Piskel

Piskel is a free, open-source pixel art and sprite editor that runs entirely in your browser. Open piskelapp.com and you are drawing: no account, no install, no paywall. It is built for game developers and hobbyists who need animated sprites without firing up a full graphics suite, and it has quietly become a classroom favorite for the same reason: there is nothing to set up before the fun part starts.

The editor covers the pixel-art basics properly: pens with sizes and dithering patterns, paint bucket, shapes, color picker, selection and move tools, plus layers with onion skinning so you can see the previous and next frames while you draw. Animation is the core use case - the live preview window plays your sprite as you work, with frame rates adjustable from 1 to 24 fps, which makes walk cycles and idle animations much easier to tune than the export-and-check routine.

When you are done, Piskel exports to animated GIF, PNG spritesheets, individual PNG frames or a ZIP, and it imports existing images and spritesheets if you want to edit rather than start from scratch. Palette tools let you build and reuse color sets, handy for keeping a game's art consistent. Work is saved locally in your browser and can be exported as a .piskel file - Piskel has no accounts at all.

Piskel is Apache-2.0 open source and still actively maintained - the GitHub repository saw commits as recently as October 2026. The project does not cut regular releases anymore: the last tagged version is 0.15.0 (November 2018), but the hosted web app is updated continuously from the main branch. Official offline desktop builds for Windows, macOS and Linux exist on the download page, though they lag behind at v0.14.0 and ship on a best-effort basis, so the web version is the one to use.

The limitations are real: there is no undo button on screen (Ctrl+Z works fine), the toolset stays deliberately simple next to Aseprite - no tilemap tools, no advanced resizing - and the mobile browser experience is laggy enough that you will want a desktop or laptop. If you outgrow it, Aseprite is the natural next step. For quick sprites, game-jam art and simple animations, though, it is hard to beat a tool that costs nothing and is already open in a browser tab.

Use Piskel online or download it. The editor runs free in your browser, no account needed. Free desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux are on the official download page. Free and open source (Apache-2.0), with 12,800+ stars on GitHub.

See also: Aseprite, Krita and GIMP.