I am thinking of switching from Medibang Paint Pro to either Clip Studio or Ibis. The main reason being I am becoming very aware that very few (in my opinion) use it and I have come to consider that there are platforms out there that are simply.. better. Now, I do have Photoshop already and that`s something I plan on making manips with in the future (probably over the summer), but only to experiement; the platform is not my favorite, just in case one of the two options below is similar.

~

Why am I considering Clip Studio?

I have heard majority of good things about it in general, not only when it comes down to manips. Furthermore, I have heard it has a solid animation feature. As an animation student, that peaked my interest; a vast majority of artists I look up to also use this program. I have heard Clip Studio is complicated.. is that true? xd

~

Why am I considering Ibis?

Very simple, a lot of good artists here on HEE recommend it. The one thing stopping me is how Clip Studio seems more appealing to me in general.

~

Now, price is not an issue at all; I am willing to pay for a subscription or even do one of the one-time payments. I wanted to ask here to see if anyone as experience with both and has input on strengths vs. weaknesses of both programs. If you have only used one, I`d still love to hear how the program is from your perspective, ^^

~

Edit: Just in case it matters, I make art on a XP Pen and a Huion. I can not remember the models from the top of my head, but both are pen displays. I switch between them since my XP Pen is massive (larger than my laptop) while my Huion is basically iPad sized. :)

Tenebris Hollow said:

Cant say i've tried Clip studio but i absoluetly love ibis! You can also do animation on it.

Simple to use, easy to import brushes, overall doesnt make me wanna throw my tablet :)

I'll highly recommend Clip Studio. I'm the sort of person who tries out a lot of art software (I used Medibang back in the days when it was still named FireAlpaca 😅), but CSP has been my go-to workhorse for just about a decade now. It carried me easily through my art degree and is far and away the best general-purpose art program I've used.

At least from my experience it was very easy to jump in and get started with--the UI is fairly similar to Medibang's, and there are plenty of resources if you ever get lost or want to learn something new. At the same time, it's also a fully-capable professional tool. The complicated features don't get in the way if you don't need them, but they're availible if you ever do and you'll rarely need something it can't do.

If you're looking to do digital art and animation beyond photomanips, CSP has a phenomenal brush engine and color mixing; it feels great to paint in. CSP probably won't be the only tool in your toolbox if you're getting into industry-level animation, but it's one that most of my animator friends use alongside their other software and for off-hours art. That said, I've done photomanips with it and it's great for that too.

I've glanced at Ibis but haven't used it before; if you're looking for thoughts I'm happy to run it through its paces this weekend or something and give you my opinions on how it compares? From what I've seen Ibis doesn't look quite as powerful, which is why I've not tried it before now, but that's just based on a few screenshots and videos I've watched so I'm happy to try it in case I'm proven wrong.

If you do wind up choosing to go the Clip Studio route, my recommendation would be to get a CSP Pro (not EX) perpetual license. If you're not in a hurry Celsys runs sales roughly every quarter, but the last one just ended a few days ago so the next will probably be around June. Even at full price, though, it's not very expensive and I highly recommend getting perpetual licenses for art software when you can, especially since they're getting rarer these days. (Update: I do see that they do a three-month free trial—I haven't checked the terms for it, but that'd probably take you right up to the next big sale so you could try it for a bit and then buy it on sale if you liked it.)

Dash and Duchess said:

I've been using ibis for quite a while, and personally I've found it to be the most easy to use and effective application for me! It's got all the base features, smudge, blur, lasso, lasso fill/erase, etc. and it's got hundreds of other brushes you can download onto it. If you decide to give it a try I'd be more than happy to help you find things/navigate the app :)

Thronesfell said:

I'll highly recommend Clip Studio. I'm the sort of person who tries out a lot of art software (I used Medibang back in the days when it was still named FireAlpaca 😅), but CSP has been my go-to workhorse for just about a decade now. It carried me easily through my art degree and is far and away the best general-purpose art program I've used.

At least from my experience it was very easy to jump in and get started with--the UI is fairly similar to Medibang's, and there are plenty of resources if you ever get lost or want to learn something new. At the same time, it's also a fully-capable professional tool. The complicated features don't get in the way if you don't need them, but they're availible if you ever do and you'll rarely need something it can't do.

If you're looking to do digital art and animation beyond photomanips, CSP has a phenomenal brush engine and color mixing; it feels great to paint in. CSP probably won't be the only tool in your toolbox if you're getting into industry-level animation, but it's one that most of my animator friends use alongside their other software and for off-hours art. That said, I've done photomanips with it and it's great for that too.

I've glanced at Ibis but haven't used it before; if you're looking for thoughts I'm happy to run it through its paces this weekend or something and give you my opinions on how it compares? From what I've seen Ibis doesn't look quite as powerful, which is why I've not tried it before now, but that's just based on a few screenshots and videos I've watched so I'm happy to try it in case I'm proven wrong.

If you do wind up choosing to go the Clip Studio route, my recommendation would be to get a CSP Pro (not EX) perpetual license. If you're not in a hurry Celsys runs sales roughly every quarter, but the last one just ended a few days ago so the next will probably be around June. Even at full price, though, it's not very expensive and I highly recommend getting perpetual licenses for art software when you can, especially since they're getting rarer these days. (Update: I do see that they do a three-month free trial—I haven't checked the terms for it, but that'd probably take you right up to the next big sale so you could try it for a bit and then buy it on sale if you liked it.)

Alright, I spent some time this evening getting to know Ibis. Take everything I say here with a grain of salt because I've only used it for a few hours and haven't learned all its ins and outs, whereas I've used Clip Studio for a decade. I tried to keep that in mind, but between that and personal preferences your mileage may vary.

Speed/Lag:

At least for my screen-size canvas and only a few layers, Ibis ran lickety split and I didn't notice any lag at all until I tried to open up the adjustments/filters menu. That's something I'd expect you'd get regular use out of for photomanips, and trying to scroll through it started lagging really hard. I think it was burning RAM trying to generate thumbnails for all of them based off my active canvas but I'm not sure; it was painful, whatever the cause.

Ibis has slightly lower system requirements of the two, but neither need anything crazy and on modern machines both should run fine overall. I use an eight-year-old old iPad as my main machine for Clip, and it just scrapes by the minimum system requirements but it runs fine even though I tend to work large and with lots of layers.

Palm Rejection:

I had a LOT of problems with stray taps in Ibis. Even with palm rejection turned on, the gesture/tap shortcuts stay enabled (which could be fine, that's what I'd normally want), and the program's ability to distinguish a deliberate undo tap versus me moving my hand as I drew was almost nonexistant. I was constantly undoing or hitting buttons under my hand while trying to make a pen stroke.

UI:

If you're drawing on a phone, I think Ibis' UI makes total sense; that's very much what it's designed and optimized for. Large touch-style buttons, minimal text, most-used controls down at the bottom of the screen where they'd be out of the way visually but easy to reach quickly on a mobile device. There are no PC-style dropdown menus that I've seen, it's all scrolling through thumbnails or mobile-style flyout lists with a few options each.

On a larger screen--either a screenless drawing tablet with a full monitor or an iPad-style screened tablet, that UI is (in my opinion) really uncomfortable to use. Since there's almost no labeling on buttons the only way to figure out what an icon does is to look it up or to tap it and find out, and if you're looking for something specific you might be hunting for a while. The same icons are also used to mean different things in different places, and the cancel/confirm buttons switch places a lot from menu to menu, so I kept tapping the wrong things.

To an extent, time and use would help build muscle memory on that and make it less confusing, but I found it frustrating as a new user. Personally I much prefer having oldschool, text-based menu dropdowns for things that don't benefit from being a single-tap button. It's much, much easier to navigate that way when you aren't familiar with the software or a given feature, and the benefits of mobile layouts get lost on desktop anyway.

You may or may not feel the same way about its UI, though; I know some folks much prefer the mobile style and find it much more intuitive.

Brushes, Filters, and Other Assets:

Ibis's watercolor brushes were nice to use with a little fiddling and I thought their color mixing was interesting--I didn't use it long enough to get super familiar with how all the settings work, but to a certain extent it reminds me of how Paint Tool SAI felt to paint with (with some improvements).

Once they did finally load in, I'll fully admit that there are some neat filters in Ibis' defaults. I dig the glitch one in particular. Both Clip and Ibis have community assets for download, though, so I don't think the brush or filter defaults should be a huge sway in either direction. I think Ibis has some interesting filters, Clip has a better default brush set, but both seem to have enough availible to download that you'll probably find ones you'll like.

From what I could find in the software and from other folks online, Clip's brush engine is a lot more powerful than Ibis' and gives you a lot more customization. That means you'll probably have more community options with Clip and can fine-tune your tools more as you go.

General Features:

I think Clip Studio wins this one handily. If you're just going by current names Clip and Ibis are about the same age, but Clip actually has an extra decade of developement time on it when you count its early days as Comic Studio/Manga Studio. Clip also has the benefit of always having been targeted towards computers first and foremost, whereas Ibis only recently made the jump from mobile to desktop. The result is that Clip has had a lot more time to build out its feature set and refine its tools. I didn't find anything in my (limited) time perusing Ibis or its features on its site that Clip can't do just as well, and Clip's got all sorts of extra odds and ends tucked into its crevices these days. A silly one I've been really enjoying lately is the color window where you can mix up colors like you would on a physical palette, and then colorpick off it without having to keep switching back and forth to the eyedropper.

Ibis' selection layer is interesting to me, especially for photomanips, but I haven't spent enough time with it to really know how it compares to my usual workflow. Other folks might have insight there?

Also... I couldn't find a way to layer mask in Ibis? Clipping masks yeah, no problem, but I've done some web searching and I'm not finding any true layer masking which to me would be a killer for photomanips. Being able to mask out a horse for example, nondestructively, makes a huge difference in how fast I can work.

I did see that Ibis and Clip are integrated with each other, so you can easily pass files you start in Ibis off to Clip. It looks like that was especially intended for the days when Ibis didn't have a desktop version but it's nifty. Clip has more overall file compatibility than Ibis.

This one's a little hard to get very detailed with since it's such a broad category and there's so much I could compare, but if there's anything specific you're curious about I can try and write up something more specific. I'm probably not the one to speak to the animation tools, though; I've dabbled with them but 2D animation isn't as much my wheelhouse.

Price:

Not counting sales, the monthly plans are pretty much the same cost between Ibis and Clip, with around $5 monthly or a hair over $25 if you subscribe annually.

Clip's perpetual Pro license (EX isn't worth it unless you do some hyper-specific types of work, and you can always upgrade at a partial fee if you need to later) is about the same price as Ibis' one-time Pro upgrade. That said, I'll warn you that from the phrasing on their site and what I'm seeing folks say on Reddit and elsewhere, the Pro upgrade unlocks features permanently but is on top of the Prime subscription, not a replacement for it. So to my understanding you'd still have to pay the Prime fee, you'd just also have the Pro features alongside it.

I don't know if Ibis runs regular sales, but Clip has them roughly quarterly and I'd expect the next to be in June. Clip also offers a student discount, but I don't see one from Ibis; they only discount for educational institutions, not individual students.

Overall Thoughts:

My personal opinion is that Ibis would probably blow Clip out of the water on a phone, but on a tablet or on desktop Clip has had more time to mature as a piece of software and it's a much better option both for power and quality of life. If you're pursuing art education it'll probably serve you better in the long term. Ibis might catch up with time, but I don't think it's quite managed it yet.

That said, at the end of the day it's really about what feels better for you and what suits your needs. Iibs and Clip both have free trials so I'd recommend trying both out and seeing which one catches you; even if one sounds perfect on paper you may use it and realize it's not actually what you like. There's no right or wrong answer!

Thronesfell said:

Alright, I spent some time this evening getting to know Ibis. Take everything I say here with a grain of salt because I've only used it for a few hours and haven't learned all its ins and outs, whereas I've used Clip Studio for a decade. I tried to keep that in mind, but between that and personal preferences your mileage may vary.

Speed/Lag:

At least for my screen-size canvas and only a few layers, Ibis ran lickety split and I didn't notice any lag at all until I tried to open up the adjustments/filters menu. That's something I'd expect you'd get regular use out of for photomanips, and trying to scroll through it started lagging really hard. I think it was burning RAM trying to generate thumbnails for all of them based off my active canvas but I'm not sure; it was painful, whatever the cause.

Ibis has slightly lower system requirements of the two, but neither need anything crazy and on modern machines both should run fine overall. I use an eight-year-old old iPad as my main machine for Clip, and it just scrapes by the minimum system requirements but it runs fine even though I tend to work large and with lots of layers.

Palm Rejection:

I had a LOT of problems with stray taps in Ibis. Even with palm rejection turned on, the gesture/tap shortcuts stay enabled (which could be fine, that's what I'd normally want), and the program's ability to distinguish a deliberate undo tap versus me moving my hand as I drew was almost nonexistant. I was constantly undoing or hitting buttons under my hand while trying to make a pen stroke.

UI:

If you're drawing on a phone, I think Ibis' UI makes total sense; that's very much what it's designed and optimized for. Large touch-style buttons, minimal text, most-used controls down at the bottom of the screen where they'd be out of the way visually but easy to reach quickly on a mobile device. There are no PC-style dropdown menus that I've seen, it's all scrolling through thumbnails or mobile-style flyout lists with a few options each.

On a larger screen--either a screenless drawing tablet with a full monitor or an iPad-style screened tablet, that UI is (in my opinion) really uncomfortable to use. Since there's almost no labeling on buttons the only way to figure out what an icon does is to look it up or to tap it and find out, and if you're looking for something specific you might be hunting for a while. The same icons are also used to mean different things in different places, and the cancel/confirm buttons switch places a lot from menu to menu, so I kept tapping the wrong things.

To an extent, time and use would help build muscle memory on that and make it less confusing, but I found it frustrating as a new user. Personally I much prefer having oldschool, text-based menu dropdowns for things that don't benefit from being a single-tap button. It's much, much easier to navigate that way when you aren't familiar with the software or a given feature, and the benefits of mobile layouts get lost on desktop anyway.

You may or may not feel the same way about its UI, though; I know some folks much prefer the mobile style and find it much more intuitive.

Brushes, Filters, and Other Assets:

Ibis's watercolor brushes were nice to use with a little fiddling and I thought their color mixing was interesting--I didn't use it long enough to get super familiar with how all the settings work, but to a certain extent it reminds me of how Paint Tool SAI felt to paint with (with some improvements).

Once they did finally load in, I'll fully admit that there are some neat filters in Ibis' defaults. I dig the glitch one in particular. Both Clip and Ibis have community assets for download, though, so I don't think the brush or filter defaults should be a huge sway in either direction. I think Ibis has some interesting filters, Clip has a better default brush set, but both seem to have enough availible to download that you'll probably find ones you'll like.

From what I could find in the software and from other folks online, Clip's brush engine is a lot more powerful than Ibis' and gives you a lot more customization. That means you'll probably have more community options with Clip and can fine-tune your tools more as you go.

General Features:

I think Clip Studio wins this one handily. If you're just going by current names Clip and Ibis are about the same age, but Clip actually has an extra decade of developement time on it when you count its early days as Comic Studio/Manga Studio. Clip also has the benefit of always having been targeted towards computers first and foremost, whereas Ibis only recently made the jump from mobile to desktop. The result is that Clip has had a lot more time to build out its feature set and refine its tools. I didn't find anything in my (limited) time perusing Ibis or its features on its site that Clip can't do just as well, and Clip's got all sorts of extra odds and ends tucked into its crevices these days. A silly one I've been really enjoying lately is the color window where you can mix up colors like you would on a physical palette, and then colorpick off it without having to keep switching back and forth to the eyedropper.

Ibis' selection layer is interesting to me, especially for photomanips, but I haven't spent enough time with it to really know how it compares to my usual workflow. Other folks might have insight there?

Also... I couldn't find a way to layer mask in Ibis? Clipping masks yeah, no problem, but I've done some web searching and I'm not finding any true layer masking which to me would be a killer for photomanips. Being able to mask out a horse for example, nondestructively, makes a huge difference in how fast I can work.

I did see that Ibis and Clip are integrated with each other, so you can easily pass files you start in Ibis off to Clip. It looks like that was especially intended for the days when Ibis didn't have a desktop version but it's nifty. Clip has more overall file compatibility than Ibis.

This one's a little hard to get very detailed with since it's such a broad category and there's so much I could compare, but if there's anything specific you're curious about I can try and write up something more specific. I'm probably not the one to speak to the animation tools, though; I've dabbled with them but 2D animation isn't as much my wheelhouse.

Price:

Not counting sales, the monthly plans are pretty much the same cost between Ibis and Clip, with around $5 monthly or a hair over $25 if you subscribe annually.

Clip's perpetual Pro license (EX isn't worth it unless you do some hyper-specific types of work, and you can always upgrade at a partial fee if you need to later) is about the same price as Ibis' one-time Pro upgrade. That said, I'll warn you that from the phrasing on their site and what I'm seeing folks say on Reddit and elsewhere, the Pro upgrade unlocks features permanently but is on top of the Prime subscription, not a replacement for it. So to my understanding you'd still have to pay the Prime fee, you'd just also have the Pro features alongside it.

I don't know if Ibis runs regular sales, but Clip has them roughly quarterly and I'd expect the next to be in June. Clip also offers a student discount, but I don't see one from Ibis; they only discount for educational institutions, not individual students.

Overall Thoughts:

My personal opinion is that Ibis would probably blow Clip out of the water on a phone, but on a tablet or on desktop Clip has had more time to mature as a piece of software and it's a much better option both for power and quality of life. If you're pursuing art education it'll probably serve you better in the long term. Ibis might catch up with time, but I don't think it's quite managed it yet.

That said, at the end of the day it's really about what feels better for you and what suits your needs. Iibs and Clip both have free trials so I'd recommend trying both out and seeing which one catches you; even if one sounds perfect on paper you may use it and realize it's not actually what you like. There's no right or wrong answer!

Thronesfell said:

Also... I couldn't find a way to layer mask in Ibis? Clipping masks yeah, no problem, but I've done some web searching and I'm not finding any true layer masking which to me would be a killer for photomanips. Being able to mask out a horse for example, nondestructively, makes a huge difference in how fast I can work.

Dash and Duchess said:

Popping back in case anyone else had the same issue, There's a small lock icon next to the clip button, which I believe makes that layer mask/alpha lock! :D

Yeah, those are the buttons for clipping masks and alpha lock respectively, but layer masking is something different. Kind of a cousin to clipping masks, in a sense! But whereas clipping masks can only mask to the transparency of the layer they're clipped to, layer masks add an additional channel to a layer which can be masked by hand (they can even be used on clipping layers themselves to get extra control).

I'm having a hilariously hard time describing it without pictures, but this site might do a better job than me: https://99designs.com/blog/design-tutorials/how-to-use-photoshop-layer-masks/