Stencil AI vs Ghostline

This is the comparison we get asked for most. Stencil AI is built for the references that decide a stencil app — portraits, fur, black-and-grey realism — where the detail has to survive all the way to skin. That is the difference, and it shows immediately.

For context on who is writing this: Stencil AI is used by 5,000+ paying tattoo artists, who have generated more than 194,000 stencils, and it holds 4.6 stars from 187 App Store ratings. Stencil AI is also built by working tattoo artists — a co-founder who tattoos full time, and an award-winning artist and convention judge with three decades behind the machine who sets the quality bar every stencil is measured against.

Written by the Stencil AI team; we make one of the two apps compared here. Every Ghostline figure below comes from its own App Store listing and website, verified 2026-09-25, and every output claim is one you can check in ten minutes by running the same reference through both apps.

The short answer

• Stencil AI is the stronger tool for realism. Stencil AI's Hatching mode keeps the structural outlines, the shadow direction and the fine detail — hair, iris texture, the break between planes — and renders them as cross-hatching dense enough to print and transfer. Three styles cover everything from lettering to hyperrealism.
• And it does more with the stencil once it exists: warp it to a shoulder or arm before printing, measure the placement on skin with LiDAR, place several stencils on one sheet each at its own real size, run a studio with multiple artist seats, work in 16 languages, and start from 1,000+ ready-made subjects.
• Ghostline is cheaper — $5.99 a month against our $13.99 — and it is Apple-only. If budget is the single deciding factor, that is the trade you are making.

Feature by feature

Where the output actually differs

Any stencil tool copes with bold line art — a single contrast pass is enough. The test is a portrait, or fur, or a black-and-grey piece where the tattoo is the shadow.

That is where conversions separate, and it comes down to how much detail survives. The two shortcuts in general use both destroy it, in opposite directions. A brightness cutoff (Curves then Threshold) has no notion of structure, so mid-tones flatten: cheekbones and eye sockets become patches, fur becomes a solid mass. A blur-based pass (invert, Color Dodge, Gaussian blur) erases detail by radius: individual hairs, iris texture and the break between two shadow planes dissolve into soft grey that prints faint. Both are global operations — they treat a pixel in an eye exactly like a pixel in the background, because they cannot tell them apart.

Stencil AI's Hatching mode exists for that case. Mid-tones are rendered as dense cross-hatching, so the shadow structure and depth of the reference survive into a print-ready stencil — not an outline of the subject, but the whole tonal map you tattoo from. Stencil AI's Outline and Standard cover the simpler references, because running a realism engine over a piece of lettering is just slower.

We are not going to characterise how anyone else's software works internally. Take one portrait — ideally one that gave you trouble — and run it through both. Look at the eyes, the direction of the fur, and the edge where light meets shadow. That comparison settles this faster than any feature table can.

Platforms, briefly

Ghostline is iPhone and iPad only, and needs iOS 17.6 or later. Stencil AI runs on iPhone, iPad, Android and web on one account. If you are all-Apple this changes nothing for you — it matters if your studio has an Android tablet at the station, or you prep stencils on a desktop between clients.

Fitting the stencil to a real body

Both apps print at true size. The difference is what happens when the placement is not flat. Stencil AI lets you drag grid points to bend the stencil along a shoulder, ribcage or forearm and then prints it warped, so it lies flat on skin instead of fighting the curve. On LiDAR-equipped iPhones, Stencil AI can also measure the placement area on the body and use that measurement as the print size. Ghostline does not have either of these.

Starting from a library

If a client arrives without a reference, Stencil AI includes 1,000+ ready-made stencil subjects with a guide for each. Ghostline is built around converting a reference you supply.

What switching actually involves

Less than people expect, because there is no library to migrate. Stencils are images and PDFs — whatever you have already made in Ghostline stays in your photo library and files, untouched, whatever you do next.

• Nothing transfers, and nothing needs to. You are not moving a database; you are changing which app you open when a reference arrives.
• Run both for a week. Both apps can sit on the same device. Put the same difficult reference through each and compare the printed result, not the screen.
• Cancel only once you are sure. An App Store subscription runs to the end of the period you already paid for, so there is no reason to cancel before testing.
• One Stencil AI account covers every device. The same login works on iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, so switching device later does not mean switching tool.

What artists say about the output

These are App Store reviews of Stencil AI, quoted verbatim. None of them are from artists who told us they moved from Ghostline — we have no reviews that mention it, and we are not going to imply otherwise. They speak to the thing this page turns on: what comes out.

Common questions

Other comparisons

All of our comparisons live on the comparisons page.

• Stencil AI vs Procreate
• Free converters vs Stencil AI
• Ghostline alternatives
• Ghostline vs Procreate — neither of them us