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Piskel: free online pixel art and sprite editor, in your browser

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By AiCoN | Published 20 October 2026 | Sources checked 20 October 2026

Piskel calls itself a free online editor for animated sprites and pixel art, free and open-source, and it runs in your browser.

The Piskel editor with a pixel-art sprite and its animation frames — Official image of the Piskel editor with a pixel-art sprite and its animation frames, from the Piskel website. Publisher's material, not AiCoN's; hotlinked.

What it is

Piskel is a website for drawing pixel art and animated sprites. Its page says "Piskel is a free online editor for animated sprites & pixel art" and "Design characters, animations, and tiles, right in your browser". Its page description adds "Create pixel art, game sprites and animated GIFs". It is a web tool, not an AI tool.

Is it free?

Yes, per Piskel. Its page title and description say "free online sprite editor" and "Free and open-source". GitHub lists the licence as Apache-2.0. We saw no price on the pages we read. We did not check whether any feature needs a sign-in.

Good to know, per Piskel

The site says Piskel "is best used in a desktop browser and in landscape orientation".
The FAQ says Piskel "periodically saves your work" and lets you restore recent sessions from the Import panel. It also says it was "made to create small sprites" and to save your work often if you see a performance warning.
"Piskel For Kids" is described in the FAQ as "a version of the Piskel editor that is designed to be extra safe for children". We did not test it and cannot say what the safety features are.
There are offline apps for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, current version v0.14.0 on the download page. The site says these get "best-effort releases" with "very limited QA and testing" and that it strongly recommends the online version for the latest fixes. The download buttons point to Google Drive links, so we did not use them. Use the online editor, or the GitHub download page the site also points to.

Our advice

Use it on a laptop or desktop, not a phone, as the site says.
Use the online version. Save your work to a file as you go.

Privacy and data

The site has a Privacy policy link in its footer, which we could not read as a page, so we make no claim on what it collects or where your sprites are stored.
The site loads Google ad code (Google AdSense) on its pages, so expect ads.

India

No region limit appears on the pages we read. We did not test it from India. There is no price to convert.

Source code

The GitHub project piskelapp/piskel is under Apache-2.0, per its GitHub page.

AiCoN checkRead the Piskel home, FAQ and download pages and the GitHub page on 20 October 2026. We did not use the editor.

Frequently asked questions

Is Piskel free?

Yes. Its page calls it a free online sprite editor and says it is free and open-source.

Does it have a kids version?

Yes, "Piskel For Kids", per the FAQ. We did not test it.

Can I use it offline?

The site offers offline apps for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, with limited testing, as it says.

Sources: piskelapp.com, FAQ, Download, GitHub. Checked 20 October 2026.

Independent guide, not affiliated.