation.
- Hand-drawn animation creation
- Loopable animation focus
- Musical interface inspiration
- Dynamic non-destructive workflow
- Fluid time control
- Infinite canvas
- SVG native file format
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A new way to create hand-drawn animation. So playful you’ll think it’s a toy, but it's secretly a robust app with a reimagined UI for animators and creators. Taking inspiration from music creation tools, using Looom feels more like playing an instrument than operating software - exploring lines, shapes and colors through loopable time and rhythm. Looom is all about looping animation with a smile. It was designed for professionals and beginners of any age and is already being used by some influential indie animators. A delightful environment to learn, experiment, practice and create drawn animation. Wonderfully musical, Next-gen dynamic non-destructive workflow. FLUID TIME No first frame or last. Looom’s threads are independent in length and speed, always tweak-able. INFINITE CANVAS Lets you go as deep or as far as you want thanks to a completely resolution-independent vector engine. OPEN-ENDED Looom uses SVG as it’s native file format. Your work can be viewed in browsers and opened in desktop animation software.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Inspire Pro at 4.5 against Looom's 3.8. Inspire Pro also leads on price ($4.99 vs $9.99) and update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 4 months). Looom's advantage is chart position (#117 vs unranked) and device support (3 vs 1). On ratings volume, 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
Inspire Pro costs $4.99 and Looom $9.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Inspire Pro holds the better App Store score, 4.5 against 3.8. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 330 and 122 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 81% of Inspire Pro's written reviews are positive against 62% of Looom's.
Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, Looom every 4 months. Both last shipped on October 19, 2026.
| Parameter | Inspire Pro | Looom |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $4.99 — better | $9.99 |
| Rating | 4.5 (330 ratings) — better | 3.8 (122 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 80.8% of reviews — better | 61.7% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 330 — better | 122 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks — better | Every 4 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Best chart rank | — | #117 — better |
| Devices | iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 13.6 | 13.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 284 MB | 43 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | snowCanoe | IORAMA AB |
Customer experience
Inspire Pro
Looom
User reviews
Inspire Pro
From 330 App Store ratingsWhat 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
Looom
From 122 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 💡 Innovative and unique animation interface
- 🎨 Intuitive drawing experience once learned
- 🎬 Real-time animation playback while drawing
- 📱 Works seamlessly on iPad and iPhone
- 🎯 Simple and minimalist design approach
Room to improve
- 🐛 Frequent crashes losing user work
- 😕 Non-intuitive UI despite minimalist design
- 🎨 Limited to single color per layer/thread
- 🖌️ Only one basic brush option available
- 📤 Extremely cumbersome export process
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 moreShow fewer
- Improve playback and recording features
- Integrate with more cloud storage services
Looom
Reported bugs
12 issues- App crashes mid-animation causing work loss
- Grey screen on launch preventing app opening
- Drawing not registering properly
- Frame navigation swiping goes wrong direction
- Accidental marks appearing from sensitive touch controls
Show 7 moreShow fewer
- Eraser functionality not working on some devices
- Zoom controls triggering timeline instead
- Disappearing artwork when switching frames
- Export controls not grabbable on iPad Pro
- Accidental deletion of projects with no recovery option
- Non-Apple Pencil input not recognized without settings change
- Performance issues and stuttering
Requested features
23 requests- Better export options (GIF, video, SVG with proper formatting)
- Increase frame limit beyond 24 frames
- More than 5 layers/threads
- Multiple colors and brush sizes per layer
- Frame duplication and copy-paste functionality
Show 18 moreShow fewer
- Undo/redo gesture support (two-finger tap)
- Shape tools (circles, rectangles, lines)
- Background image import for reference tracing
- Hex color input and color picker tool
- Partial eraser (erase parts of lines, not entire lines)
- Double-tap Apple Pencil to toggle eraser
- Layer naming and hiding capabilities
- Adjustable frame rate and FPS control
- Sound/audio support
- Ability to rearrange frame order
- Onion skin customization (forward and backward)
- Static/pinned layers
- Higher resolution export options
- Video import for rotoscoping
- Pressure sensitivity support
- Animation scene management
- Seamless looping export
- Left-hand mode accessibility
In-app purchases
Inspire Pro
No in-app purchases
Looom
No in-app purchases









