Inspire Pro vs Abstractor
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.
Abstractor
This drawing app uses generative magic and dynamic flow brushes to create unique, animated artwork. Explore infinite possibilities with brushes that respond to your gestures, imported images, and algorithmic patterns.
- Generative flow brushes
- Image-driven velocity maps
- Algorithmic particle behavior
- Color shifting based on stroke
- Layer support
- Color source layers
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ABSTRACTOR: PAINT WITH GENERATIVE MAGIC Unleash your vision with Abstractor, a poetic drawing app for iPad and iPhone, crafted for artist explorers and playful creators. Paint with infinite possibilities, where every stroke pulses with generative magic. FLOW BRUSHES: THE HEART OF CREATION Dive into the soul of Abstractor with flow brushes, where particles swirl like living liquids, leaving hypnotic trails across your canvas. These dynamic tools respond to three unique velocity maps: • Stroke Paths: Your gestures carve flowing rivers, guiding particles along vibrant trails. • Image-Driven Flow: Import an image to shape a velocity field, infusing brushes with textured, directional energy. • Algorithmic Soul: Add generated noise or patterns to give particles a distinct character—turbulent storms or gentle ripples. Tune particle behaviors in real time, sculpting their essence like a visual composer. Blend these maps to create mesmerizing, emergent patterns that surprise and inspire, making every stroke a performance. Colors shift with stroke angle, pressure, or speed, weaving emotion into every line. Use familiar layers or bind tools to them for tailored magic. Paint over a color source layer, pulling hues from imported images to craft radiant distortions—flow brushes shine here, warping visuals into dreamlike abstractions. Abstractor is your canvas for boundless wonder. Download now and let your art flow eternal.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Abstractor at Free against Inspire Pro's $4.99. Abstractor also leads on rating (5.0 vs 4.5) and update cadence (every 5 days vs every 3 weeks). Inspire Pro's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 3) and ratings volume (330 vs 5). On ads and device support 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
Abstractor is free to download; Inspire Pro costs $4.99 up front. Abstractor sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $0.99 per month. Inspire Pro asks for nothing beyond the download.
Abstractor holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.5. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Inspire Pro has 330 ratings behind it against 5, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 81% of Inspire Pro's written reviews are positive against 71% of Abstractor's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, Abstractor every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 19, 2026 and October 1, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Inspire Pro | Abstractor |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $4.99 | Free — better |
| Rating | 4.5 (330 ratings) | 5.0 (5 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 80.8% of reviews — better | 71.4% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 330 — better | 5 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Paid | Free with in-app purchases — better |
| Devices | iPad | iPhone, iPad — better |
| Requires iOS | 13.6 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 284 MB | 4 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | snowCanoe | superdiagonal |
Customer experience
Inspire Pro
Abstractor
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
Abstractor
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Inspire Pro
No in-app purchases
Abstractor
- All Access · 1 Month$0.991 Month
- Premium · 1 Year14 Days trial$9.991 Year
- All-Access$9.99









