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Comment by macco | Hacker News Reader

Do they really compete with each other? I thought they would complement each other, am I wrong?

I think they complement each other. Gimp is probably powerful, but I by the time I figure out how to do something, I forget what I was trying to do in the first place. Krita is easy to use, but can't do SVG. And Inkscape is still the best for SVG.

One of the major goals of this year for Krita is improved SVG support.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-m...

The overlap between GIMP and Krita is quite large. In general, at this point Krita is mostly a superset of the GIMP - though I still use GIMP a lot due to familiarity. Also, Krita is a must for >8bit images at the moment.

On the other hand, GIMP supports palette-based editing.

Neither of which I would use for palette based pixel pushing. For that I use something like Promotion or Aseprite. I tried to pixel with Gimp and found it frustrating.

I use Krita for painting and sketch work (animation now) with my Wacom or Surface Pro, I use Gimp or FireAlpaca (new on the scene) for manipulation and finally Promotion or Aseprite for pixel work. There is really no killer drawing application that does it all. Which is probably a good thing.

They're both general-purpose image editors, no? No doubt each has things it does that the other doesn't, but I would expect each to aim to subsume all the other's features.

Krita is more really an artistic tool, and less of a general image editor such as Gimp. Or as Wikipedia puts it, "Krita is designed to be a digital painting application."

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