Krita compared: free painting program with layers, masks and CMYK

According to its developers, Krita is a specialised painting program. The Krita manual lists illustration, concept art, matte painting, textures, comics and animation as explicitly supported fields. The whole interface is built around them.

• More than 100 preloaded brushes and over 9 brush engines. You save your own brushes and organise them with tags.
• Three kinds of stabilisers smooth shaky strokes, plus a dynamic brush tool.
• Wrap-around mode helps you paint seamless textures and patterns.
• You import brush and texture packs from other artists through the resource manager.
• For 2D animation there is a dedicated workspace with a timeline, multiple layers and audio.
• Vector tools help you create comic panels, and the text tool lets you add text.

According to the developers, Krita supports pressure-sensitive graphics tablets as long as your operating system recognises the tablet and it is set up correctly. On Windows, Krita uses either the tablet's WinTab drivers or Windows Ink. You can load Photoshop brushes in ABR format, but only with their basic features.

Krita works with layers: besides paint layers there are vector, filter, group, file, clone and fill layers. On top of that come transparency masks, which hide parts of a layer, plus filter masks, transform masks and selection masks. According to the manual, filter masks and filter layers work like adjustment layers and apply filters non-destructively to a single layer or to the whole image. Transform masks change layers without permanently resampling the pixels. File and clone layers cover tasks for which Photoshop uses smart objects.

That is enough for composites and matte paintings. For classic photo retouching, Krita has limits:

• According to the manual, there is no automatic healing tool. Instead you get the clone brush and the Smart Patch tool, which fills selected areas using existing image patterns.
• There are no clipping masks. Krita solves this with layer groups and the "inherit alpha" feature.
• The range of filters is large, but according to the developers some special filters and colour adjustments you know from Photoshop are missing.
• AI tools for cut-outs or fills are not part of the feature set.

In our view, Krita therefore suits composites and image ideas that you paint over anyway, and is less suited to high-volume portrait and product retouching.

Krita saves in its own KRA format. You can open PSD files and save them back as PSD. According to the manual, Krita keeps raster layers, blending modes, layer styles, vector shapes, text layers, groups and transparency masks, and since version 5.3 also shapes, vector masks and guides. On request, Krita loads text from PSD files as editable text; saving text to PSD has limitations. Because PSD is not openly documented, the Krita developers advise using other formats such as TIFF or OpenRaster for exchange where possible.

Other formats Krita opens: TIFF, including Photoshop-style layered files, PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF, SVG, PDF with multiple layers, and camera raw via a dedicated import filter. Krita does not offer PDF export. The project removed the import filter for GIMP's XCF format with version 5.3.4.

For colour spaces you can choose RGB, greyscale, CMYK, YCrCb, XYZ and Lab, with 8 or 16-bit integer and 16 or 32-bit floating point. Colour management uses ICC profiles; for HDR images Krita uses OpenColorIO and OpenEXR. You can edit directly in CMYK. Even so, the manual recommends painting in an RGB working space and converting to the print shop's CMYK profile at the end, or leaving the conversion to the print shop.

Krita has no built-in AI image features: you will not find generative fill, AI cut-outs or AI upscaling in its feature set. The project has released an experimental plug-in called Fast Sketch Cleanup, which is meant to turn sketches into clean lines automatically using neural networks. According to the project's announcements from 2024 and 2025, it is a separate download. The team trained the model itself, using pictures that people donated explicitly for this purpose. The plug-in runs locally on your computer, without an internet connection, without a server and without an account.

Krita itself is covered by the privacy policy of the KDE community, which Krita belongs to: as a rule, KDE software does not transmit data from your device unless you explicitly trigger it. The news section on the welcome screen, which loads news from the Krita website, is disabled by default. According to the FAQ, what you create with Krita is yours alone. In our view, there is therefore nothing to suggest that your images end up in AI training.

Krita runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. For Linux there is an AppImage plus community-maintained Flatpak and Snap packages. According to the developers, the Android version in the Google Play Store is still a beta and meant for tablets only; according to an announcement from 2024, it also runs on ChromeOS. Krita does not support iPad or iPhone.

There are currently two release lines: Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0, the port to Qt6. According to the developers, both have the same features apart from Wayland support on Linux. The project recommends version 5.3 for productive work; Krita 6 is still considered early access on all platforms and is not yet available for Android.

Krita is free software under the GNU GPL v3. You may use, study, modify and redistribute it free of charge, including for commercial work. With the version from the Krita website, you download new versions yourself. Alternatively, there are paid versions on Steam, the Microsoft Store, the Epic Games Store and the Mac App Store. According to the developers, they are functionally identical but receive automatic updates, and the revenue supports development.

Krita suits you if you paint or draw digitally, create comics or concept art, and want a free program without a subscription. With filter layers, masks, colour depths up to 32-bit floating point and CMYK, it offers a lot of technical depth. Matte paintings and composites that you paint over also work well.

If you mainly retouch portraits and product photos, Krita is less suitable in our view: it lacks an automatic healing tool, AI cut-outs and some of the usual colour adjustments. If you regularly exchange PSD files with clients, you should know the limitations of the PSD support. For quick social media graphics, programs with design templates and one-click tools are a better fit in our view.