Comparison

Inspire Pro vs WowPaint

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

WowPaint

Create seamless patterns for backgrounds, textures, and more with intuitive drawing tools. Adjust parameters live while painting and utilize fingertip-based stroke sizing. Supports Apple Pencil and multiple layers.

Highlights
  • Seamless pattern creation
  • Wrapped painting mode
  • Fingertip stroke size adjustment
  • Live parameter changes
  • Multiple layers
  • Photo tracing mode (Pro)
Features
Read full description

Pattern/texture designers: You’ll find the app’s unique feature set very useful when making repeatable images (patterns). Other artists: WowPaint is great for drawing and painting “normal” art as well! • CREATE SEAMLESS PATTERNS • Use the Seamless Pattern Options to aid you in creating seamless patterns that can be used as website or desktop backgrounds, in print, or for textures in 3d modeling. When you have switched on Wrap X/Y, any strokes you paint that go over the picture’s edge will continue on the opposite side. That means that there will be no hard edges where strokes are cut off (since they continue instead), which makes the picture a perfect candidate for being seamlessly repeated. A tremendous help when using the Wrapped Painting mode is the option of having the picture displayed as tiles next to each other. You’re free to paint anywhere on these tiles, and you will see the results in real time. You can also switch on Edge Indicators, to make it easier to see where the picture being repeated begins and ends. • FINGERTIP = STROKE SIZE • When you paint, the app measures how much of your finger is touching the screen and changes the stroke size accordingly. There’s a huge difference between using just the corner of your fingertip and pressing down the whole fingerprint area! A 2nd tool assigned to your finger will still use this feature, so don’t ignore it just because you have an Apple Pencil! • LEFT-HANDED? • Just swipe the toolbar over to the other side! • PARAMETERS CAN BE CHANGED LIVE • Use any buttons or controls to change/adjust color, size, force, simultaneously while painting. • UNIVERSAL PURCHASE • If you choose to buy the Pro upgrade, this one-time in-app purchase will unlock all Pro features in the app on all available platforms (iPad-iPhone-Mac)! • METAL • The engine is based on Metal, with 128-bit color and floating-point arithmetic. • SWIFT • The app was developed entirely using Swift (earlier versions used C++). • APPLE PENCIL SUPPORT • FULL SCREEN PAINTING • • DARK MODE • LANDSCAPE • PORTRAIT • WIDE COLOR • • MULTIPLE LAYERS • PHOTO TRACING MODE (Pro feature) •

Screenshots

WowPaint4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is price: WowPaint at Free against Inspire Pro's $4.99. WowPaint also leads on rating (4.7 vs 4.5) and device support (4 vs 1). Inspire Pro's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 6) and update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 2 months). On review sentiment, ratings volume, ads 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

WowPaint is free to download; Inspire Pro costs $4.99 up front. WowPaint sells 6 one-off in-app purchases. Inspire Pro asks for nothing beyond the download.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

WowPaint holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.5. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 331 and 119 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 81% of Inspire Pro's written reviews are positive against 76% of WowPaint's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, WowPaint every 2 months. The most recent releases landed on October 23, 2026 and October 20, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard6 real differences · 4 level
Inspire Pro versus WowPaint: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterInspire ProWowPaint
Price$4.99Free — better
Rating4.5 (331 ratings)4.7 (119 ratings) — better
Positive reviews80.8% of reviews — better75.9% of reviews
Number of ratings331 — better119
Update frequencyEvery 3 weeks — betterEvery 2 months
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
MonetizationPaidFree with in-app purchases — better
DevicesiPadiPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better
Requires iOS13.612.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size284 MB22 MB
Age rating4+4+
DevelopersnowCanoeNorbyte

Customer experience

Inspire Pro

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

WowPaint

All ratings119 ratings
Positive94.1%
Neutral2.5%
Negative3.4%
Written reviews29 reviews
Positive75.9%
Neutral10.3%
Negative13.8%

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

WowPaint

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

None

Inspire Pro

No in-app purchases

6 purchases

WowPaint

One-time6
  • Tip Jar: Smallest Tip$1.00
  • Tip Jar: Small Tip$2.00
  • Tip Jar: Medium Tip$5.00
Show 3 more
  • Pro Upgrade$7.00
  • Tip Jar: Big Tip$10.00
  • Tip Jar: Biggest Tip$25.00

Questions

Is Inspire Pro free?
Inspire Pro costs $4.99, with no in-app purchases.
Is WowPaint free?
WowPaint is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Which has better reviews, Inspire Pro or WowPaint?
WowPaint is rated higher. Inspire Pro averages 4.5 out of 5 from 331 ratings, while WowPaint averages 4.7 from 119 ratings.
Do Inspire Pro or WowPaint have ads?
Neither Inspire Pro nor WowPaint shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Inspire Pro or WowPaint?
Inspire Pro ships an update every 3 weeks, and WowPaint every 2 months. Most recently, Inspire Pro was updated on October 23, 2026 and WowPaint on October 20, 2026.

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