Adobe Fresco vs InkForge

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.

InkForge is a GPU-backed raster drawing app with a stamp-based brush engine, layers, selection tools, animation and an AI panel. Its six procedural texture tips support pressure control of brush size and opacity. The app offers unlimited layers, twelve blend modes, clipping masks and non-destructive layer effects. Its frame-by-frame timeline supports duplication, onion-skinning and adjustable FPS, with GIF or WebM export. Native .inkforge projects preserve layers and frames; export formats include PNG, JPEG and TIFF. The AI panel lists fourteen modes, including style transfer, sketch-to-painting, inpainting and background removal. Generation can use Gemini or Replicate with the user's own key, or a local ComfyUI graph. The maker says keys are stored locally and the ComfyUI path stays on the machine. InkForge is free and open source under the MIT license. It lists Windows, macOS and Linux support, while download requirements specify Windows 10+ and macOS 13+. The maker describes cross-platform development as active and the native macOS build as the original Swift implementation.