Mario Paint shipped in 1992 with a mouse in the box and three things nobody had bundled before: a paint canvas, a frame-by-frame animator, and a music sequencer that let you drop notes on a five-line staff. Nintendo never made a real sequel. If you loved that combo and want it on your Windows, macOS, or Linux desktop today, the Mario Paint alternatives below give you the same three tools split across different apps, most of them free.
We tested seven picks against the original’s core loop: click to paint, string frames together, hear the result. None matches Mario Paint’s all-in-one charm, but two come close for animation, one is a near-perfect kid replacement for the paint half, and the rest each pick up one of the three pillars.
Quick comparison
| App | Best for | Free plan | Starting price | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Krita | Painting and short animations | Fully free | $10 on Steam (donation) | Real animation timeline with onion-skinning |
| Aseprite | Pixel-art frames | Source code free, binary $19.99 | $19.99 one-time | Sprite-first workflow with tags |
| Tux Paint | Kids and Mario Paint feel | Fully free | Free | Rubber-stamp panel that mimics 1992 |
| Pencil2D | Traditional hand-drawn cartoons | Fully free | Free | Bitmap and vector on the same timeline |
| GraphicsGale | Classic pixel animation | Fully free | Free | Onion-skin and palette control from the Windows-98 era |
| OpenToonz | Studio-grade 2D animation | Fully free | Free | The engine Studio Ghibli maintains |
| Sketchbook | Digital sketching for older kids | Fully free | Free | Predictive stroke and full symmetry tools |
Why people miss Mario Paint
Three complaints repeat on Reddit’s r/retrogaming and r/Nintendo threads about the 1992 title:
- No modern sequel from Nintendo. The closest thing is Mario Paint on Nintendo Switch Online, an emulation of the SNES ROM. The mouse peripheral is dead, and playing it on a controller feels wrong.
- The music maker is the real loss. Mario Paint’s fly-swatter bonus round gets the memes, but the composer window (with cats, dogs, and coin sounds as instruments) is what people rebuild in trackers to this day.
- Kids want the same first ten minutes. Parents on r/nintendo describe handing their kids Mario Paint and getting an hour of quiet creativity from a five-year-old. Nothing else opens that fast for that age.
None of the apps below solve all three at once. Krita covers painting and animation. A separate tracker or DAW covers the music side. That’s the trade-off.
Krita – Best for painting plus short animations
Krita is a free open-source paint app that added a proper animation timeline in version 3.0 and has kept building on it. You get onion-skinning, exportable frame ranges, and audio-track scrubbing, which is the closest a free tool gets to Mario Paint’s animator window with modern comforts.
Where it falls short: The learning curve is real. The default brush pack is huge, the UI has floating dockers that feel dense next to Mario Paint’s fixed panels, and the timeline lives on a separate window most kids will never find on their own.
Pricing:
- Free: Everything, forever, on the Krita website.
- Paid: $10 on Steam if you want the same binary with cloud saves and to support the project.
- vs Mario Paint: Free vs the $30 SNES cartridge, and a superset of the paint and animation halves.
Migrating from Mario Paint: No project files to migrate. You are starting a new file. Krita will import your Mario Paint screenshots if you want to trace over them, and it exports GIFs, MP4s, and PNG sequences for sharing.
Download: Krita on Steam · krita.org
Bottom line: Get this if you want one app that covers Mario Paint’s painting and animation for grown-ups. Not the pick for a five-year-old.
Aseprite – Best for pixel-art frames
Aseprite is a pixel-first sprite editor with the tightest animation workflow on desktop. Frames, tags, layers, and per-frame timing all live on one bottom-of-window timeline, and export to GIF, sprite sheet, or PNG sequence is one dialog.
Where it falls short: It only works in pixels. Free-form brushes and pressure sensitivity are not the point. If you want the Mario Paint airbrush and stamp feeling on a huge canvas, this is not it.
Pricing:
- Free: The source code is on GitHub under a source-available license.
- Paid: $19.99 one-time on Steam or itch.io.
- vs Mario Paint: Cheaper than the cartridge in real terms, and the sprite tooling is deeper than anything Nintendo shipped.
Migrating from Mario Paint: Import PNG frames from a Mario Paint recording, drop them on the timeline, and Aseprite treats them as an animation. Palette-swap tools let you match the SNES’s 256-color feel.
Download: Aseprite on Steam · aseprite.org
Bottom line: The best pick if what you loved about Mario Paint was making the little dog walk across the screen.
Tux Paint – Best for kids and the Mario Paint feel
Tux Paint is a free open-source paint program built for children aged three to twelve. The interface is a single window with big buttons on the sides, a paint area in the middle, and a rubber-stamp panel that plays sound effects when you drop stamps. That last part is the closest anything comes to Mario Paint on a modern desktop.
Where it falls short: No animation timeline. No music composer. It is the paint half of Mario Paint, done well and safely, and nothing more.
Pricing:
- Free: Windows, macOS, Linux, Chromebook. No ads, no accounts.
- Paid: A stamp expansion pack is available for a small fee on the site.
- vs Mario Paint: Free, cross-platform, and safer for a small child (no in-app purchases, no network).
Migrating from Mario Paint: Nothing to migrate. Tux Paint saves each drawing to a local folder and lets kids reopen them from a scrollable thumbnail list, which is the same pattern Mario Paint used.
Download: tuxpaint.org
Bottom line: The kid-friendly pick. Install it, close the manual, and hand over the mouse.
Pencil2D – Best for traditional hand-drawn cartoons
Pencil2D is a free cross-platform 2D animation app that puts bitmap and vector layers on the same timeline. Draw a rough with the pencil brush, refine it on a vector layer, and export to MP4. The workflow maps onto the “keyframe then inbetween” logic that classic Disney and Fleischer animators used.
Where it falls short: The paint tools are basic. It is animation-first, and static drawings look better in any of the other picks here.
Pricing:
- Free: Fully open-source under a permissive license.
- Paid: None.
- vs Mario Paint: Same free price today, with a real timeline instead of a nine-frame loop.
Migrating from Mario Paint: Import your Mario Paint frame captures as a bitmap layer sequence. Pencil2D will hold each frame for the duration you set and lets you scrub the timeline the way Mario Paint’s animator wanted to but never quite could.
Download: pencil2d.org
Bottom line: Pick this if the Mario Paint memory you want back is the animation loop, not the drawing tools.
GraphicsGale – Best for classic pixel animation on Windows
GraphicsGale is a Windows-only pixel-animation editor from HUMANBALANCE that went fully free in 2017. It has the tight per-frame layer control that pixel artists relied on for handheld and web-game sprites in the late 1990s and early 2000s, plus onion-skinning and a solid palette editor.
Where it falls short: Windows only. The UI looks and feels like Windows 98 because it basically is. No macOS or Linux port.
Pricing:
- Free: Fully free since 2017.
- Paid: None.
- vs Mario Paint: Free, and gives you an animator window that is closer to Mario Paint’s than anything except Aseprite.
Migrating from Mario Paint: Import a PNG sequence or GIF, drop it on the frame strip, and you have your Mario Paint animation running natively.
Download: graphicsgale.com
Bottom line: Get this if you are on Windows, want pixel animation, and Aseprite’s price is a dealbreaker.
OpenToonz – Best for studio-grade 2D animation
OpenToonz is the open-source release of the Toonz Premium software that Studio Ghibli has used since Princess Mononoke. It is overkill for a Mario Paint replacement, but if the animator window taught you that you actually wanted to be an animator, this is the free upgrade path.
Where it falls short: Steep learning curve. The UI still shows its Italian-studio roots and the terminology (levels, columns, cells) will not match anything a Mario Paint fan already knows.
Pricing:
- Free: Fully open-source, maintained by Dwango with Ghibli’s patches upstreamed.
- Paid: None.
- vs Mario Paint: Free, and the same engine that shipped in Ghibli’s production line.
Migrating from Mario Paint: OpenToonz treats each image sequence as a level. Drop your Mario Paint captures in as a bitmap level and they slot into a timeline.
Download: opentoonz.github.io
Bottom line: Only pick this if you want the Ghibli tool. Everyone else should start with Krita or Pencil2D.
Sketchbook – Best for older kids and digital sketching
Sketchbook is Autodesk’s free sketching app for Windows and macOS with a clean canvas, predictive strokes, rulers, and full symmetry tools. It works well for the 10-and-up crowd that has outgrown Tux Paint but is not ready for Krita’s floating panels.
Where it falls short: No animation timeline. No music. It is a sketch and paint tool, not a Mario Paint replacement in full.
Pricing:
- Free: Fully free on Windows and macOS since Autodesk released it in 2018.
- Paid: None.
- vs Mario Paint: Free, cross-platform, and with much better brushes.
Migrating from Mario Paint: Nothing to migrate. Import a screenshot as a background layer and paint on top if you want to remix a Mario Paint sketch.
Download: sketchbook.com
Bottom line: Pick this if you want a paint app with grown-up brushes that a ten-year-old can still handle.
How to choose
- Pick Krita if you want one app for both painting and animation and you can spend an evening learning the timeline.
- Pick Tux Paint if you are handing this to a small child and want the closest thing to the Mario Paint out-of-box feel.
- Pick Aseprite if pixel animation is the point.
- Pick Pencil2D if you want free hand-drawn cartoon animation and do not care about pixel-level control.
- Pick GraphicsGale if you are on Windows, want to draw pixels, and $19.99 for Aseprite is a no.
- Pick OpenToonz if a Mario Paint memory is what made you want to be an actual animator.
- Stay on Mario Paint (via Nintendo Switch Online) only if you specifically want the composer, since none of these apps replicate that music-window flow.
FAQ
Is there a modern Mario Paint replacement?
Not from Nintendo. The closest single-app match on desktop is Krita, which covers painting and animation. Tux Paint covers the paint half in a way small children can handle. The music composer has no direct replacement in any of these apps, so you would pair one of them with a tracker like LMMS or a DAW like BandLab.
What is the best free alternative to Mario Paint?
Krita for grown-ups who want painting and animation in one app, Tux Paint for kids who want to open the app and start drawing without instructions.
Can I do animation on Windows without paying?
Yes. Krita, Pencil2D, GraphicsGale, and OpenToonz are all free on Windows. GraphicsGale is Windows-only, and the other three are cross-platform.
What was Mario Paint on the SNES?
A 1992 Nintendo release that bundled a paint program, a nine-frame animator, and a five-line-staff music composer, plus a fly-swatter bonus game. The cartridge shipped with the SNES Mouse peripheral in the box.
Can I import Mario Paint files into any of these?
No, because Mario Paint saved to a battery-backed SRAM chip on the cartridge, not a portable file format. What you can do is capture frames from the ROM (running on Nintendo Switch Online or an emulator) and import those PNGs as an animation source.
