Adobe Fresco vs Drawpile

Adobe Fresco is a free drawing and painting app for stylus and touch devices. It offers pixel, vector, watercolor, and oil live brushes, plus frame-by-frame animation and motion paths. Artwork can use unlimited layers. Adobe lists support for iPad, iPhone, Windows devices with Intel, Nvidia, or AMD processors, and specified Surface ARM devices. Fresco work can move into Photoshop and sync as a Creative Cloud document. When connected, artwork syncs automatically to Adobe Creative Cloud; offline documents remain local and sync after reconnection. Publish & Export or Quick Export can send artwork to Dropbox or other cloud storage. The free plan includes 5 GB of cloud storage, while a paid Fresco plus Photoshop on iPad plan includes 100 GB. Adobe says paid upgrades add premium Adobe Fonts and more storage. Fresco is available on iOS and Windows, with desktop and mobile apps.

Drawpile is a drawing, painting, sketching and animation app for people working together on one canvas, with offline use also available. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and the web; on iPhone and iPad, the browser version works, but there is no native iOS app. Its toolkit includes more than 200 built-in brushes, several brush engines, a brush editor and stroke stabilization. Layers and layer groups support blend modes, alpha preserve, clipping groups, masking and alpha lock. Animation tools include a timeline and onion skins. Canvases can be saved as OpenRaster or PSD, and images can be pasted from files or other programs. Users can join official community servers without arranging their own infrastructure, or operate a server themselves. External authentication can let users access potentially untrusted third-party servers without sharing their password with those servers. Drawpile says it does not transfer information to other networked systems unless a user or operator specifically requests it. The free plan costs nothing.