When comparing Piskel vs Krita, the Slant community recommends Krita for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art / sprite editors?” Krita is ranked 3rd while Piskel is ranked 7th. 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 Works in any browser
WPiskel is HTML5-based so it works in any modern browser.
Pro Animation support
Piskel includes onion skinning, exporting to sprite sheets or gifs, defining frame rate, and present live playback.
Pro Sleek interface
It is also easy on the eyes.
Pro Very simple for beginners
Once you get the hang of it its a very powerful tool
Pro Offline versions available
The downloadable version of Piskel (built with node-webkit) is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Pro Easy to use lighten and darken tool
With the click of a button you can create amazing shading.
Pro Enough tools to be powerful
It has enough tools to be powerful, but not too many to put off beginners.
Pro Open source
Piskel is licensed under Apache License, meaning that the user can use the software for any purpose.
Pro Has a straight foreward tile view mode
... so you can instantly see the result while drawing tiles
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).
Cons
Con Lacks a true resizing tool
There doesn't seem to be any decent tool in Piskel for an easy stretch or shrink. The only ways possible is resizing the whole image or importing and image and shrinking it from the export tool.
Con No button for undo
Have to use ctrl+Z.
Con Rotation is limited
Rotation is only made in predefined angles. Does not support variable rotations or mouse based rotation. Does not support rotating selected areas, only frames-layers.
Con Shading by hand
Shading can be difficult.
Con Doesn't work well with drawpads
In the online tool you can't draw lines at all, yet using a graphic tablet, being in the offline version controls are pretty chunky and everytime you start drawing a line, the screen flickers black for a short period of time.
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.