StylusX drawing app review: Feels like Procreate on Windows

Free license of the app was provided to me for review purposes

StylusX is a new drawing app released in September 2025 on the Microsoft App Store, and this is designed for touchscreen Windows devices, and touchscreen pen displays. It is a one-time purchase of USD 19.99.

Bottom line

This app looks good, is intuitive and easy to learn and use.

The UI is designed to touch-friendly and works well, and palm rejection works great. The UI almost looks and feels like Procreate on iPad, except this app does not support as many finger gesture shortcuts. And even though the app is designed for touchscreens, it supports many keyboard shortcuts.

There's a decent selection of tools available for image adjustment, layer adjustment and selection. The brush library has many good looking brushes, and there's a lot of brush customisation available.

There are some downsides and they are mostly limitations as the app is still new. Artworks cannot be exported as PSD, and TIFF exports do not have layers. There's auto-save for backup, but you'll also need to manually save with a filename.

This app looks and feels polished, but it's still under development so more features may in the future. For USD 20, it's really worth the money. And if you don't like it, you can get a refund within 14 days from Microsoft App Store.

Gallery

This is the gallery page with your recent artworks and folders of artworks. The gallery structure here does not follow the folder structure of Windows. I wish the gallery followed the Windows folder structure because it's easier to manage files that way.

At the bottom right is the current file you're working on that's still open. When you create a new file, you'll be prompted to save that file if it wasn't already saved.

Creating files

When creating a new file, there are several presets available:

• Web/Mobile: Screen size, 4K UHD, 1440P, 1080P, 720P, vertical 1090 x 2340px
• Print (CMYK): A6, A5, A4, A3

It does not seem possible to create a custom canvas size yet.

The nice thing here is you can choose RGB and CMYK colour modes, and various colour profiles for both colour modes.

Workspace

The workspace UI is quite minimalist and should work great even on small 10-inch Windows tablets.

The top left corner has the settings:

There's also pressure curve adjustment. By default there are only two control points, and you have to click on the curve to add a third control point which you can move around.

There are many keyboard shortcuts supported, and from what I see they are quite similar to Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. You can also create your own keyboard shortcuts.

The tools beside the settings are:

• Media & Modes: Add Image, Navigator Window, Liquidfy
• Drawing Assist: 3D Assistant, 2D Assistant, Symmetry/li>
• Effects: Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Perspective Blur, Noise, Sharpness, Bloom, Shadow
• Adjustment: Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Curves, Brightness, Black and White, Invert

Image adjustment options are shown above.

The top right has tools for transform, selection, smudge, eraser, brush, layers, colour palette. The layers and colour palettes can be detached and placed permanently on the canvas.

And just like Procreate, you can also drag a colour from the top right into an enclosed area to for a colour fill, and adjust the threshold for the colour fill.

The layer tools are quite standard. They are

• Rename layer
• Select Alpha
• Mask
• Merge Down
• Fill Layer
• Lock Focus
• Clipping Mask
• Alpha Lock
• Merge All
• Hide Focus
• Reference

Swipe right on the layer and you can lock, duplicate, clear or delete the layer. Visibility, opacity and blending mode of layers can be adjusted.

The brush library has a big selection of brushes, and there's a lot of brush customisation possible. Brushes also support tilt and direction.

There are several colour box options available, e.g. wheel, box, sliders. Below are colour shades and choose shade, tint, tone, colour temperature, complementary tint, complementary shade and analogous. There's also colour history and customisable favourites palettes.

These are some of the selection tools. You can use the magic wand as a fill bucket. And magic wand has adjustment threshold to help fill colours beyond line edges.

Work flow

The digital art workflow you can get with this app is simple and streamlined. Create layers, create on the selected layers. Use the tools for image adjustment, selection, transform, select.

The tools provided by StylusX is quite standard and can be found in other drawing apps, so if you have some experience with creating digital art, you will be able to learn the app very quickly, within a day.

Since this app is designed for touchscreen devices, the workflow is quite similar to drawing apps made for touchscreen devices. E.g. Buttons are big for fingers. Touch controls are located conveniently where your fingers will naturally at, although I wish there's another set of undo/redo button but the left bottom corner.

With keyboard shortcuts, you can work even faster.

As with learning any new apps, it will take some time to learn all the features. I still have not figured out how to exit out from certain modes when I press the keyboard shortcuts by mistake, e.g. exiting from motion blur mode.

Auto-save happens every 30 seconds.

Bugs

For a new app, I've not encountered many bugs. I've had the app crash once or twice, but it's rare and there's auto-save with file recovery.

I noticed the undo keyboard shortcut does not work consistently even with a wired keyboard. The undo finger gesture works more consistently than keyboard shortcut.

Auto-shape detection cannot be disabled with version 1.0.1.

Conclusion

StylusX is an easy and fun drawing app to use. The UI is intuitive and works well on big and small displays. I don't really have major complaints. There are some limitations but this is a new app so hopefully more features will be added. But at the time of review, the app already has most of the common tools needed for creating digital art.

This is an app i can recommend very easily. It provides a lot of value for money. It's great to have another touchscreen-focus drawing app to choose from on Windows.

To learn more about the features, you can read the documentation. There are many software tips that I did not mention.

Availability

To download the app, just visit the StylusX product page on Microsoft App Store.

To learn more about the app, just visit their website and Instagram page.