"Do I need Procreate to make digital art?"

"No. Procreate is an excellent app, but it is one tool among many, and it is the right tool for a specific person: someone on an iPad who wants maximum depth and is willing to learn a professional interface. If you are on Android, Procreate is not even an option, since it is Apple-only. If you are a beginner, a phone-first sketcher, or someone who just wants to paint without learning a wall of panels first, a simpler app like Trazu will likely make you happier. Need is the wrong question. Fit is the right one."

"Is there a Procreate for Android?"

"No. Procreate is Apple-only. The main Procreate app runs on iPad, Procreate Pocket runs on iPhone, and Procreate Dreams runs on iPad, all exclusively through Apple\u0026rsquo;s App Store. There is no official Procreate for Android and the company has not announced one. If you are on an Android phone or tablet and want a painting app that behaves like real paint, Trazu runs on both Android and iOS, free to start, with no account required."

"Is Procreate hard to learn?"

"Procreate is not hard to learn in the sense of being broken or confusing, but it is deep, and depth has a cost. It packs a large brush ecosystem, layers with blend modes and masks, animation, and big canvases into a professional interface, so a beginner faces a real learning curve before the first satisfying result. Many people download it, see how much there is, and stall. If that is the wall you keep hitting, a simpler painting app that opens to a loaded brush and a single canvas will get you painting in seconds instead of hours."

"Do I need an iPad for Procreate?"

"For the full Procreate experience, effectively yes. The main Procreate app is iPad-only and priced at $12.99 as a one-time purchase. Procreate Pocket is a separate $5.99 app for iPhone that carries most of the depth onto a small screen. Procreate is made to be touch-perfect on its own, and an Apple Pencil is optional rather than required, though it makes the experience better. If you do not own an iPad and do not plan to buy one, that alone is a strong reason to look at a phone-first painting app instead."

"What is the best Procreate alternative?"

"It depends on what frustrated you about Procreate. If the problem is platform, Trazu, Autodesk Sketchbook, and ibis Paint all run on Android, which Procreate does not. If the problem is the learning curve, a simpler app that opens to a loaded brush solves it. Trazu is the alternative built specifically for people who want painting to feel like real paint, with paint depletion, wet-into-wet mixing, and real paper texture, while staying simple to open. For a full field of options, see our roundup of the best simple drawing and painting apps."

Do I Need Procreate? An Honest Answer

Do you need Procreate? Probably not, and that is not a knock on Procreate. Procreate is one of the best painting apps ever made, but it is built for a specific person: an iPad owner who wants maximum depth and will learn a professional interface to get it. If you are on Android, it is not even an option. If you are a beginner or a phone-first sketcher, a simpler app will likely make you happier. The honest question is not which app is better. It is which one fits you.

This post is a fair head-to-head, not a hit piece. We fetched Procreate’s official site and its App Store listing in June 2026 and confirmed every price, platform, and policy below before writing. If you came here looking for permission to skip the most-hyped app in digital painting, you might have it. But you should decide for a real reason, so let us give you one.

What Procreate gets genuinely right

Procreate is superb, and any honest comparison has to start there. It is the standard that other painting apps are measured against, and it earns that position. On its App Store listing it holds a 4.4 rating across roughly 50,000 ratings, which is a lot of people agreeing that the app delivers.

The depth is real. Procreate ships with a large, well-tuned brush ecosystem and lets you build and import your own, which is why an entire economy of custom Procreate brush packs exists. It has a proper layer system with blend modes, masks, and clipping. It handles large, high-resolution canvases that hold up for print work. It does frame-by-frame animation inside the same app. The company, Savage Interactive, sells it as a one-time purchase with no subscription, currently $12.99, and every update since 2011 has been free to existing owners. You pay once and you own it. In a software world drifting toward monthly rent, that is rare and worth respecting.

There is one more thing Procreate does that deserves credit, because it is a real principled stand and not marketing. Procreate has publicly committed to never adding generative AI. In a statement on its website, headlined “AI is not our future,” the company writes “Creativity is made, not generated,” and says generative AI is “ripping the humanity out of things.” For an artist who does not want their tool quietly turning into an image generator, that is a genuine point in Procreate’s favor. We respect it.

So this is not a story about a bad app. It is a story about fit.

Who Procreate is genuinely the right call for

Procreate is the right tool for a specific, real person, and if you are that person you should buy it and stop reading.

You should use Procreate if you own an iPad, ideally with an Apple Pencil, and you want the deepest touch painting app available. You should use it if you are a professional or serious hobbyist illustrator who needs a huge brush library, layered files, masks, and big print-ready canvases. You should use it if you want to animate, since frame-by-frame animation lives right inside the app and Procreate Dreams, a separate $19.99 iPad app, goes further. And you should use it if you actively want maximum depth and are happy to climb the learning curve to reach it. For that person, Procreate is not just adequate. It is the best thing they can buy, once, for $12.99.

Notice that every item on that list assumes two things: an iPad, and an appetite for depth. That is exactly where the question gets interesting, because a large number of people who think they need Procreate have neither.

Who is better served by something simpler

A lot of people would be happier with a simpler painting app, and there is no shame in being one of them. Three profiles come up again and again.

The first is anyone on Android. This is the hard line in the whole comparison and it is not a matter of taste. Procreate is Apple-only. The main app is iPad-only, Procreate Pocket is iPhone-only at $5.99, and Procreate Dreams is iPad-only, all sold exclusively through Apple’s App Store. There is no official Procreate for Android. If you own an Android phone or tablet, the decision is already made for you, and the only useful question is which non-Procreate app is best.

The second is the phone-first sketcher. Procreate is built iPad-first, and while Procreate Pocket brings most of the depth to iPhone, a lot of that depth is hard to use well on a phone-sized screen. If your main canvas is a phone in your hand on a couch or a bus, you do not need a professional studio compressed into five inches. You need an app designed for the phone from the start.

The third is the beginner who keeps stalling. This is the quiet majority. Someone opens a professional app, sees the brush menus, the layer panel, the blend modes, the gestures to memorize, and closes it, concluding that digital painting “is not for them.” It was never them. It was the wall. Depth you have to climb before your first good mark is depth working against you on day one. For this person, the right app is one that opens to a loaded brush and lets the first stroke happen in seconds.

Trazu: simple to open, behaves like real paint

Trazu is the painting app built for the people Procreate is not built for, and it runs on iPhone, iPad, and Android. Its promise is “Real paint. No mess.” You pick a medium, pick a paper, load a color, and the brush is already loaded, so you are painting in seconds with no panels to configure first.

Under that simple surface is a real paint engine, which is the part that separates Trazu from a basic sketch app. The brush holds a finite charge of pigment that depletes as you stroke, the way a loaded brush runs dry on canvas. It picks up and mixes with wet color already on the paper for true wet-into-wet blending, with color mixed in the perceptually accurate Oklab space rather than crude RGB. Watercolor pools and darkens at the edges of a wash the way real water carries pigment to the rim. And every stroke catches on real paper tooth, so the texture you chose actually changes how the medium sits.

The range is wide for an app this easy to open. Trazu ships with eight mediums, basic, oil, watercolor, charcoal, ink, chalk, pastel, and airbrush, each with its own behavior, across more than twenty brush tips from round, flat, and filbert through fan, palette knife, nib, rigger, and sponge. There are nine paper textures, from smooth and hot-press through cold-press and rough watercolor to canvas weave, toned tan, toned grey, kraft, and blueprint, each with real grain. The standard tool set is all there: eraser, flood fill, eyedropper, rectangle select, transform, crop, copy and paste, import a photo as reference, undo and redo, and export to PNG or JPEG.

It also teaches you to see while you paint, which Procreate does not try to do. Four study views live inside the canvas, value, temperature, saturation, and contrast, and you can flip your own work in progress into any of them to diagnose it mid-stroke. That is the digital version of the value study the old masters did before painting and a built-in way to catch problems like muddy color or weak temperature before they ruin a piece.

And it respects you the way Procreate does on privacy. Trazu is fully offline. No account, no sign-up, no email, no ads, no tracking. Your drawings live on your device and are never uploaded. Trazu is free to start with the entire paint engine, all eight mediums, and all nine paper textures unlocked from the first stroke, and the free tier saves up to ten drawings. Trazu Premium is a one-time purchase, yours forever with no subscription, that removes the saved-drawing cap and unlocks the four study views.

The honest caveats: Trazu is new, so it does not carry years of reviews the way Procreate does, the study views sit behind the premium upgrade, and it is not trying to be a deep professional production app with masks, blend modes, and animation. If you want those, that is precisely the kind of person who should buy Procreate.

How to actually decide

Start with your device, because it can settle the whole thing in one step. If you are on Android, Procreate is off the table, and you are choosing among Android painting apps, where Trazu’s full paint engine is a strong pick. If you are on an iPad with an Apple Pencil and you want maximum depth, Procreate is very likely your app, and $12.99 once is a fair price for what you get.

If you are somewhere in the middle, ask what actually stops you. If what stops you is the learning curve, the wall of panels, the sense that you have to study an app before you can paint, then a simpler app is not a compromise. It is the correct tool, and you will make more art with it precisely because it asks less of you up front. If what stops you is that you want painting to feel like paint, pigment that runs out, colors that blend wet into wet, paper that grabs the brush, then you want a real paint engine, simple to open, which is exactly what Trazu is built to be.

For the full field of options across both ecosystems, with honest pros and cons for each, see our roundup of the best simple drawing and painting apps.

The bottom line

Procreate is excellent, and for an iPad owner who wants depth and will learn the interface, it is the right call and a genuine bargain at $12.99 once. The mistake is assuming that because Procreate is the most celebrated painting app, you personally need it. You might not. If you are on Android, you cannot have it anyway. If you are a beginner or a phone-first sketcher who just wants to paint without a feature wall, you will probably make more and better art with something simpler.

So do not buy the app with the best reputation. Buy the one that fits how you actually paint. If that is depth on an iPad, it is Procreate. If it is real paint that opens in seconds, on whatever phone or tablet you already own, start free with Trazu on iPhone and iPad or on Android.