Krita

Our verdict: the most complete free digital painting studio available — signed releases, fully open source, and zero data collection.

Krita is a professional-grade painting program built by artists, for artists, under the stewardship of the Netherlands-based Krita Foundation and the KDE community. It covers the full illustration workflow — a deep brush engine with stabilizers and drawing assistants, non-destructive layers and masks, comic and concept-art tooling, and a frame-by-frame animation suite — at a level that stands comparison with paid flagships. The 5.3 series, current as of mid-2026, added a rebuilt text engine and steady bugfix releases, while an experimental 6.0 line based on Qt 6 is developed in parallel.

Everything about the project is in the open: the complete source code lives on KDE's infrastructure, releases are GPG-signed, and the foundation's privacy statement is a single sentence — no personal data is accessed, collected, or transmitted. Krita is free to download directly from krita.org; optional paid builds on the Microsoft Store, Steam, Epic Games Store, and Mac App Store exist purely to fund development. The Android build is functional but still labelled beta and is aimed at tablets and Chromebooks rather than phones.