Cosmigo Pro Motion NG vs Krita

Tilemap can be drawn with tools that automatically keep your palette of tiles consistent. Both free painting and tile-placing modes work in the same workspace allowing you to easily switch between workflows.

You can separate the color information out of the image file into a separate palette file.

You can use Onion Skinning to see surrounding frames to help create animations.

The user can create normal rastered or custom grids with custom shapes, or they can just mix up all they want.

Pro Motion gives you a direct feel for the pixels: how they will lay down when pressed as soon as you've finished marquee selecting. It's thus very easy to drag around to get a perfect look, moving it a few pixels here or there.
Related to this then is the way you can play with single-color mode. You can drag-click the 'paste' to create different colored silhouettes of the selection. Even while zoomed in, you can see the exact pixels as they would be rendered if set down where your mouse is.

Oldschool pixel artists will find all their beloved functions from the Amiga Pixel Art Programs, DPaint and PPaint. Such functions include smear, paint, color cycle, mirror, kaleidoscope, tint, smooth, fill with dither or random dither, fill with spherical color fade, auto outline, and tons more.

Most keyboard shortcuts are the same as those of DPaint, so you immediately feel at home with ProMotion. You can of course re-define them as you wish.

If you want to create a simple 'masking', it's very simple. Most normal paint programs have transparency, but what they don't let you do is treat transparency as if it were another pixel on the screen.

Typically, you are required to set up layers, and use eraser to block/unblock areas to get the effect you want. This is both long-winded and uncomfortable.

Pro Motion supports the regular Layer System you would expect from Photoshop, but with the added support of animation layers (which have frames) and static image layers (for templates, backgrounds, or other static elements).

The user can copy any part of the frame or even whole animations and use them as brushes or just store them for easy re-use later.

You can easily create a mask to protect part of the image against modification, or to exclude part of the image from the brush capture action. The mask is created either by selecting the colors (from the palette or directly from the image), or by drawing it using any of the available tools (pencil, line, circle, box, etc.) Once defined, you can freeze the mask or let the program update it, based on the drawing colors.

Pro Motion gives you instant right-click access to the background color. This is useful in cases where pixels are very close to each other and you are not able to easily get the balance of each color right.

There is a free version available for Pro Motion that has a limited feature set but is a good way to check out the software. This is also a good choice for those who do not need many features but want to use a simple pixel editor. The limitations of the free version can be seen here.

There's a Gradient Tool with several modes of dithering.

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.

Krita is getting constant releases with updates and bug fixes. New features are added at a pace that far surpasses the other alternatives.

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.

KDE has a long history of making solid applications.

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".

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.

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).