Design Wizard vs Procreate Comparison 2026
Both cover thumbnails & cover art and design & graphics. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Thumbnails and video from one cheap plan
Paint on an iPad for the price of one lunch
At a glance
- Design Wizard starts cheaper, at $9.99.
- Only Design Wizard has a free tier.
Side by side
Design Wizard | Procreate | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $9.99 | From $12.99 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free plan, paid tiers | One-time purchase |
| Free tier (they differ) | Yes | No |
| Billing (they differ) | Monthly or annual | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
Design Wizard
Thumbnails and video from one cheap plan
Design Wizard edits both images and short videos from templates, which is unusual at ten dollars a month and useful for anybody whose thumbnail and channel trailer want the same treatment. Text, shapes and logos can be laid over video rather than only over stills. The free tier resizes and edits without uploads of your own. Stock media allowances are what separate the paid plans, so somebody bringing their own footage gets less from the upgrade than somebody who is not.
Our note
The free tier is worth taking seriously for stills, and the $9.99 step is really the price of the video features rather than a general upgrade. If your thumbnails are the whole job, test whether Basic covers them before subscribing at all.
Procreate
Paint on an iPad for the price of one lunch
Procreate is the drawing app most illustrators on an iPad already own, and it is bought once rather than rented. The brush engine is the reason: it responds to pressure and tilt closely enough that people who trained on paper stop noticing the screen. Animation, perspective guides and a time-lapse recording of every session come with it, and that last one has quietly become how artists prove a piece is theirs. It runs on iPad only, and the company has said plainly that it will not add generative image tools.
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.