OpenToonz vs Adobe Animate | Which One is Better? (Full Comparison)

From free animation tools to commercial software, we have a wide range of options at our disposal to create 2D or 3D animations nowadays. This is why we thought of making things easier for you, by making full comparisons between all these options. 

In this post, let’s extend the series from the perspective of a new comparison: OpenToonz vs Adobe Animate. If you know one or both of them, you must’ve asked yourself the question: is OpenToonz better than Adobe Animate? or is it the other way around.

OpenToonz vs Adobe Animate: a matter of price tag?

Nowadays, we have many tools at our disposal for animating virtually anything. Ranging from free tools to animate 2D puppets, and going all the way to commercial software for creating full-length 3D Animated feature films, the choices are endless.

But when it comes to the Opentoonz vs Adobe Animate comparison, one might rush to the conclusion of: “Opentoonz is better because it’s free” or “Animate is better because only quality products have price tags”.

Well, shocker: none of this is true. There might be some nuances of course, since there’s a huge difference between software that are industry-standard and those that are not. But we usually base our comparisons solely on what they really have to offer on a practical level, from tools and features

We have a history of comparing free vs paid software just to prove that it’s actually a valid point. The following are just a few examples:

• GIMP vs Photoshop in the photography and graphic design field.
• Krita vs Procreate in the digital drawing and painting field.
• GIMP vs Illustrator in the graphic design and branding field.

The OpenToonz vs Adobe Animate falls into the same category, and we posted the article (and the video on the YouTube channel) as a demonstration of that. Let’s get to it!

1. Software Overview

Let’s begin with a brief overview on both software:

First, OpenToonz is a 2D animation and graphic design software, besides being the free and open-source version of Toonz. It provides you with a range of powerful tools that allow you to make various animation styles.

Official Website: OpenToonz

Second, Adobe Animate is a vector animation software and it’s part of the Creative Suite of Adobe. It allows you to create 2D animations, video presentations and much more.

Official Website: Adobe Animate

2. Use Cases

The use cases of any software will depend on your needs, and what you want to achieve in the first place. But some software are better suited for some cases than others.

OpenToonz

On one hand, we have OpenToonz can be especially useful if you want to rely on classic hand-drawn line-art, and merge it with the modern aspect of animation. As the successor of Studio Ghibli’s main production software, it proved itself to be on the professional level. It had a hand in making famous shows Futurama, Princess Mononoke, Anastasia and many others.

Adobe Animate

On the other hand, Animate has also an extensive array of use cases that we’ve covered in depth before.

In brief: it’s perfect for creating interactive animation content, since it’s extensively used for TV and web series purposes. It produces overkill flash animations and graphics, so much so that it’s also very popular in the video games industry. Not to mention that you can benefit from the social share feature, exporting your work as a 360 VR animation for immersive experiences.

3. Interface

When it comes to the interface, there’s a clear distinction to be made. OpenToonz doesn’t have the most intuitive interface, so let’s break it down to clarify:

• For the layout: it uses an X sheet, so the timeline is arranged vertically with a few alignment custom options. It’s one of the main unusual factors that contributed at making the interface kinda hard to handle at first.
• For the workspace: it’s divided into rooms that serve a very specific purpose each. The default ones are Basics, Cleanup, Drawing, Timeline, Animation, Palette, X sheet, Browser and Farm.

Jumping to Animate, we can say that it has the same usual Adobe interface:

• It’s intuitive, organized, simple to get around in addition to being highly customizable.
• The huge number of tools though can overwhelm you at first, and it’s probably the only thing that might make it difficult to approach.

4. Opentoonz vs Adobe Animate: which is easier?

These specific traits of the UI can directly affect the learning curve:

OpenToonz

OpenToonz has a steep learning curve because of how unusual the interface is. Although many users consider it beginner friendly, it can be very challenging to learn how to use it.

Adobe Animate

Looking at the other side of the comparison, Animate is a lot easier to digest and very good for beginners. It’s especially easy to get a grip of if you’re familiar with Adobe’s ecosystem. Nevertheless, it might require some extra time to grasp the massive toolset.

5. Art Tools

Now that you have a better idea about the program’s interfaces, let’s have a closer look at the art tools. Starting with OpenToonz:

• It offers a wide range of brushes that go beyond 200 tweakable formats. Using them, you can simulate various classic mediums, like watercolor, oil painting, acrylic and much more.
• It also grants you the ability of seamlessly scanning your hand-drawn artworks. With 4 different types of scanning that complies with the TWAIN standards, you can expect maximum levels of accuracy. Either black and white or colored, binarized or not, you can pretty much do it all. You can also save the setting to use them in further projects and avoid pointless repetition.
• Not to mention that the system supports both raster and vector technologies. This is why you’ll find 3 types of layers that you can choose from: the raster type, the Toonz type and the hybrid type that merges both.

Looking at things from the opponent perspective now, Adobe Animate comes with amazing and interactive tools:

• Animate provides you with all the necessary tools to work on building your graphic elements effectively. The frequent ones are the pen tool, selection tools, eraser, transform tools and multiple shapes like rectangle, ellipse and much more. All of these are vector-based for maximum levels of quality.
• The brushes are very easy to use, and the vector ones are even more interesting since they’re pressure sensitive. This will help you sketch and draw characters smoothly and naturally.
• If you want to save some time, Animate offers you many templates that you can use and customize. It also grants you access to a rich media library with drag-and-drop options to ease the process.
• It does have a scanning feature for physical line-art, but it’s not anywhere near as good as the one that comes with OpenToonz.  You can use it and tweak the parameters to achieve some sort of a digitized version to make your project richer nonetheless.

6. Animation Tools

Things get a little tougher when comparing animation tools:

OpenToonz provides you with many of them to perform traditional, cut-out of keyframe animation.

• It allows you to use the onion-skin feature to view frames and their respective elements back and forth. This will help you transition your art between frames in a coherent way without any mispositioning mistakes, making the whole thing a lot smoother. Especially when your animation is complex and you have to rely on the frame-by-frame one instead of the tweened.
• This is backed up with a motion tweening tool however, which is suitable for simpler animation purposes. It helps you get that movement illusion rolling in the most believable way, without too much of a hustle adding views in-between your keyframes.
• Not to mention that you can make your composition richer, using the wide range of styles, distortions and visual effects.

Animate is also good for frame-by-frame and key-frame animation, but there are a few differences to spot. We can mention for example the fact that you can only use vector graphics. If you happen to be needing a bitmap or a raster image, you’ll have to break it up or vectorize it. Unlike OpenToonz that supports both raster and vector graphics, and has a very reliable interconversion system to make everything compatible with your workflow.

7. Rigging Tools

Moving to rigging tools, you’ll notice that both software equally display powerful features to a certain extent:

OpenToonz

• You can use the skeleton tool to set-up bones and build a rig. The Hook tool will extend the possibilities of what you can do by helping you move the rig points with ease.
• For deformation, you have the great Plastic tool that can be very handy when deforming your meshes. And of course, the whole process supports Inverse Kinematics.

Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate follows pretty much the same pattern, except that it’s a lot simpler. However, you’re very likely to need third party plugins or other software to fully complete the task. Most users end up relying on Character Animator for the rigging process.

8. Compositing Tools

Compositing is a whole other story and it’s one of the core differences. The reason for this is the fact that OpenToonz has a compositing system. Unlike Animate that falls behind in this area and requires third party tools for this specific task, like After Effects for example.

9. License and Pricing

Finally, there’s one last factor that can probably break the tie (if any): which is the pricing.

OpenToonz is free and open-source as we mentioned before, even if you decide to use it for commercial ends.

Adobe Animate however is a paid tool with a 21 days free trial option. The most popular plan is the Creative Cloud Bundle that includes Animate and the rest of the products. It will cost you around $30 per month and roughly $240 per year.

Final Thoughts

As a conclusion, you can see that choosing one of these software depends on many factors besides your needs as an animator. For example: if you prefer simplicity and you’re willing to financially invest in it, you can go for Animate. But if your work could use your drawing skills and you don’t mind the steep learning curve, OpenToonz would be a better choice.

We hope you found this article useful and informative. Comment below if you think that we’ve missed something or if you have any other suggestions.