Wick Editor Alternatives for Free Animation and Simple Games

Wick Editor is a free, open source (GPL-3.0) tool that runs in the browser and describes itself on Flathub as a tool for creating games, animations and everything in between. For many students it filled the gap Flash left. The site still loads, so old projects are not lost. The project itself has stalled. The GitHub repository shows the lead developer's last commit on March 3, 2021, and the last merged change of any kind is an automated dependency bump from March 6, 2023. The newest release tag, 1.19.0, dates from December 11, 2020. A user-filed issue titled "Do not issue bug reports" warns that bug reports will not be read, and 156 issues sit open.

That leaves a working editor with no one fixing it as browsers change. If Wick still does what you need, keep exporting copies of your .wick files. If you hit a bug, nobody will patch it. The eight picks below are all live as of November 2026. Two cover Wick's game side, four cover its animation side, one is the paid heir to Flash, and one runs on a phone or tablet.

For a 2D role-playing game rather than a short cartoon or arcade game, our RPG Maker alternatives page covers engines built for that.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Scratch

MIT's Scratch is the most likely landing spot for a student who used Wick in class. Its FAQ calls it a free programming language and online community. You snap code blocks onto sprites instead of typing JavaScript, and costumes double as animation frames. A cartoon and a platformer use the same editor, which is the part of Wick most readers miss.

The web editor needs no install. The Scratch app works offline on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Android, which helps on school laptops with blocked sites. Projects shared to the community can be remixed, so a beginner can open someone else's game and see how it was built. Drawing tools are basic, so many students draw in another app and import the art.

Best for: Kids, students and teachers who want animation and simple games in one free editor.

Pricing:

• Free, with no paid tier.

Watch out for:

• Blocks only. Anyone who liked writing JavaScript in Wick will find no text code view.
• No official Linux app. The Scratch Wiki lists Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Android only.

Official site: Scratch.

GDevelop

If the games were the reason you opened Wick, start with GDevelop. It is an open source 2D game engine where logic is written as events ("when the player touches a coin, add 1 to score") rather than scripts. The download page offers the editor in the browser, as desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux, and as mobile apps for iOS and Android. The project ships often. Version 5.6.287 was tagged on November 4, 2026.

Publishing is where it goes past Wick. The pricing page lets free users post unlimited games to gd.games and export one desktop build and one Google Play build per day. Leaderboards and multiplayer lobbies are built in, so a hobby game can have a high score table without a server of your own.

Best for: Beginners who want to finish and share a real 2D game without writing code.

Pricing:

• Free: 3 cloud projects, 40 AI credits a month, 1 desktop and 1 Google Play export a day, no iOS publishing.
• Silver: $7.99/month or $54.99/year.
• Gold: $13.99/month or $95.99/year.
• Pro: $39.99/month or $399.99/year.
• Education: $3.29/month or $19.99/year per user.

Prices in USD from GDevelop's plan pricing feed, which feeds the pricing page.

Watch out for:

• The free plan shows a nag screen in the debugger and live preview, and does not remove the watermark or allow iOS publishing.
• It is a game engine first. Frame-by-frame drawing is not part of it, so animations need to be drawn elsewhere and imported as sprites.

Official site: GDevelop.

Pencil2D

Hobby animators who mostly drew in Wick and never touched code will feel at home in Pencil2D. It is a small, free, open source desktop app for hand-drawn animation with bitmap and vector layers, onion skin and a plain timeline. Version 0.7.2 came out in March 2026, per its download page.

It runs on old hardware. The page lists builds for Windows 7 and later (64-bit and 32-bit), macOS 10.14 and later, and Linux AppImage, plus packages for Debian, Fedora, Arch, Flatpak, FreeBSD and Homebrew. Legacy builds for Windows XP and macOS 10.7 still exist, though the page warns they lack recent security fixes.

Best for: Learning traditional frame-by-frame animation on a cheap or old computer.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, no paid edition.

Watch out for:

• No automatic tweening. A forum answer from April 2023 states plainly that Pencil2D has no (automatic) tweening feature, so every in-between is drawn by hand.
• No scripting or interactivity. It makes videos and image sequences, not games.

Official site: Pencil2D.

Tahoma2D

Tahoma2D is a free fork of OpenToonz, the open source release of the Toonz software used in studio production. The Tahoma2D site says it simplifies the workspace, adds a status bar with hints for new users, and exports MP4 and GIF without extra libraries. It also handles stop motion with DSLR cameras. Version 1.6.3 was tagged in late August 2026 on GitHub.

Pick it when Pencil2D starts to feel thin: xsheets, effects, vector and raster levels and camera moves are all there. OpenToonz itself is also alive, with version 1.8.0 tagged in June 2026, but Tahoma2D is the friendlier entry point for someone coming from Wick.

Best for: Students ready for a studio-style 2D or stop motion tool at no cost.

Pricing:

• Free and open source.

Watch out for:

• Newer Macs only. The system requirements list macOS 15 Sequoia or later, and Windows 8.1, 10 or 11 in 64-bit.
• The xsheet and level system take time to learn. Expect a slower first week than in Pencil2D or Wick.

Official site: Tahoma2D.

Construct 3

Like Wick, Construct 3 runs in the browser, but it is a commercial game engine from Scirra rather than a volunteer project. Logic uses event sheets with no code needed, and JavaScript is available for those who want it. The free edition on the buy page lets anyone sign in and publish HTML5 games or post to Construct Arcade.

That free edition is a trial in practice. It caps projects at 50 events (25 as a guest), 2 layers and 2 effects, and desktop, Android APK and iOS exports need a paid licence. Schools get per-seat education pricing with a 3-seat minimum on the same page.

Best for: Students and hobbyists who want a maintained browser game editor and can pay a yearly fee.

Pricing:

• Free edition: 50 events, 2 layers, 2 effects, web export only.
• Personal: $129.99/year or $18.99/month.
• Business: $469/year per seat.
• Education: per seat, 3-seat minimum, graduated by seat count.

Watch out for:

• Subscription only, with no lifetime licence. A Construct forum thread titled "Crazy Pricing Model" shows users pushing back on this.
• The 50-event cap is reached fast, so most real projects need the paid Personal plan.

Official site: Construct 3.

Synfig Studio

Tweens were half the appeal of Flash and Wick, and Synfig Studio is built around them. You set key positions and, as the Synfig site puts it, the software calculates the in-between frames. A full bone system rigs cutout characters from vector shapes or bitmaps, and a Skeleton Distortion layer bends images.

It is free under GPL v3 and runs on Windows 7 or later, OS X 10.8 or later and Linux. The latest release is 1.5.5, dated March 22, 2026, following 1.5.4 in January. The site asks for at least a dual-core 2 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM.

Best for: Cutout and motion-graphics style animation where you rig once and pose many times.

Pricing:

• Free and open source under GPL v3.

Watch out for:

• Steep start. Ease of use is its lowest score (3.5 of 5) on Capterra, where reviewers say they needed tutorials before getting anywhere.
• Several of the same Capterra reviews report crashes on heavier files, so save often.

Official site: Synfig Studio.

Adobe Animate

Animate is Flash Professional under a newer name, and it is what Wick copied. Symbols, the timeline, classic and shape tweens and ActionScript-era habits all carry over. The product page lists exports to HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, SVG and Adobe AIR.

Its future was in doubt this year. Adobe announced on February 2, 2026 that Animate would be discontinued on March 1. Two days later it reversed, telling TechCrunch it is "not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate." The app is now in maintenance mode: security patches and bug fixes continue, new features do not, and new customers can still subscribe.

Best for: Animators who need the Flash workflow and file formats for paid or studio work.

Pricing:

• US$22.99/month on the annual plan, billed monthly.
• A free trial is offered; Adobe does not publish its length.

Watch out for:

• No new features are planned while in maintenance mode, so it is a stable tool, not a growing one.
• It is the only pick here that costs money every month just to open your files.

Official site: Adobe Animate.

FlipaClip

Plenty of young animators now draw on a tablet, not a laptop. FlipaClip is a flipbook-style app for that. On the App Store it is at version 5.0.3, with a free tier of 3 layers, blending modes, clipping masks and MP4 or GIF export, and FlipaClip Plus for unlimited layers and PNG sequence export.

It runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 15 or later), on Android, and on Apple silicon Macs through the iPad build. The help center adds that Plus also allows audio import, and that prices are shown inside the app under the diamond icon.

Best for: Kids and teens animating with a finger or stylus on a phone or tablet.

Pricing:

• Free: 3 animation layers, MP4 and GIF export.
• FlipaClip Plus: in-app purchases on the US App Store range from $5.99 to $39.99, for monthly and yearly plans.

Watch out for:

• No games or code. It is for short animations only.
• The 3-layer cap on the free tier gets tight for a scene with a background, a character and effects.

Official site: FlipaClip.

How to choose

When to stay with Wick Editor

Keep Wick if you have a finished project that still opens and exports cleanly, or a class that is halfway through a unit built on it. It is free and the editor still loads at wickeditor.com. Start anything new elsewhere, though. With no code commits since 2021 and bug reports going unread, the next browser update that breaks it may never be fixed.

Frequently asked questions