Software for Web Browser

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

Godot has a dedicated 2D renderer with pixel-snapping, nearest neighbour filtering and viewport scaling options that make low-resolution games straightforward.

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

The pixel art editor

Gribble is a pixel art and animation editor that runs in the browser (gribble.app) or as an Android or iPhone app. One account syncs projects between all devices.

Website: gribble.app
Android: Play Store
iOS: App Store

Layers with opacity and 15 blend modes. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, frame tags and playback.

Every stroke is recorded, so a finished artwork can be exported as a timelapse.

The community features includes a global gallery with museum frames, a profile page, followers, likes and achievements.

Tools

Brushes, eraser, bucket, dither gradient, color picker, global color picker, ellipse tool, square tool, line tool, square select, lasso select, magic wand, dither, shading, outline, gradient, symmetry, smudge.

Features

Autosave, cloud-storage, timelapse, image/GIF imports, image/video/GIF/code/spritesheet exports, unique 9-patch mode and export, palette lock, alpha lock, themes, pixel perfect, 512x512 grids, palettes, gribble files (.grbl), artwork forking.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

Blockbench is a free and open source editor for low-poly models with pixel art textures. Models can be exported into standard 3D formats, to be shared, rendered, 3D-printed, or used in game engines or games line Minecraft. Modeling, UV mapping, texturing with pixel-art tools, rigging and animating, can all be done in the program.

Blockbench has a clean and beginner friendly interface, but also offers lots of customization and advanced features for experienced 3D artists. Plugins can extend the functionality of the program even further.

picoCAD builds small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and textures them with a single tiny texture sheet, in a deliberately constrained toolset. Models and turntable renders export straight out of it.

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the browser.

BitFontMaker2 is a bitmap font editor that runs in a browser: draw each character on a small grid, set the widths, and download a TrueType file. It has been around a long time and stayed simple, which is why it is still the quickest way to get a pixel font out of an idea.

PICO-8 bundles a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound effect editor and tracker into one tiny virtual machine with strict limits that keep games small and finishable.

LibreSprite continues the last GPL version of Aseprite as a community project. It keeps the familiar layers, animation timeline and palette tools, and adds its own scripting and a browser build.

A basic web-based editor made to be simple and intuitive, which can load any palette from the Lospec palette list. It is no longer in development and may contain bugs.

It covers the usual pixel art tools (pixel-perfect pencil with a stabilizer, shapes, paint bucket, gradient with dithering, lasso and magic wand selections, symmetry, a tile preview for seamless textures) along with layers, groups, blend modes, layer effects (outline, drop shadow, glow) and reusable components: a sprite drawn once can be placed on any board, and its copies follow it.

Palettes belong to each file: classic presets, the colors used in the drawing, palettes the user keeps, or .hex and .gpl files. Shade and lighten step along the palette’s ramps. A reference image can sit under the drawing to trace over, and the eyedropper picks its colors.

For isometric work it has a 2:1 grid that tools snap to, 2:1 lines, box, cylinder and pyramid tools shaded from the palette, extrusion of flat shapes into volumes, shapes drawn on walls or on the ground, staggered tile previews and images laid onto a face. A file can hold several boards side by side.

Exports: PNG at 1× to 32×, SVG with one path per color and the layers kept as groups, .aseprite files, tilesets for game engines (PNG sheet with a Tiled tileset and map), and the drawing as code (React, CSS, JSON or ASCII).

Its strongest areas are isometric pixel art and work that ends up in design tools or code: components and multiple boards for icon sets and UI assets, and SVG that pastes into Figma as vector shapes. It suits game artists making sprites, tiles and isometric scenes, designers who need pixel icons, and people trying pixel art without installing anything. It has no animation yet, and works best with a mouse or trackpad; tablet support is in progress.

Docs: baipix.app/docs

Bfxr adds new waveforms, filters and a mixer to the sfxr formula, and runs in the browser.

Bitsy is a tiny editor for making small worlds: a few rooms of 8x8 tiles, an avatar that walks around them, and short conversations with the things in them. The limits are the point - there is no scripting to speak of and two colours at a time - and a finished game is a single HTML file.

Bosca Ceoil is aimed squarely at people who have never written music. Everything is on one screen, the instruments are chosen from a list, and the scale and chord helpers make it hard to play a wrong note. Blue is the maintained rebuild of the original, and it runs on desktop and in a browser.

ChipTone builds sound effects from layered oscillators, envelopes and effects with a lot more control than an sfxr style generator.