Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Easy to use
Getting started with the program is straightforward. It's laid out intuitively - main workspace in the middle, color selection on the left, tool section on the right and animation timeline at the bottom.
All tools and the vast majority of functions have keyboard shortcuts so you can learn to get results quickly.
Aseprite is a very focused program - it's not filled with icons, there's no excess functionality and dialog boxes generally have only a couple of options so you're never overwhelmed and it's easier to learn.
Pro Good selection of tools for animation
You can change the playback speed of the loop and speed of each individual frame, you have 3 playback modes - forward, reverse and ping-pong, it includes Onion Skin mode to speed up the animation process and allows tagging the timeline to help keep animations organized. And it has a live preview so you can always see the end result.
Onion Skin mode that will overlay previous and next frames over the canvas so you can use them as references when drawing. For Onion Skin mode you can adjust things like range, opacity, tint, whether the onion frames are in front of or behind the canvas, etc.
You can tag different parts of the timeline when you, for example, need different animations for the same character. You can then loop those tagged sections individually.