What is Krita used for?

Krita is a free digital painting application for illustrators, concept artists and comic creators, built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. It is a good fit for illustrating comics and concept art, and creating textures and matte paintings.

Is Krita open source?

Yes. Krita is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at KDE/krita and is written mainly in C++.

Yes. Krita is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Krita?

Yes. Krita can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Krita an alternative to?

Krita is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint and Corel Painter. Other open-source alternatives to Adobe Photoshop include GIMP, Graphite and vue-fabric-editor.

Is Krita actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Krita was on 2 October 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.

Krita: open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Procreate

About Krita

Krita is a free and open-source cross-platform application for creating digital art from scratch. It is a digital painting program meant for artists who want to produce professional work from start to finish, and it is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters, and the digital VFX industry.

It is built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. The GitHub repository is only a mirror, since the real code lives on KDE's invent.kde.org. The project offers a user manual at docs.krita.org, API documentation, a bug tracker, a community forum at krita-artists.org and an IRC channel where most developers can be found. Nightly builds for both unstable and stable branches are available from KDE's CI server.

Krita is written in C++ and licensed under GPL-3.0. The README includes a repository status table with feature and string freeze information for the current branch, and developer builds for Linux with debug symbols can be fetched from the CI system.

Key features

Digital painting for illustration and concept art
Cross-platform on KDE and Qt
Nightly and stable builds from KDE CI
Online user manual and API docs
Community forum and IRC support

Good fit for

→Illustrating comics and concept art
→Creating textures and matte paintings

Built with: C++
Tags: digital-painting; drawing; illustration; art; kde; qt; cross-platform; graphics

Krita: questions and answers

What is Krita used for?: Krita is a free digital painting application for illustrators, concept artists and comic creators, built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. It is a good fit for illustrating comics and concept art, and creating textures and matte paintings.
Is Krita open source?: Yes. Krita is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at KDE/krita and is written mainly in C++.
Is Krita free?: Yes. Krita is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Krita?: Yes. Krita can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Krita an alternative to?: Krita is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint and Corel Painter. Other open-source alternatives to Adobe Photoshop include GIMP, Graphite and vue-fabric-editor.
Is Krita actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Krita was on 2 October 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.