head to head
Nooka vs Procreate
These two apps get compared a lot and are barely competitors. One is a professional illustration app; the other assembles photos into pages you keep. Here is the honest split, and the cases where each is clearly wrong.
The short answer
If you are drawing or painting, buy Procreate — it is the better drawing app by a wide margin and costs $12.99 once. If you are cutting up photos and keeping the results as pages in books, Nooka fits better. They solve different problems, and plenty of people own both.
Disclosure: Nooka is our app, so read this with that in mind. Every figure below comes from the App Store listing for each app, checked on 11 August 2026. Prices change — confirm before buying.
Side by side
| Nooka | Procreate | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Bagl Limited | Savage Interactive |
| On the App Store since | March 2026 | March 2011 |
| Platforms | iPhone and iPad | iPad only (Procreate Pocket is the separate iPhone app) |
| Price | Free, with an optional Nooka Pro subscription | $12.99 once on iPad; Pocket $5.99 once on iPhone |
| Built for | Assembling photos into scrapbook pages | Illustration, painting, and drawing |
| Where files live | On your device, optional iCloud Backup | On your device |
| Organises work into | Pages, books, and a styled bookshelf | A flat gallery of canvases |
| Photo cutouts | Built in, one of the main tools | Possible with selection and masking, by hand |
| Drawing tools | Simple pens and brushes | Full brush engine, pressure and tilt, custom brushes |
Nooka is free to download, with no ads and no account. Exact Nooka Pro prices are on the pricing page, and Procreate’s are on its own site.
Where Procreate wins
Procreate is the better drawing app, and it is not close. It has been shipping since 2011, it is the tool a large share of professional illustrators on iPad actually use, and its brush engine, pressure handling, and layer controls are what a serious illustration app looks like. Nooka's drawing tools are deliberately simple — enough to doodle in a margin, not enough to paint.
Procreate is also the better deal for anyone who dislikes subscriptions. $12.99 once, with a decade of free updates behind it, against a recurring Nooka Pro subscription. If paying once matters to you, that is a real point in Procreate's favour and no feature list changes it.
So if what you actually want is to draw, stop reading and buy Procreate. This page is only useful if what you want is something else.
They are built around different starting materials
Procreate starts with a blank canvas and a brush. Everything on the page is something you drew, and the app's whole design serves that: brush selection, colour mixing, pressure curves, layer blend modes.
Nooka starts with your camera roll. The first action is importing a photo, and the main tool is the one that cuts a subject out of it so it can sit on the page without a rectangle around it. Drawing is something you do on top of that material, not instead of it.
You can absolutely import photos into Procreate and cut them out with selection and masking. It works, and people do it. It is several deliberate steps rather than one tap, because removing backgrounds is not what the app is organised around.
Procreate has no concept of a book
This is the difference that matters most over months rather than minutes. Procreate keeps finished canvases in a gallery — a flat grid you can group into stacks. That is fine for artwork, which is usually finished, exported, and done.
Nooka is built around the assumption that a page belongs to a book, and the book sits on a shelf you decorate. Covers, spines, titles, and shelf decorations exist because the point is returning to the thing later, not exporting it once.
If you are making a travel journal across three weeks, or a junk journal you add to on and off for a year, that structure is the product. If you are making individual illustrations, it is overhead.
Device support is genuinely different
Procreate is iPad-only. The iPhone product is a separate app, Procreate Pocket, bought separately at $5.99 — so an iPhone-and-iPad household buys the tool twice, and the phone version is the lesser of the two.
Nooka runs on iPhone and iPad from the same purchase, with the same free tier and the same Pro subscription covering both. That matters if you tend to capture material on your phone and finish on a tablet, because both ends of that workflow are the same app.
The Apple Pencil helps both, for different reasons
In Procreate the Pencil is close to essential. Pressure and tilt are what the brush engine is for, and finger painting gives up most of what you paid for.
In Nooka the Pencil improves two specific steps — cutting a subject out precisely, and handwriting that looks like handwriting. Importing, arranging, resizing, and stickers all work fine by touch. It is an improvement rather than a requirement.
Which one is for you
Choose Procreate if
- You draw or paint, and brush feel matters to you
- You want to pay once rather than subscribe
- You work on an iPad and own an Apple Pencil
- You want a mature app with a decade of updates behind it
- Your output is individual pieces you export and share
Choose Nooka if
- Your pages start from photos rather than from a blank canvas
- You want cutouts without doing selection and masking by hand
- You want finished pages kept in books rather than in a gallery
- You want the same app on iPhone and iPad
- You want to style a shelf as much as you want to make the pages
Most people who want both should own both
These are not really substitutes, and $12.99 once plus a free Nooka download is a reasonable place to land. A common pattern is drawing an element in Procreate, exporting it as a transparent PNG, and importing it into a Nooka page alongside photos. Nooka reads transparency fine, so hand-drawn pieces drop straight in.
questions
Frequently asked questions
Is Procreate better than Nooka?+
For drawing and painting, yes, clearly — Procreate has a full brush engine and over a decade of development behind it. For assembling photos into scrapbook pages and keeping them in books, Nooka is built for that and Procreate is not. They are better at different jobs rather than one being better overall.
Can Procreate be used as a scrapbook app?+
It can, and people do. Procreate imports photos, has layers, and can mask out backgrounds by hand. What it has no concept of is books, albums, or shelves, so organising pages over time is something you invent and maintain yourself. It also has no sticker library and no one-tap cutout.
Is Procreate on iPhone?+
Not as such. Procreate is iPad-only. There is a separate iPhone app, Procreate Pocket, sold separately at $5.99. Nooka runs on both iPhone and iPad from a single download.
Which is cheaper, Nooka or Procreate?+
Procreate, for anyone keeping it long term. It is $12.99 once on iPad, while Nooka Pro is a subscription, so it overtakes that within a few months. Nooka's free tier costs nothing indefinitely, but limits you to one book and one canvas. Current Nooka prices are on the pricing page.
Do you need an Apple Pencil for either?+
For Procreate, close to essential — pressure and tilt are most of what the brush engine offers. For Nooka, helpful for two steps: cutting out subjects precisely and handwriting. Everything else in Nooka works fine by touch.
Can you use artwork from Procreate inside Nooka?+
Yes. Export from Procreate as a PNG with a transparent background, then import it into a Nooka page. It behaves like any other cutout, so you can layer, resize, and rotate it alongside photos.
Keep reading: Best scrapbook apps for iPad, Nooka as a digital sketchbook, and Nooka vs Paper.