Krita 5.3.4.1

Krita is a free, open-source painting program built for artists who draw, ink, colour and animate, not for people fixing holiday photos.

Version 5.3.4.1 is the current stable release, a small hotfix from 7 October 2026 that repairs display colour profiles.

It runs on 64-bit Windows, macOS, Linux and Android tablets, and every feature is free with no trial, account or watermark.

What Krita Actually Does

Krita is a digital canvas for a graphics tablet. It ships with more than 100 ready-made brushes, nine brush engines for building your own, and stabilizers that smooth out a shaky hand. Wrap-around mode tiles the canvas as you paint, so seamless textures and patterns take minutes instead of an afternoon.

Beyond painting, it handles comic work with vector panels and speech bubbles, and frame-by-frame 2D animation with onion skinning, audio tracks and video export. Version 5.3 also rewrote the text tool, so lettering is now edited directly on the canvas.

What Is Free and What You Pay For

The download from krita.org is the full program under the GNU GPL v3 licence. There is no paid tier hiding features.

Paid copies also exist on the Microsoft Store, Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Mac App Store. They contain the same Krita, add automatic updates, and the money left after the store fee funds development. Buying one is a fair way to say thanks, but nobody needs to.

The Android version has an optional supporter subscription that adds extra brush bundles. The core app stays free there too.

Krita 5.3 or Krita 6?

The project now ships two builds of the same features. Krita 5.3.4.1 is the one the developers call suitable for productive work, while Krita 6.0.4.1 is the Qt6 port and is labelled early access.

Krita 6 adds Wayland and HDR support on Linux, but it has no Android build yet and will have more bugs. On Windows, stick with 5.3 unless you enjoy reporting crashes.

Which File to Download

Windows builds are 64-bit only, and the project lists Windows 8.1 or later with 4GB of RAM as the floor. The Microsoft Store copy needs Windows 10 or later, and there are separate 32-bit Arm and x86_64 APKs for older or Intel-based tablets.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is simple: if your starting point is a camera photo rather than a blank canvas, Krita is the wrong tool. It can crop and adjust colours, but retouching, cloning out objects and RAW development are not what it was built for.

• GIMP is the established free choice for photo retouching and general image editing.
• Photon Studio is a newer Photoshop-style editor that opens layered PSD files and runs AI selections offline.
• PhotoCraft offers layers, masks and PSD support, though it is still early alpha.

For quick edits and screenshots on Windows, paint.net is lighter and faster to learn.

If your files come straight off a camera, develop them first in darktable or RawTherapee.

Logos and scalable artwork belong in a vector app such as VectorCraft. Full 3D work is Blender territory.

Other Painting Programs Worth a Look

Artweaver Free is a simpler Windows painting tool with realistic preset brushes, a gentler start for beginners. Affinity by Canva combines photo editing, vector design and illustration in one free app.

To browse finished artwork quickly, XnView MP opens hundreds of formats, and XnConvert batch-converts whole folders of exports.

More options sit in the graphics tools section.

Quick questions

Download Krita 5.3.4.1 and see how it handles your images, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.