What Happened to Bitstrips
Bitstrips started in 2007 in Toronto as a web comic-builder, went massively viral as a Facebook app around 2013, and spun its avatar tech into a keyboard app called Bitmoji. In March 2016 Snapchat's parent company acquired Bitstrips — a deal widely reported at around $100 million — and by July 2016 the original comic-strip app was shut down so the team could focus entirely on Bitmoji stickers inside Snapchat. The comic side never came back; even the standalone Bitmoji app is being folded into Snapchat in 2026. Millions of users' comic archives were orphaned with no successor product.
Bitmoji Is Not a Bitstrips Replacement
Bitmoji kept the avatar builder and threw away the comics. What survives is a sticker generator: one avatar, one panel, a caption baked into preset art. What's gone is everything that made Bitstrips a comic tool — multi-panel strips, scene composition, posing characters relative to each other, your friends in the same frame, dialogue you wrote yourself. If a sticker of your avatar is all you needed, Bitmoji inside Snapchat still does that. If you wanted to tell stories, it never did.
The Best Bitstrips Alternatives in 2026
The test for a real Bitstrips replacement is simple: can you put a recognizable you into a multi-panel story? Preset-avatar tools do it with parts pickers; AI tools do it from photos or a description.
Comicory — comics starring you, from photos
Upload a few photos and the AI turns you into a consistent comic character it can redraw in any scene you write — which is the Bitstrips promise delivered with generated art instead of preset poses. Friends and family become co-stars the same way, and the output is a real multi-panel comic in your choice of art styles, not a sticker. Full disclosure: Comicory is our tool. Photo upload is a paid feature; the free tier casts characters from text descriptions instead.
Bitmoji — if stickers are actually enough
Still the best pure avatar-sticker maker, and free. The honest question is whether you're nostalgic for the avatar or for the comics; if it's the avatar, Bitmoji inside Snapchat is the direct descendant and there's no reason to look further.
Pixton — the preset-avatar comic maker that survived
If you specifically want the parts-picker avatar workflow inside an actual comic builder, Pixton is the surviving example: build avatars, pose them in scenes, arrange panels. It's education-focused and subscription-priced (roughly $99+/year), and everything renders in one house style — but mechanically it's the closest living relative of Bitstrips for Schools.
Recreating the Bitstrips Experience Today
The modern version of the loop is faster than the original. A photo to comic converter gets a character version of you in one step instead of twenty minutes of menu choices, and a comic maker stages multi-panel scenes around that character from a written description — no pose library to scroll. The group-comic trick works again too: add each friend as a character once, then write scenes that put everyone in the same panel. The strips-about-your-friends genre that made Bitstrips a Facebook phenomenon translates one-to-one.