For over twenty years , The Ugee is known for offering good drawing tablets for the beginner digital artist at an affordable price.

The cheapest drawing tablets I know with good reviews are by Ugee. You can get a Ugee m908 tablet with 10 x 6.25″ working area for a little less than $50.

For beginners, You could blow your entire budget on the cheap Ugee tablet and then just learn to do digital art on free drawing programs.

The good news is that there are several good free programs cater to digital painting, offering a range of features and functionalities. I have listed them below for your review.

All of these can be used with your ugee drawing table so just look through them, and pick one you like.

6 best free drawing programs for a cheap ugee tablet

These are some good free art programs to use with Ugee tablets for digital painting.

1. Krita

Krita is a powerful and feature-rich painting program, with a variety of brushes, layers, and tools for professional-grade artwork.

It’s free, open-source, and works well with ugee tablets, offering great customization for stylus pressure and tilt sensitivity.

Krita has a few performance issues when working on huge file sizes. Other than that it’s pretty good with a great brush engine.

It’s available for Windows, MacOS, linux and Android devices.

2. Medibang Paint

This one is a favorite of manga artist due to it’s simplicity and and has a good variety of tools you need to create an art. It’s not open source but it’s still free.

It’s strongest points are how lightweight it is, the fact that it’s multiplataform, and it’s free “cloud service.” This means that you could be working on any device and continue your project in any other.

Say you sketch in your Ugee UT2 Android tablet and finish in your Windows laptop.

Medibang Paint is available for Windows, MacOS, Android and iPadOS.

3. FireAlpaca

FireAlpaca is free desktop software for Windows and Mac — no mobile app version.

It’s a lightweight, simple program that will run okay on a low–spec computer and give decent results. That’s why it’s so popular, the barrier of entry is very low.

It’s intuitive and easy to use, has lots of tools available without feeling overwhelming or bloated. once you learn it other programs would be easier.

I’d personally recommend FireAlpaca, since it has a built-in brush stabilizer. In addition to digital painting tools, it also features comic book templates.

4. Mypaint

Mypaint has some good things, like brush engine, lots of nice default brushes, storyboarding, and the infinite canvas.

The canvas is handled in a different way, you start with a huge textured canvas, and then you later decide the final size. The interface is simple but very different to other apps, so it could take some time to get used to it.

The things i don’t like is that it seems it can’t make selections, and it can’t transform, and i really need that because i’m usually changing the position, size, and shape of things in the canvas so i would need to redraw a lot in this app.

It’s free and catered for digital painting, available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but if you wanna use it for comic design then you have no choice but to use another tool along with this one.

5. GIMP

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. As the name suggests, it is like Photoshop, the photo editing software.

You can make full comics with GIMP alone, and nothing else needed. It has lots of tools for drawing and editing, but might require a bit of a learning curve.

But GIMP is an image editor first and foremost, even if artists tend to use it for painting, so it’s great for post-production mostly.

I don’t draw with Gimp, but I do use it to for comic book coloring. If you want a free photoshop alternative, consider it.

It’s available for Windows, MacOS, and linux computers.

6. Inkscape

Inkscape is a free vector program that perfect for creating scalable vector graphics, like patterns, logos, illustrations, or geometric designs, etc.

It’s a bit different from raster-based drawing programs but can work very well with an ugee tablet for line art.

So if you’re looking for vector look, go for it. No questions asked.

It’s available for Windows, MacOS, and linux computers.

Conclusion

Any good graphics software mentioned here will work well with an Ugee tablet(or any other tablet), what you need to figure out is what software will allow you to accomplish what you want to do.

Krita is the best I have used, It can do anything really. There is just a slight learning curve if you have never worked digitally before .

For beginners, user-friendly options like FireAlpaca or MediBang Paint are excellent choices. They provide powerful tools without overwhelming features, easing the learning curve.

For mobile android drawing apps, ibis paint is good, you could even try MediBang paint.

I hope this is enough info to get you started into the world of digital art programs.

Don’t be scared to look up any commonly used free software and experiment, every artist is different and not everyone likes the same thing.

Explore More: The Ultimate UGEE Drawing Tablets Overview of 2025