Summary

• Pixelmator Pro challenges Photoshop with affordable pricing and integrated AI tools.
• Adobe Photoshop offers more platform support, while Pixelmator Pro is Mac-exclusive.
• Pixelmator Pro has a sleek interface and powerful features, making it a promising alternative to Photoshop.

Photoshop has had competitors against it for years, and many often fall short compared to Photoshop’s power and historical development. With new and upcoming proprietary creative software like the Affinity suite, there are some that are dangerously close to being better than Photoshop. Pixelmator Pro gives Photoshop a run for its money with creative features, big-name development, and integrated AI.

Price

Winner: Pixelmator Pro

Adobe prices are variable depending on whether you subscribe to one singular app, a small plan, the entire Creative Cloud All Apps plan, and again if you’re a student, professional, or part of a business or enterprise. Adobe Photoshop has a handful of price modelsdue to those factors.

A solo Photoshop plan for a professional (non-discounted) is $23 per month. The Photography plan — which includes both Photoshop and Lightroom for well-rounded photo-editing — comes at around $20 per month. Yes, it’s cheaper to get more in your plan. Photoshop is also part of the all-inclusive All Apps plan, from $59 monthly. All prices are annual contracts. You can get a 7-day free trial before subscribing.

Pixelmator Pro takes the opposite approach to price plans compared to Adobe Photoshop. With a one-time cost, Pixelmator Pro is affordable, with a justified cost of $50 for the desktop app and $10 for the mobile version of Pixelmator. Both of these are propriety tools and are not under a subscription plan or temporary license.

You can also get a free 7-day trial of Pixelmator Pro to test before purchasing.

Platform support

Winner: Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop has long been available for desktop use across a variety of operating systems, namely Windows and Mac, with some workarounds to access it on Linux. The desktop app isn’t the only way to access Photoshop, though. Gone are the days of owning Photoshop and installing it via disk, but it is now possible to access it on multiple platforms.

Alongside the desktop app is the Photoshop on the Web appwhich has most of the same features. There’s also Photoshop for iPad, which is parred-down compared to the full desktop or web applications. Photoshop is available for Android and Windows tablets, too.

Pixelmator Pro is entirely developed for Apple and Mac operating systems — in fact, Apple acquired Pixelmator in November 2024. There is no version for other operating systems or platforms, although there’s a parred-down version for iOS and iPadOS, simply called Pixelmator.

Interface and navigation

Winner: Draw

Much of Photoshop’s interface has become synonymous with creative software, being commonly replicated in many open-source creative tools. Although it’s received some updates over the years, Photoshop’s interface and navigation have largely stayed the same.

It is familiar, easy to navigate, and customizable for your preferences. With the addition of AI tools in recent times, Photoshop has some annoying pop-ups — like the Contextual Task Bar — but, overall, it has a nice, functional user interface.

Pixelmator Pro’s Mac-based development makes it feel like a native Apple tool with a sleek and minimalist interface. Its default navigation is flipped compared to Photoshop’s, but it’s not difficult to navigate.

The macOS nature of development brings a familiar interface and UX/UI features to Pixelmator Pro, as it looks like other native Apple tools. It will likely have a small learning curve for new users, but it isn’t difficult to learn.

Features and tools

Winner: Draw

Photoshop is a raster graphics editing tool, often used for image manipulation and photo editing. It’s been around since 1987 and has long since developed the world’s leading graphic design software and tools, among other developers.

Despite Photoshop’s great photo-editing tools, it’s often used alongside Lightroom for the best photo-editing results. It offers cropping, layers and blend modes, manipulation tools like smudge, selection, erase, and adjustment layers that affect color, lighting, threshold, and more.

Pixelmator Pro offers tools and features that cross all the boundaries of creative software. While it focuses on raster image editing, Pixelmator Pro also offers vector illustration and editing tools, as well as digital painting tools. It has naturally integrated AI tools that work seamlessly with non-AI tools.

You can work directly in Pixelmator Pro to edit RAW format images, which requires the Camera Raw plugin to do in Photoshop. It features its own LUT tools for the best color enhancement and editing. Like Photoshop, it also features a host of AI and ML tools for more precise and faster editing workflows.

Compatibility with other software

Winner: Pixelmator Pro

Photoshop is very compatible with other Adobe tools, allowing you to integrate files from other Adobe software into your Photoshop documents — and vice versa with various Adobe tools. This keeps it compatible with the Adobe and Creative Cloud ecosystems. Photoshop as a software isn’t very compatible with non-Adobe tools, though.

The famed Photoshop file — PSD, or Photoshop document — is compatible with many other software, especially Photoshop alternatives. This makes it easy to open and edit PSDs from others in or out of Photoshop. You can also open, edit, and export many other formats in Photoshop. Although you can edit your work with vectors in Photoshop, it isn’t the best software for vector graphic editing or creation.

Pixelmator Pro’s Apple development allows it to be incredibly compatible with most Apple apps, tools, and software. The tools are integrated extraordinarily well with most native Apple tools, and since the acquisition from Apple in late 2024, more compatibility with other Apple apps is expected.

You can use Pixelmator Pro’s editing tools directly from Apple Photos without opening your images separately in the editing software. It has native Apple Pencil support from the iPadOS version of Pixelmator.

Animation and video

Winner: Photoshop

Neither software is billed as animation or video tools — plenty of better video editing tools are available — but it’s nice to have a bonus feature in creative software.

Photoshop offers a timeline for light videos, animations, or motion GIF creation. It’s very simple and utilizes the layer function most people already use in Photoshop. It wouldn’t be my go-to animation tool, but using Photoshop’s timeline has come in handy in the past.

Pixelmator Pro doesn’t currently offer any type of animation or tools, but it has a very basic video editor built-in. It lets you play back and trim the footage, but not much else.

AI features

Winner: Draw

Photoshop added many AI tools across 2023 and 2024; it’s expected to see even more throughout 2025 and beyond.

Its generative AI can be used to expand, remove, replace, or edit any image type. The AI selection features help make selecting complex areas a total breeze. The neural filters let you transform your images in ways that traditionally would take hours of painstaking skill.

Some of Photoshop’s AI tools seem gimmicky — like many AI features announced in creative software — but using Adobe Firefly’s technology, the quality is high for image generation, and the selection tools are incredibly accurate.

The AI tools in Pixelmator Pro are more integrated and less obvious than Photoshop. The background masking tool works incredibly accurately, even on complex areas like afro-textured hair. It doesn't offer obvious generative AI features, but they may be to come.

Some of the ML features Pixelmator Pro offers are enhancement and resolution tools, color matching, denoise, quick selection tools, background removal, subject selection, and masking tools. These are all naturally found within the toolbox and don’t have specific AI or ML labels on the tools.

Pixelmator Pro has more promise than Photoshop’s future

Pixelmator Pro is a much newer software compared to Photoshop, and despite less time in development and being publicly available, Pixelmator Pro already has all the same features and power as Photoshop — except animation tools. Photoshop is an industry standard, but with Apple's acquisition of Pixelmator Pro, Apple users choosing to stick with a native tool that offers similar, or better, features, power, and compatibility might overtake it.

• Adobe Photoshop

  See at Adobe

• Pixelmator Pro

  $50 at Apple Apps