Inspire Pro vs FocalPaint
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.
FocalPaint
This app offers a unique brush engine for realistic paint simulation, pigment mixing, and canvas textures. It allows for custom brush and layer creation using Metal GPU or Javascript code, with advanced features like spectral color models and Apple Pencil Pro support.
- Realistic paint and pigment mixing
- Custom brush and layer creation
- Transparent ink simulation
- Apple Pencil Pro support
- Spectral color model
- Open source shader code library
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FocalPaint's unique brush engine simulates thick paint and real pigment mixing with accurate physics models. Features: - Realistic color blending behaves like real paint! - Real canvas texture and paint thickness - Transparent Ink simulation - Open Source GPU shader code library for reference and customization - Write your own custom brush with Metal GPU or Javascript code - Write your own custom layer modes with Metal GPU code - Apple Pencil Pro support with hover - 16 channel "spectral" color model (256 bits per pixel) - Wide color gamut (P3) Please note: Apple A12 GPU or newer is required Terms of Use: https://www.focalpaint.com/p/terms-of-use.html Privacy Policy: https://www.focalpaint.com/p/privacy.html Special Thanks to: Scott Allen Burns Troy James Sobotka & Friends colour-science.org python library MyPaint painting software team Anna Timm (@anti-art)
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Inspire Pro at 4.5 against FocalPaint's 4.2. Inspire Pro also leads on ratings volume (331 vs 13) and iOS requirement (13.6 vs 18.6). On price, review sentiment, update cadence and ads 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 FocalPaint $4.99 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 4.2. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Inspire Pro has 331 ratings behind it against 13, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 81% of Inspire Pro's written reviews are positive against 79% of FocalPaint's.
Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, FocalPaint monthly. The most recent releases landed on November 10, 2026 and November 11, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Inspire Pro | FocalPaint |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $4.99 | $4.99 |
| Rating | 4.5 (331 ratings) — better | 4.2 (13 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 80.8% of reviews — better | 78.6% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 331 — better | 13 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks — better | Monthly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPad | iPhone, iPad — better |
| Requires iOS | 13.6 — better | 18.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 284 MB | 557 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | +4 |
| Developer | snowCanoe | brien dieterle |
Customer experience
Inspire Pro
FocalPaint
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
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- Improve playback and recording features
- Integrate with more cloud storage services
FocalPaint
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Inspire Pro
No in-app purchases
FocalPaint
No in-app purchases









