Android alternatives Six apps, and the catch in each.

Most lists of Procreate alternatives are ranked by affiliate rate and include at least one app that does not run on Android. This one is ranked by nothing, states the business model plainly, and tells you where each app will eventually annoy you.

Every price and platform on this page was checked against the vendor's own store listing on 14 August 2026. Prices change, and the store listing always wins over anything written here.

The comparison

Business models below are as listed on each vendor's own store page on 14 August 2026. The "catch" column is the thing you find out in week three.

App	Model	Brushes
ibis Paint X ibis inc.	Free, ad-supported	Own format. Nothing imports from Procreate.
Infinite Painter Infinite Studio LLC	Free tier, Pro unlock	Imports and exports its own brushes and brush sets.
Clip Studio Paint CELSYS, Inc.	Subscription	Huge first-party and community library in its own format.
Krita Krita Foundation	Free and open source	Open .bundle format, large free community library.
Sketchbook Sketchbook, Inc.	Free, with in-app purchases	Own format, modest library.
Adobe Fresco Adobe	Free tier, Creative Cloud	Adobe live brushes, tied to the Adobe account.

Where each one bites

ibis Paint X

Ads between actions unless you buy the removal, and the deeper tools sit behind a Premium subscription. Enormous library, enormous user base — over 100 million downloads on Play alone.

Infinite Painter

The free tier caps you at three layers at device resolution, which is enough to evaluate the brush engine and not much else. The engine itself, in our assessment, is among the strongest on Android.

Clip Studio Paint

On an Android tablet you need an active monthly or annual plan to save or export your own artwork. The industry-standard toolset, rented rather than owned.

Krita

The Play listing still describes itself as a beta and says it is "not suitable for real work yet". It is built for big screens. On the desktop Krita is superb; the Android build is not the same product.

Sketchbook

Clean, fast, and free to install, with a deliberately small toolset. If you want layer masks and heavy compositing you will outgrow it.

Adobe Fresco

Not on Android at all. Adobe ships Fresco for iPad, iPhone and Windows only — it comes up in every Android roundup and it should not.

The one that is not on the list

Adobe Fresco is on the list above only to remove it from yours. It runs on iPad, iPhone and Windows and has never run on Android, yet it appears in Android roundups constantly. When you see it in one, treat the rest of that page's claims as unchecked.

What actually matters when you pick

Brush count is the specification everyone leads with and the one that predicts your experience least. Three things predict it better.

What the free tier withholds. There is a large difference between an app that limits features and one that limits export. The first lets you learn whether you like it. The second holds your finished work hostage, and you only discover it at the end of the first drawing you care about.
Whether the stylus is read properly. Pressure alone is table stakes. Tilt, and a per-brush response curve rather than one global setting, are what separate an app that feels like a tool from one that feels like a toy.
Whether your library can leave. Every app in the table uses its own brush container, and none of them read each other's. The time you invest in building or buying a brush library is invested in that app, not in your own work — which is fine until the day you change device.

About that last one

It is the reason this site exists, so read the next paragraph with that in mind.

Brush lock-in is not a conspiracy; it is a side effect. Every one of these formats was designed to describe one engine's capabilities, and an engine cannot honestly promise to reproduce a stroke it has no mechanism for. That is why no converter exists, why the ones advertised online do not work, and why the only thing that reliably survives a move between apps is the texture — we pulled several formats apart to show exactly which half survives.

The alternative is not a converter. It is a brush file that was never platform-specific to begin with, which is what .apexobrush is: one archive of textures and settings that the same engine reads on Android, iPad and Mac.

How the format works →

Questions people ask next

What is the best free Procreate alternative for Android?

Sketchbook is the cleanest free option to install and ibis Paint X carries the deepest toolset of the free-to-start apps, though ibis is ad-supported and puts much of that depth behind a subscription. Krita is free and open source but its Android build still describes itself as a beta unsuitable for real work.

Can I use my Procreate brushes in an Android app?

Not directly. A .brushset is a Procreate-specific container and no Android app reads it. What does move is the artwork inside — the stamp and grain textures — which you can extract and rebuild around in another app. The settings, curves and dynamics do not transfer.

Is Clip Studio Paint free on Android?

Not usefully. On an Android tablet you need an active monthly or annual plan to save or export your own artwork, which means the free mode is a demonstration rather than a way to work. The phone version allows a limited number of free hours each month.

Is Adobe Fresco available on Android?

No. Adobe publishes Fresco for iPad, iPhone and Windows only. It appears in a great many "best Android drawing app" lists anyway, which is a reliable sign that the list was not checked.

Disclosure

We make one of these. Here it is.

This page is published by Lumivance Technologies, who build Apex Olira. We have an obvious interest in what you conclude, so the competitor facts above are linked to their own store listings and you should check them.

What we build is a drawing app that runs the same canvas engine on iPadOS 15+, macOS 11+ and Android 8+ and reads the same .apexobrush files on all three. If your brushes need to survive a change of device, that is the problem it was built for. If you draw on one iPad and always will, Procreate is an excellent app and this is not an argument against it.

How one brush file works on three platforms →