When comparing Piskel vs Cosmigo Pro Motion NG, the Slant community recommends Piskel for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art / sprite editors?” Piskel is ranked 7th while Cosmigo Pro Motion NG is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Piskel is:
WPiskel is HTML5-based so it works in any modern browser.
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 Good tilemap editing tools
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.
Pro Supports palette indexing
You can separate the color information out of the image file into a separate palette file.
Pro Onion Skinning support
You can use Onion Skinning to see surrounding frames to help create animations.
Pro Supports custom grids
The user can create normal rastered or custom grids with custom shapes, or they can just mix up all they want.
Pro Marquee select allows you to see your results
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.
Pro The Developer is very active and helpful.
Pro Includes almost all original DPaint and PPaint functionality
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.
Pro Transparent 'color' behaves like any other color on the canvas
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 Revamped Layer System (NG) support
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).
Pro Brush containers useful for animations
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.
Pro Offers drawing masks and brush capture masks
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 Background color is accessible by right-click
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.
Pro Free limited functionality version
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.
Pro Gradient Tool
There's a Gradient Tool with several modes of dithering.
Pro Supports layers
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 Pro version and upgrades come at a price
The Pro version of Cosmigo Pro Motion costs $39 and includes a number of features that aren't available in the limited free version.
If you have an existing Pro Motion license, it costs $19 to upgrade to the newest version or you stick with the feature limited free edition.
Con Supports Windows only
Pro Motion only supports Windows, but you can easily run it on macOS and Linux using Wine, PlayOnMac, PlayOnLinux etc.