Rindraw vs Procreate

Compared in October 2026. Both apps change. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.

The main difference

Procreate is a raster painting app⁶: when you lift the Pencil, the stroke becomes pixels on its layer. Rindraw keeps each stroke as the path your Pencil took, with its pressure and tilt. When you recolor a line, bend it or export the drawing bigger, Rindraw paints the stroke again at the new size, so it stays sharp instead of being stretched.

That doesn't make Rindraw a vector app like Illustrator (how they compare). Its brushes have grain and texture, and what you export is a picture: PNG, JPEG, HEIC, JPEG XL, TIFF or PSD.

Side by side

What it costs to draw and animate

With Procreate, drawing on iPad and iPhone and animating with tracks and keyframes takes three apps, each bought on its own: Procreate for iPad at $12.99², Procreate Pocket for iPhone at $5.99³, and Procreate Dreams for iPad at $12.99⁴. That's $31.97, and none of them runs on a Mac. Rindraw is one $12.99 purchase for all of it, on iPad, iPhone and Mac. More in a Procreate Dreams alternative.

Where Procreate is better

• Everything made for it. Procreate has been out since 2011⁶, so a great many iPad drawing courses, tutorials and brush packs are made for it. Rindraw opens Procreate brushes, but a lesson will still show Procreate's screens.
• Animation. Procreate Dreams is an app made only for animation⁴, with its own courses and tutorials. Rindraw's tracks, keyframes and Perform are newer, though they come in the same app you draw in, on iPad, iPhone and Mac.
• Years of use. Rindraw 1.0 came out in 2026. Procreate has had many more years of artists finding its rough edges.

Where Rindraw is different

• Lines you can still change. Recolor finished lineart, warp a pose or export poster-size from a sketch drawn at screen size, without redrawing it.
• References inside the drawing. Procreate's Reference window holds one picture, and more is planned⁷. Rindraw's holds as many as you like, a pose, a character sheet, the page before, and keeps them in the drawing file. Open more than one window, each with its own picture and zoom, blur a picture to see its values, or lock its zoom. They float over the canvas, so you don't need split screen or windowed mode to draw from them. Touch and hold one to pick up its color.
• Selections grown or shrunk by the pixel. Expanding or contracting a selection by an exact number of pixels has been asked for in Procreate's community for over ten years and is still marked Considered⁸. In Rindraw it's in the selection's Modify menu, with Grow and Similar beside it. For a sticker's border, the Outline filter draws a line round a layer's paint and stays editable.
• One purchase for iPad, iPhone and Mac. With your library in iCloud Drive, each device has the same drawings, brushes and palettes.
• Many pictures in at once. Pick any number of photos or files, or drop a stack of images on the canvas. Each lands on a layer of its own, in the order you picked, ready to move into place.
• A new iPad that has your drawings. Procreate keeps your artworks inside the app on one iPad, so a lost or replaced iPad takes them with it, unless you exported them first or restore the whole iPad from a backup. Syncing them to iCloud Drive and the Files app is on Procreate's list of requests In Development⁹. Keep Rindraw's library in iCloud Drive, and a new iPad has your drawings once you sign in, as long as your iCloud storage had room to upload them. Kept on the iPad, they still show in the Files app, so you can copy them anywhere.
• Built not to lose work. Every stroke is saved as you draw it, and your undo history is still there after you close the app.
• Nothing collected. No account, no analytics and no tracking. See the privacy policy.

Is there a Procreate for Mac?

Not yet. As of October 2026, Procreate runs only on iPad¹, and its iPhone version, Procreate Pocket, is a separate app³. Procreate has announced Procreate Mac, made alongside Procreate 6, and expects both most likely in 2027¹⁰. Until then, to use Procreate with a Mac, you can mirror your iPad's screen to it with AirPlay, but the app is still running on the iPad. Sidecar works the other way, making the iPad a screen for the Mac.

Rindraw has a Mac version, included in the same purchase as iPad and iPhone. You draw with a mouse, a trackpad or a pen tablet, with the tablet's tilt and eraser end. More about Rindraw for Mac.

Waiting for Procreate 6?

Procreate has said Procreate 6 will be its biggest update yet, and named some of what it brings¹⁰. Most of it is in Rindraw today:

• Adjustment layers. They change the colors of everything beneath them without changing those layers, so you can change, hide or delete them later. How they work.
• Blend modes on groups. A group blends with what's under it as one picture, with its own opacity. Group blend and opacity.
• iCloud file sync. Keep the library in iCloud Drive, and the same drawings are on your iPad, iPhone and Mac. Your library in iCloud Drive.
• Undo history saved in the file. A Rindraw drawing keeps its whole history, so you can still undo after you close it, or open it on another device.
• Strokes past the canvas edge. Move strokes off the canvas and back, and they come back whole, since Rindraw keeps what's past the edge. Show Outside Canvas shows it faintly while it's out there.
• A Mac version. Rindraw for Mac is in the same purchase as iPad and iPhone. Rindraw for Mac.

Procreate also lists more layers, which this page doesn't compare. Your Procreate artworks open in Rindraw with their layers and groups, so you can try these on your own work.

Moving from Procreate

Your artworks, brushes and palettes open in Rindraw with their layers and settings. Moving over takes a few minutes:

1. Share from Procreate. In Procreate's gallery, tap Select, choose your artworks, then tap Share and choose Procreate. Share your brush sets from the Brush Library, and your palettes from Palettes.
2. Open them in Rindraw. Send them to Rindraw from the share sheet or with AirDrop. Or save them to Files, then import a whole stack at once from Import in Rindraw's gallery.
3. Keep drawing. Each artwork becomes a drawing in your gallery, its layers as you left them, and your brushes and palettes are in their libraries, ready to use.

Before you start, it's worth backing up your Procreate artworks. Moving to a new iPad at the same time? See Procreate on a new iPad. Every detail of what a file keeps is in Bringing Procreate files into Rindraw.

What comes with you:

• Artworks (.procreate): layers with their names, opacity, blend modes, masks, clipping and groups, with the background, color profile, resolution and animation settings.
• Photoshop files (.psd, .psb): layers with their blend modes, masks and groups, in RGB, grayscale or CMYK, at 8, 16 or 32 bits.
• Brushes (.brush, .brushset, .brushlibrary, .abr): with their own shapes, grains and pressure curves, ready to tune in the Brush Editor.
• Palettes (.swatches, .ase, .aco): with their names.

The gestures you know do the same things: two-finger tap to undo, three-finger tap to redo, three-finger scrub to clear the layer, three-finger swipe down to copy and paste, and four-finger tap for full screen. If you go back, Rindraw saves drawings as Procreate and Photoshop files, layers and all, so your work is never locked in.

Finding your way

Most of what you reach for is where it was. Where Rindraw puts something elsewhere or names it its own way:

Moving from another app? See how to bring your work over from Clip Studio Paint, ibisPaint, MediBang Paint, Infinite Painter, Sketchbook, Adobe Fresco, Tayasui Sketches, ArtRage, Rebelle, Corel Painter, PaintTool SAI, Krita, or Photoshop.

Get Rindraw on the App Store

Sources

Checked on November 4, 2026.

1. Procreate FAQ: Procreate 5.4.14 requires an iPad running iPadOS 16.3 or newer; you can paint on imported 3D models.
2. Procreate on the App Store (US): $12.99, for iPad.
3. Procreate Pocket on the App Store (US): $5.99.
4. Procreate Dreams: a one-time purchase of $12.99 USD, for iPad. On the App Store (US), it runs on iPad and not on iPhone.
5. Procreate on generative AI.
6. Procreate (software), Wikipedia: a raster graphics editor, first released March 16, 2011.
7. Procreate Community, Import multiple reference images: posted six years ago, marked Planned in September 2026.
8. Procreate Community, Contract / expand selection: posted twelve years ago, marked Considered; Procreate's team replied five years ago that it was still not planned.
9. Procreate Community, What we're working on: Procreate's team lists "iCloud syncing: Sync files to iCloud Drive and the Files system on iPadOS" as In Development, as of October 19, 2026.
10. Procreate Community, Procreate 6 & Procreate Mac: posted by Procreate's CEO in March 2026. Procreate 6 and Procreate Mac share one codebase, will not be released in 2026, and are most likely arriving in 2027. Procreate 6 lists more layers, adjustment layers, blend modes on groups, iCloud file synchronisation, undo history saved in the file, and layers larger than the canvas.

Procreate is a trademark of Savage Interactive Pty Ltd. Rindraw is made by Sawir Studio and isn't affiliated with Procreate or Savage Interactive.