Clip Studio Paint vs Inkscape Comparison 2026
Both cover design & graphics. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
At a glance
- Only Inkscape has a free tier.
Side by side
Clip Studio Paint | Inkscape | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $0.99 | Free |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | Free |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Not stated | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Everything, in an open format |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Clip Studio Paint
Built for comics, and it shows
Clip Studio Paint is drawing software written for people making comics, manga and animation rather than for general illustration. Panel layouts, speech balloons, screentones, 3D reference figures you can pose and a vector layer that lets a line be redrawn after the fact are all part of the base product. The pen engine is the other reason artists move to it. Licensing is unusual: a monthly plan, an annual plan and a perpetual licence all exist side by side, and the device you use decides which grades are open to you.
Only on this side
- Covers motion graphics & animation
Inkscape
Free vector drawing that writes plain SVG
Inkscape draws vector artwork and saves it as ordinary SVG rather than a format only it can read, which is what makes a logo drawn here openable in a browser, a build pipeline or somebody else's editor years later. It covers illustration, clip art, typography and diagramming on Linux, Windows and macOS. There is no account, no seat count and no upload step. The interface has its own habits and will feel strange to anybody arriving from a commercial editor, which is the real cost of it being free.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.