When comparing Krita vs GraphicsGale, the Slant community recommends Krita for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art / sprite editors?” Krita is ranked 3rd while GraphicsGale is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Krita is:
All the most used and useful tools are easy to find in Krita's UI and are often just one click away. They are not hidden behind menus or dropdowns.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use layout
All the most used and useful tools are easy to find in Krita's UI and are often just one click away. They are not hidden behind menus or dropdowns.
Pro Constantly updated
Krita is getting constant releases with updates and bug fixes. New features are added at a pace that far surpasses the other alternatives.
Pro Free and open source
Krita is completely free and open source. They have raised a couple of successful Kickstarters in the past to get the initial financing and now they are accepting donations.
Pro Developed in part by KDE, which has a great community and therefore great support.
KDE has a long history of making solid applications.
Pro Amazing support for displaying brushes
Krita's preset brushes are one of the default dockers. Each brush has a preview on mouseover that shows a detailed view of the type of brush involved. All the brushes also have useful and descriptive names such as "HP Pencil" or "Textured Fuzzy".
Pro Very customizable
Although the UI is rather busy, Krita is very customizable. The editing window can be themed and the sidebar can be customized extensively throw many dockers or panes.
Pro Easy editing in a tiled view
Tiled view that shows your image tiled in the editor, and permits you to edit it as you are seeing it tiled. If the brush passes out of your texture, it will just automatically wrap back the painting to the other side of the original texture, while permitting you to paint and see the results on any of the tiled "clones" (the shortcut key to activate this is w by default).
Pro Powerful animation tools
The animation tools in GraphicsGale are very easy to work with. Furthermore, the live preview helps clean up the animations in real time without a hitch.
Pro Offers a great palette tool
With GraphicsGale, the user can save and load palette, create gradation, and make color uniform.
Pro Free
Graphics Gale used to cost money but recently the program switched over to a free license.
Pro Pretty easy to learn the UI and the tools you have to work with are fantastic
Pro Works really well under Wine
Wine can help emulate Windows on non-Windows systems. You can get Graphics Gale running anywhere Wine can run. See WineHQ for more details.
Cons
Con New features are not tested thoroughly
Since releases are so often and with little time between them, usually new features are not tested a lot and this can bring a lot of bugs with them. Which fortunately are quickly patched in the next release.
Con Documentation is lacking
Krita's official documentation is incomplete in some areas, especially for new features that are constantly added. But this is compensated with it's great design and usability which makes it easier to understand how things work.
Con Poor touch controls
They are still pretty much a WIP. But they are getting there.
Con Working with text is not that pleasant
Con Only available on Windows
GraphicsGale is only available on Windows.
Con UI requires a lot of clicking
The UI windows not very nice and requires a lot of clicking. For example mouse wheel is not useable at all to zoom in and out in main window.