Pyxel Edit vs Aseprite

Tiles can be animated within Pyxel Edit, with "onion skin" frame overlays to assist in making smooth frame transitions.

Pyxel Edit is widely acclaimed for its ease of use.

Given an image and specified tile dimensions, Pyxel Edit will extract a tileset with no duplicate tiles. This mostly works for flat images though. If you feed Pyxel "finished maps" you will still get a lot of duplicates.

Tile-based images (maps) built in Pyxel Edit can be serialized via XML or JSON for easy import elsewhere.

For only $9 (£6), this is one of the cheapest but also one of the best pixel editors out there.

Instantly see if your tiles are tileable and/or seamless and fix it easily.

You can change the playback speed of the loop and the speed of each individual frame. There are three playback modes: forward, reverse, and ping-pong. Onion Skin mode is included to speed up the animation process and to allow for tagging the timeline to help keep animations organized. There is also a live preview so you can always see the end result.

Onion Skin mode 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 items like range, opacity, and tint, whether the onion frames are in front of or behind the canvas, etc.

You can tag different parts of the timeline when, for example, you need different animations for the same character. You can then loop those tagged sections individually.

Getting started with the program is straightforward. It's laid out intuitively: the 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, allowing for results to be obtained quickly.

Aseprite is a very focused program: it's not filled with icons, there's no excess functionality, and dialog boxes generally only have a couple of options so you're never overwhelmed and it's easier to learn.

Always in touch with the community and approachable via Twitter.

Tools are good, easy to use.

It makes drawing lines and shapes less jaggy by default.

Aseprite is free if you compile it yourself. Its maintainers also offer a security-signed package with a technical support license for a one time fee of $14.99. It's also easy to use and presents really awesome tools.

Aseprite is available on macOS, Windows and Linux. The unfree source code is published on GitHub.

It was designed with pixel art in mind, unlike other general-purpose image editors. This means you get lots of useful features and very little clutter from tools and features that you won't need.

The interface invites you to be creative, and since it's pixel art you are creating, this adds to the feeling of being in the right environment. Everything seems to have its natural place and thereby could make beginners feel right at home.

Aseprite has a beautiful pixel-art interface that makes it a pleasure to use.

Aseprite is scriptable using the Lua language, which can be used to automate tasks and add new functionality. Some consider the API more user-friendly than GrafX2's.