Procreate vs. The Midnight Gallery: Which Should You Actually Use?
Procreate and The Midnight Gallery are not really competitors — they solve different problems. Here is an honest comparison of both, and why a lot of people end up using both at once.
Comparing Procreate to The Midnight Gallery is a bit like comparing a professional kitchen to a daily meal-prep routine. One is built for producing finished, polished work with total creative control. The other is built to make sure you actually cook — sorry, draw — every single day. Here is the honest breakdown.
Procreate: the professional illustration tool
- Full layer system, blend modes, and a best-in-class brush engine.
- One-time purchase (no subscription), works only on iPad.
- Built for producing finished pieces you control from first stroke to final export.
- No built-in daily structure — what you draw, when, and how often is entirely up to you.
The Midnight Gallery: the daily habit app
- One theme per day, chosen for you — no blank-canvas decision paralysis.
- One attempt, published automatically at midnight to a public community gallery.
- Free, works on iPhone and Android — no iPad or Apple Pencil required.
- No layers or advanced tooling — the constraint is intentional, not a missing feature.
Where each one actually wins
🎨
Try it yourself
You just drew above — the real app gives you a brand new theme every single day. Free to download.
Try the canvas now
Draw something right here — no download needed yet.
If you already know what you want to draw and want full control over the result — commissioned work, a portfolio piece, detailed fan art — Procreate is unambiguously the better tool. Its layers, undo history, and brush customization exist precisely because that kind of work benefits from iteration.
If your actual problem is that you *don't* draw regularly — the sketchbook stays closed, Procreate stays unopened for weeks — the extra power is not helping you. The Midnight Gallery removes every decision (what to draw, when, whether to redo it) so that the only decision left is whether to open the app. That is a completely different design goal, and it is why the two apps do not really compete for the same 15 minutes of your day.
"The best camera is the one you have with you."
— Chase Jarvis
The same logic applies here: the best drawing app is the one you actually open. Many artists use The Midnight Gallery for their daily warm-up and habit-building, then bring the ideas and confidence they build there into Procreate for the pieces they want to polish.
Pro Tip
A common workflow: draw the daily theme in The Midnight Gallery first thing, then if a particular idea excites you, recreate and refine it in Procreate later that day. You get the daily habit and the polished output.
Can I use Procreate and The Midnight Gallery together?
Yes, and many people do — Procreate for deliberate, finished work, and The Midnight Gallery for the daily constraint-driven practice that keeps skills sharp between bigger projects.