Stitchmate vs KG-Chart

How they compare in practice

Feature tables can be unkind to a program from 2000, so it is worth saying plainly what KG-Chart gets right.

KG-Chart is small, fast, and predictable. It opens instantly, it has never asked anyone to create an account, and the $35 you paid a decade ago still unlocks today's version. For designers who chart by hand — placing every stitch deliberately, working from a sketch rather than a photo — that focus is the appeal, and its stitch set goes further than Stitchmate's in one place: Hardanger. It still gets maintenance releases (1.42.8 came out in April 2026), but the developer now calls it a legacy product, has stopped selling new licenses, and has moved on to StitchSketchEx. That successor runs on Windows 11, macOS 13.5+, iOS, and Android, loads KG-Chart files, and has palettes for DMC, Anchor, Cosmo, Olympus, and more, with charts up to 500 × 500. If you already own KG-Chart, "legacy" is not the same as "broken", and plenty of stitchers are happy with a tool that does one thing well.

Stitchmate covers the same hand-charting workflow — brush, fill, line, shape, symbol marks, backstitch — and then widens it in three directions KG-Chart never went. First, platform: it runs in a browser on a Mac, a Chromebook, an iPad, or a Windows PC, and a chart started on one continues on another. Second, photo conversion as a real feature rather than a basic import: live preview, confetti cleanup , and a FLOW score that predicts how the pattern will feel to stitch — a 0–100 score built from fragmentation, locality, optimization, and workability. Third, threads: 60+ brand catalogs instead of a handful of built-in palettes, with one-click remapping when a customer asks for the Anchor version.

Files are the sticking point. KG-Chart's native format isn't something Stitchmate opens, and KG-Chart doesn't write .OXS or .PAT. The workable path for a designer switching is to export each chart from KG-Chart as a Raw Image PNG, which writes every stitch as a 2×2 block of pixels, scale it to 50% with nearest-neighbor resampling, and open the result in Stitchmate's pixel art mode , which maps one pixel to one stitch. Full stitches come across with their colors; backstitch isn't in the raw export and fractional stitches won't survive the scaling, so both have to be redrawn. That is a real cost for a large back catalog, and worth weighing honestly. If keeping those files editable matters most, StitchSketchEx opens them directly.

Export is where the gap is widest. KG-Chart prints auto-divided pages with a color table, stitch counts, and your comments, and previews them. Stitchmate's PDF export is a deep surface — paper size, tile size and overlap, grid colors and line weights, a cover page, custom instruction pages with live placeholders for stitch count and finished size, skein estimates, and your own logo and QR code. The PDF is Pattern Keeper compatible in every paid option, and a single download can bundle the color chart, a black-and-white chart, and the Pattern Keeper version together. If you sell patterns, this is the part of the comparison that matters most.

Thread colors: Stitchmate's color values come from scanned official color cards where we could get them and vetted community mappings elsewhere, tracked per brand rather than guessed. KG-Chart's palettes are the developer's own adjusted colors, which he describes as "intended to be used as a guide". Small differences compound across a 40-color palette.

For pattern sellers: KG-Chart Pro's purchase terms allow commercial use of your work, so existing owners can keep selling charts made in it. Stitchmate's Plus Pass ($24.99 for 30 days or $149 lifetime) includes the commercial license, custom PDF branding, a brandless export option, and skein estimates — see what Stitchmate offers sellers .

For Mac users: KG-Chart is not an option, and Ikuta Software's own answer is a different product, StitchSketchEx. Stitchmate runs in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox on macOS with nothing to install, and the same account follows you to an iPad.

Looking for a KG-Chart alternative? If you're choosing a charting tool now and can't buy KG-Chart, Stitchmate gives you the hand-charting workflow on any platform, with photo conversion and a PDF export built for today's tablets — and the free editor costs nothing to try. If you already own KG-Chart, try it alongside the copy you have.