ABrush vs Thinking Orbs: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of ABrush and Thinking Orbs — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
ABrush
ABrush
AI image generation and editing studio that runs as a panel inside Adobe Photoshop, with 23+ models, ControlNet, LoRA styles and layer-native output.
Key features
- Photoshop-native panel: Generation, editing and upscaling happen on the open document and land on real layers, with no export-import round trip
- 23+ models in one panel: Switch between Stable Diffusion, Flux, Qwen Image and others per stage of a piece rather than committing to one provider
- Targeted editing: Inpaint or regenerate only the region that needs changing, keeping the rest of the composition untouched
- Pro conditioning controls: ControlNet support plus IP-Adapter and reference images for pose, composition and style control
- Custom LoRA styles: Load your own LoRA or style models to keep generations consistent with an established look
- Generation history: Every generation is saved and recoverable, so artists can return to an earlier variation without regenerating
- Shareable presets: Save prompts and settings as presets and share them across a team to reproduce a house style
- Commercial-safe data policy: Generated images belong to the user and customer images are not used for model training
Best for
- A concept artist generating multiple variations of a character directly in the working file and painting over the strongest one
- A retoucher fixing a single element of a composite with inpainting rather than regenerating the whole image
- A studio distributing a shared preset pack so several artists produce work in a consistent house style
- A freelance illustrator using a custom LoRA to keep generated assets on-style with a client's brand
- A designer upscaling and cleaning up a low-resolution asset without leaving Photoshop
- An agency handling commercial client work that needs assurance the images aren't used for model training
Thinking Orbs
Yogesh
Thinking Orbs is a lightweight React library of animated orb status indicators for AI interfaces such as thinking, searching and compacting.
Key features
- State-Based Orbs: An Orb component with states like reasoning, searching, working, retrying, compacting and waiting to mirror what the agent is doing.
- Zero Dependencies: The React orb needs nothing but React and the plain JS version needs nothing at all, at about 3.8 KB gzipped.
- Customizable Props: Control variant, size, speed, density, dot size, tilt, pause and screen-reader label to fit any interface.
- Opt-in Shapes and Renders: Import extra shapes like cube and renders like halftone separately so only used code is bundled.
- Flexible Installation: Install from npm, pnpm, yarn or bun, or copy the component into a project with shadcn.
- Tintable with CSS: Color orbs with text-* utility classes so they match the host UI theme.
- Interactive Playground: A web playground to preview all states, shapes and renders before integrating.
- llms.txt Support: Publishes an llms.txt so coding assistants can integrate the library correctly.
Best for
- Chat Interface Status: Show a thinking or reasoning animation while an LLM responds.
- Agent Progress Display: Indicate searching, working or background-task states in an agentic coding UI.
- Context Compaction Feedback: Visualize compacting states when conversation history is summarized.
- Retry and Waiting States: Signal retries or waiting-for-input states with distinct orb variants.
- Design System Components: Add a polished AI loading indicator to an in-house React component library.
- Prototype AI Products: Quickly drop a refined status animation into demos and prototypes.
