Douga, and the ones you'd weigh it against.
What Douga is good for, what it isn't, and which of seven other programs to use when it's the wrong shape for your work — and what comes across when you bring a film in from one of them.
This page is written by the person who makes Douga, so check it: every program below links to its own site, and that site is the authority on what it does.
What Douga is for, and what it isn't
Free, with everything in it
Every feature works without paying, and the download is a folder you unzip: no installer, no redistributables, no account, no activation server. The key takes the Douga mark off your exports and that is the only thing it does.
The sheet is the document
In the painting programs the timeline is a panel you open. Here the sheet is the file: cuts, exposure, holds and the camera keys are the document, so retiming is dragging a hold rather than moving keyframes that stand in for drawings. Scenes gather cuts, each keeping its own timing and length, and the whole film leaves as a PNG sequence, a GIF, an MP4 with its audio, or an X-sheet as PDF or XDTS.
The line is a painting program's line
Five brush modes — pen, marker, airbrush, smudge and eraser — and pressure, tilt and speed each shaped by a curve of its own, with a toe so a feather touch still lays ink and a ceiling so a hard press doesn't blow out. The stabilizer pulls the wobble out of a long slow one. Fifteen brushes ship, and the brush creator builds the rest: tip shape, your own paper grain, how the line answers the pen, packed into a .dbrush to hand on.
Change one swatch, recolour the film
Ink and paint remember which swatch made them, so editing that swatch recolours every linked mark across the whole film. Keep the colours in named groups, hand the model to the next film as a .dpal, and it starts on model.
One hand stays on the pen
Hold R and roll the stack like paper. Two fingers tap to undo and three to redo, a twist turns the paper and snaps it level, and the peg bar drags, so you can lay a neighbouring drawing where the arc says it goes and tap it home.
Windows only
Linux and macOS sit under Later on the roadmap, and later means later. If you're not on Windows, one of the free programs below is your answer today rather than something to wait for.
Every other program here is older
Every program below has been in development longer than Douga has existed, several of them by decades. That buys them stability, a plugin ecosystem and somebody else to ask when it breaks, and none of those three are things a feature list shows you.
No vector layers yet
Everything you draw today is pixels, so line work doesn't survive being scaled up after the fact. Vector layers are under Next on the roadmap, which is a plan and not a date.
No rigging yet
The mechanics are in: every layer moves on keys of its own, eased, the way the camera does. What is missing is the tier above them, which is parenting one layer to another and deformers to bend what is drawn. Until those land, cut-out character work belongs in one of the programs below.
No masks or adjustment layers
Clipping, alpha lock and one keyed grade a layer are the whole list of what you can do to a pass once it is painted. In Krita or Clip Studio you mask part of it out and paint it back; here you undo, or you paint over. Everything is 8-bit sRGB end to end, so a background headed for a grade later is happier painted in one of those and brought in.
The left column is on the features page at more length. None of it is worth anything if the right column is describing your work, and if it is, one of these is.
Everything that is in the program
What ships in the free download, which is all of it. The features page takes ten of these at length; this is the whole surface at a glance.
| drawing | |
|---|---|
| Tools | Brush, eraser, fill, line, shape, text and eyedropper, with marquee, lasso, magic wand, transform, hand, and a motion tool that slides a layer along its peg bar. One key each. |
| Brushes | Pressure, tilt and speed shape the line, and the stabilizer takes the wobble out of a long slow one. The brush creator builds new ones: tip shape, your own paper grain, how the line answers the pen, packed into a .dbrush to hand on. |
| Selection | Rectangular, freehand, or everything matching the color you click. Expand, contract and feather the result, then move, scale and rotate what is inside it. |
| the paper | |
| Animation paper | Three peg holes, a field strip and the frame, modelled as paper rather than drawn as a border. Onion skin up to three drawings either side, warm ahead and cool behind, across one layer or all of them. |
| Peg bar | Drag the bar to lay a neighbouring drawing where the arc says it goes, then tap to drop the stack home. The inbetweener's gesture with paper, and the drawing itself is never edited. |
| Scanned paper | Trace to New Layer pulls the line off a scan or a photograph of paper. The drawn marks come through onto a new layer as ink and the paper behind them does not, so a pencil rough arrives as something you can paint under. Line color survives the trip: a drawing worked in red and blue the way animators mark shadow and highlight comes in with those passes still told apart, rather than flattened into one black line. |
| Guides | Perspective and grid guides per cut, with snap on or off, and a sheet frame at 16:9 HD, 3:2 layout, 4:3 TV or full field. |
| timing | |
| Dope sheet | Keys and holds for every layer on one sheet. Drag a hold to stretch it, move blocks between layers, insert or cut time, and expose on ones, twos or threes. |
| Scenes and cuts | Scenes gather cuts, and every cut keeps its own timing, camera and length. The layer stack belongs to the film rather than the cut, so a layer named once is that layer in every shot. |
| Cel bin | Every drawing the film owns, in one place. Put one on a frame and it goes as a reference rather than a copy, so a held background is one drawing however many cuts stand on it. |
| Camera | The export crop moves on its own keys, set, deleted and reset from the sheet. It moves the camera, not the artwork. |
| Motion | Every layer carries its own move inside a cut: translate, scale and rotate on keys of its own, eased between them and held either end. Drag the gizmo on the canvas to drop a key at the playhead, or type the five numbers. Two layers panning at different rates is a multiplane shoot, and one camera cannot spell it. |
| Playback | Play and loop the cut, the scene, the whole film or a marked range, with audio scrubbing under the playhead. Frame rates 8, 12, 23.976, 24, 25 and 30. |
| picture | |
| Layers | Six blend modes, per-layer opacity, alpha lock and clipping. Folders fold away, and a folder's lock, visibility or draft flag covers everything inside it. A draft layer stays on the canvas and out of every export. |
| Effects lane | Every layer carries one inside a cut, beside its exposure and its motion. Tone is the first word in it: a lift, gamma, gain and saturation grade, keyed and eased the way the camera and the motion track key theirs, so one key grades the whole cut and two grade across it. |
| Color | Pick on the wheel, read it as RGB or HSV, and keep it in a managed palette the project carries with it. |
| Palette-indexed paint | On a cel layer every pixel remembers which swatch made it, so editing that swatch recolors every linked mark across the whole film at once. A painterly layer opts out and stays free RGBA. The model travels to the next film as a .dpal. |
| sound | |
| Audio | Several wav or mp3 clips, each on its own row under the sheet with its waveform drawn along it. Re-cue in whole frames, mute one against another, weigh the mix, and the mix you hear is the mix the MP4 carries out. |
| files | |
| Project | One .dga holds every scene, cut, layer and drawing. It is an ordinary zip inside, so even a damaged one opens as a folder. |
| Imports | Images, numbered sequences, animated GIF, video to rotoscope (MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI and WMV built in), Krita .kra with its layers and its animation, wav, mp3, XDTS timesheets, pose packs and color models. |
| Exports | PNG sequence, animated GIF, APNG, and H.264 MP4 with its mixed audio, all built in. The X-sheet prints to PDF or leaves as XDTS for a studio that wants the timing. Whole film or marked range, full size or scaled, with title cards at either end, and it renders while you keep drawing. |
| the machine | |
| Runs on | Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit, on Direct3D 11. A 2.5 MB download that unzips and runs: no installer, no redistributables, no account, no activation server, and nothing to sign in to. |
| Pen and tablet | Any pen that speaks Windows Ink — Wacom, XP-Pen, Huion, Surface Pen — with a Wintab fallback for older drivers. A mouse works, badly. |
| One hand on the pen | Hold R and roll the stack like paper. Two fingers tap to undo and three to redo, a twist turns the paper and snaps it level, a pen flick scrolls the list under it, and sticky Shift and Ctrl latch for a hand that is holding the tablet. |
| If it crashes | A background snapshot is kept while you draw and offered back on the next launch. A save that fails arrives as a choice — retry, or save elsewhere — and never as a loss. |
| Extending | The Effects menu takes a new item for each plugin DLL dropped in the folder. The extra video formats, the update check and the pose packs ship as separate add-ons. |
What's not implemented yet: rigging, vector layers, and any platform that isn't Windows.
Seven alternatives, and who each one is for
Windows drawing programs you'd actually shortlist, nearest to Douga first. The free ones lead because they're what you're most likely already running.
| Program | Cost | Runs on | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Douga | free | Windows | Hand-drawn frames, timed on a sheet |
| Krita | free · open source | Windows, macOS, Linux | Painting, texture, painted backgrounds |
| Pencil2D | free · open source | Windows, macOS, Linux | The least program between you and the drawing |
| OpenToonz | free · open source | Windows, macOS, Linux | A studio pipeline: compositing, effects, scanned paper |
| Clip Studio Paint | paid | Windows, macOS, iPad, Android | Comics and illustration, with animation as part of it |
| Blender | free · open source | Windows, macOS, Linux | 2D that has to live inside a 3D shot |
| TVPaint Animation | paid | Windows, macOS, Linux | Professional hand-drawn 2D, as a business expense |
| Toon Boom Harmony | paid | Windows, macOS | Rigged characters and series work |
That table is the whole shortlist, and every name in it links out. If none of those rows is the film you are making, the download is free and the whole program is in it.
What arrives when you move a film over
Three ways in, and which one you get depends on what your program can write. All three are in the free download and none of them wants a plugin.
From Krita, the layers arrive as layers
A .kra opens as a new film at the painting's own size, or Import › Krita Image pours its layer stack into the film you already have, a cel per layer. Krita's own tiles are read directly, so nothing is flattened on the way in and nothing has to be exported first.
From Clip Studio Paint or OpenToonz, the timing arrives as timing
Both write XDTS, the timesheet the Japanese tools settled on, and Douga reads it. The sheet lands as a new cut with the exposure already on it — every hold and every re-expose where it was, blank drawings waiting under them. Bring the artwork over as a sequence and you are drawing against your own sheet rather than typing it back in.
From anywhere else, the drawings arrive as drawings
Pencil2D, Blender, TVPaint and Harmony all write an image sequence, and that comes in a cel per file, onto the active layer from the playhead, growing the cut if the sequence runs off the end of it. Each cel keeps its filename, so a folder of walk_01, walk_02 is still named that in the cel bin. An animated GIF or a video comes in the same way, with its timing.
Audio, poses, a colour model and another whole Douga project come in through the same menu. The manual lists what is under File › Import in full.