When Adobe killed Flash, the browser plugin was the part everyone discussed. The part that mattered to animators was that Flash’s authoring tool — a specific and genuinely excellent combination of vector drawing, frame-by-frame timeline, symbols and tweening — went with it, and Animate never felt like a replacement.
The hole has been there for years. Umoupen is the most serious attempt at filling it that we have seen.
Savonne Draws’ walkthrough — the longest and most practical look at the app currently available.
What it has
- A hybrid drawing system combining raster brushes and editable vector strokes
- Frame-by-frame animation and tweening
- Production tooling: storyboarding, shot sequencing, annotated timesheets
- 3D model import
- Collaborative drawing with real-time synchronisation — invite by six-character code, or public sessions
- macOS and Windows now; iPad and Android planned
- One-time purchase, licensed for up to three simultaneous devices
And a line from the developer worth quoting, given the year: “Umoupen isn’t a product of vibe coding, it’s been in development for many years.”
The hybrid raster/vector system is the real feature
This is the thing almost every other 2D animation tool makes you choose about, and the choice is a genuine trade-off:
Vector gives you editable strokes — change a line’s curve after drawing it, scale without losing quality, and get clean interpolation for tweening because the computer knows what a stroke is. It costs you expressiveness; vector brushes have historically felt like drawing with a pen that has opinions.
Raster gives you the brush feel — texture, pressure, grain, the whole repertoire of a painting app. It costs you editability, and it makes tweening much harder, because a bitmap is a grid of pixels with no structure to interpolate.
Most tools pick a side. Toon Boom Harmony is vector-first. TVPaint is raster-first and gloriously so. Krita’s animation is raster. Having both in one document, with the vector strokes still editable, is the thing Flash did well and the reason people still miss it.
The collaboration feature is more unusual than it sounds
Real-time synchronised drawing, joined by a six-character code.
Nothing in the professional 2D animation space does this. Harmony has a production server and database that is an IT project. TVPaint is a single-user application. Collaboration in animation studios happens by passing files, with all the version confusion that implies.
Six characters and you are drawing in the same document is the Figma model applied to animation, and the applications are obvious once you see it:
- Teaching. An instructor drawing over a student’s frame, live, is a fundamentally better correction than a screenshot with arrows on it.
- Studio review. A director fixing a pose in the actual file rather than describing the fix.
- Collaborative work between animators in different places, which is now most animators.
- Public sessions, which is a jam-space idea nobody in this software category has tried.
Whether it holds up under a 2,000-frame production file is the question. Real-time sync on a painting document is hard — much harder than on a text document or a vector design file — because brush strokes are large, frequent, and order-dependent.
The licensing is the quiet selling point
One-time purchase, three devices. Not a subscription.
For an individual animator this is the difference between a tool and a liability. Adobe’s model means that the moment you stop paying, you lose access to the software that opens your own archive. For a working artist with a decade of files, that is a structural dependency.
Three simultaneous devices is also the right number — a desktop, a laptop, and the tablet you actually draw on.
What to be careful about
It is indie. One developer, or a very small team, years of work, and now a shipping product. That is admirable and it is a bus-factor risk. Before you move a production onto it, find out what the file format is and whether you can get your work out — export to standard formats is the thing that makes a small tool a safe bet rather than a trap.
iPad and Android are planned, not shipped. If drawing on a tablet is how you work, the desktop version with a Cintiq is the current reality.
“Flash-inspired” is a positioning claim, and Flash’s actual strength was a specific symbol-and-library system that made reuse cheap across thousands of frames. Whether Umoupen has that depth — as opposed to the drawing tools and the timeline — is what a long project will reveal and what a demo will not.
Those caveats noted: a hybrid raster/vector animation tool with live collaboration and a one-time price is the most interesting thing to happen in this corner of software in several years, and the category badly needed it.