I am a member of a lot of art websites now. I joined weasyl when it first started a while back. Some of my friends might know that I strongly urged everyone to move from FurAffinity (FA) to Weasyl, because FA was the worst of all furry art websites. I'll resume beating that dead horse later. For now, I think some perspective is necessary. Since I am a member of so many art sites, I am in the unique position of being able to review them all in comparison to each other.

Note:

This review will focus on the features, format, and usefulness of the websites.

Communities can change, so for the purposes of this review, they will not influence the quality of a website. The quality of the community of that website will not be mentioned unless some mechanic of the website encourages unpleasant behavior.

I will certainly forget some features on this list. If you spot an important feature missing on this list, feel free to mention it in the comments.

"Post" and "Submission" might be used interchangeably

"Follow" and "Watch" might be used interchangeably

"Notes" and "Messages" might be used interchangeably
You can compare the format quality of the site's journal system by how nice this journal looks

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Tumblr: This is not strictly an art site, but it earns a unique position on this list.

Tumblr has a relatively minimalist design.

The only important things user can do is to make posts, follow another user's posts, like posts, of reblog posts as their own post.

Users cannot leave a comment on a post

They can only reblog the post to their watchers and type their comment within this new post

All of the posts are shown in a single stream feed

The posts are not divided into pages. Instead the website shows posts in a bottomless webpage. The user can scroll down indefinitely loading older posts.

These qualities would infuriate me on most other websites, but together they make tumblr unique.

With no ability to leave comments on the original post, tumblr does not emphasize community like most sites.

Tumblr is a site for quickly browsing through art shared by others and to share what you like if you want.

I like this because there is no obligation to comment on your friend's art or clean up alerts that have been accumulating.

Users can customize their tumblr archive to decide how they want other users to see their archive of posts.

Tumblr is streamlined, relaxing site to simply scroll through posts

Furaffinity: This website is the barest bones of a furry art community site.

FurAffinity has most of the essentials for an art site:

Users can customize their profile by typing in it.

A list of their other online accounts can be made in the contact information box

Users can watch other users

There is an alert system that shows new posts from other users on a user's watchlist

The alerts are listed in pages chronologically grouped by the days they were posted.

The alerts stay until the user selects and deletes them

There is an "invert selected" button to make this process quick while leaving the posts that might be interesting

Alerts are split between artwork and journals/favorites/watches.

Users can post journals

Users can leave comments on any kind of post and reply to these comments

Users can leave comments on profiles called "shouts"

Users can send private messages to other users and privately respond to notes sent by others.

Users can add posts to their favorites

Users have separate galleries

The normal gallery is for artwork posted by that user

The Journal gallery is for past journals

The favorites gallery is a list of posts from others the user liked and added to this list

The scraps gallery is like the normal gallery but is intended for work the user considers to be less important

Users can post literary submissions

FA has the worst literary format. You have to download stories to read them. So if you want to read some porn without putting it on your hard drive, then you're out of luck.

The only way the story can be read on the site is if the user submitted it as a .txt file or if they paste the words into the description section.

The format screws with line spacing and tabs. Combine this with the proper coding BS of .txt files, and the result is most of your stories being giant blocks of text or certain characters changed into grawlix.

Users can post pictures or photos

Users can post flash animations or music

Users can search for artwork on the site

There is a tag system

Tags are words that artists add to their posts that list individual components or aspects of the post

When a word is used in the search tool, all the posts that have the tag of that word is displayed to the user

Busy artists often don't tag their work meaning it cannot be found easily by using the search tool.

There is a forum but it's been neglected so much, arachnophobics get scared off by all the cobwebs.

FurAffinity is barely function and the rarity of updates suggest the site staff have little care to improve the user experience.

Most other websites have the features FA does so this will be assumed from this point.

Inkbunny: This site is very solid furry art site.

Like most art sites, it can be described as a massive upgrade from FA because it has a lot more helpful features.

The alert system

The alert system allows users to sort the alerts by artist, popularity, or by oldest first

It lacks an "invert selected" button unfortunately

The tag system is massively improved

If the artist lacks the patience of clairvoyance of putting every applicable tag on their post, users can add "suggested tags"

More tags on posts make searching easier

When submitting something, the artist must fill in tag boxes for "Genders", "Species", and "Themes/Kinks" rather than just one box which slows down the submission process.

In the same way posts list all tags for that post, galleries go further by having a collapsible list of tags of every post within that gallery.

Streams can be posted

On FA you can just spam user's journal alerts to remind them that you are going to do a stream or are doing a stream. This kind of submission eliminates the need for these journals.

The submission has a countdown clock to the time the stream will start

The post directly links users to your stream

Literary submissions are better.

The text of literary submissions can be typed or pasted during the submission process to fix any formatting issues

Literary submissions accept a variety of document formats

The story posts have their own story viewer on the site no matter what the document file type was

The readers can scroll down the story or hit the next page button to make it more like a book.

Character sheets can be posted

There are a separate kind of submission that has its own gallery.

This is great for users that have lots of characters

The favorite system has a 3 star system

On each post there are three buttons (1 star, 2 star, and 3 star). Each adds the post to the user's favorites, but users can view their favorites sorted by how many stars they gave them.

This is the closest thing to folders of favorites any furry art site has, so I think it's worth looking into.

Profiles can have a paypal button for donations

The site background can be changed to the user's choice. Mine is cloudsdale from MLP FIM.

The site mascot icon in the corner can be changed. It's always a pink bunny, but you can choose which one you like the most.

Users can add each other as friends

Friends can see certain posts that the artist has specifically made exclusively visible to friends.

Artists can limit the visibility of their posts to their friends or even just themselves

There is a submission folder system called "pools"

Artists can put any post into any of their folders

Posts can be placed into multiple folders

Artists can post mature "cub" artwork. No mature human artwork can be posted for legal reasons because of this.

Users can list certain tags they wish to block (make invisible to them). This helps those users that don't want to see the cub art if nothing else.

Tags can be blocked in all circumstances or only when the artwork is mature depending on the wish of the user.

Inkbunny doesn't seem to be making any changes, but it hardly needs any. As it is, Inkbunny is a well rounded furry art site. While I am hesitant to admit this opinion, at the moment If think Inkbunny is functionally the best furry art site.

SoFurry: Best place for Furry writers

SoFurry has a lot of features Inkbunny does

There is a well implemented folder system

Users can suggest tags

There is a tag filtering system

Art streams can be posted

The ability to add other users as "friends"

SoFurry has other features

Sofurry now has its own chat system for instant messaging. While interesting, this doesn't seem necessary since most users probably already have instant messaging accounts and prefer to use those (I do at least). This might leave the chatrooms a bit empty.

Sofurry has an amazing group system

Each group has their own forum, news announcements, and chat room.

Users can add posts they find to the group "pool" (basically a favorites list).

Sofurry has the best profile format I have ever seen. The profile itself has unique features

Users can have multiple avatars uploaded

The user picks which avatar they want to use for the time allowing for easy switching

Users can have separate mature and general avatars

Users that have turned on the option to see mature art will see the user's mature avatar instead of their general one

Users can have lists of tags and kinks

This works with the tag system and is very similar to the kink list F-list has where users can share which kinks they love, like, tolerate, or hate.

Users can have separate mature profile details that are visible only to those with mature visibility turned on.

The profile shows what groups the user is in.

There is an achievement system tied with user profiles

The achievement system encourages site participation

I've seen these systems on other sites and question their usefulness. Participating in a community site should be a rewarding activity already without having to use artificial reward systems.

The site has a unique alert system

All the alerts of new posts of any kind are in a single chronological list divided into pages.

When the user checks these alerts on their watchlist, they are all listed at once, but there are tabs for each post type (such as journal, story, music, etc). When the user clicks a tab, it filters the submissions so only the type of submission for that tab is displayed

Users can choose to get custom alerts for things via RSS.

I have no clue how this works, but like many things listed here, I think it's still a cool idea worth looking into.

Along with stream submissions, the site has it's own market so users can browse those offering trades or commissions.

Users can give posts a star rating from 1 to 5. I'm not sure why the site has this subjective rating system feature to be honest.

The site has the best literary features I've ever seen.

The text editor on the site has proper formatting like colors, bulleting, and indentation.

Users can download literary posts as epub files if they want to read them on e-readers

The site has a readability plugin on the side on literary post pages

Readers can bookmark their place on literary submissions

The folder system works with posts and allows the artist to make a sequence of posts that users can subscribe to individually (so you can get alerts on the one story series your favorite author writes) and easily navigate to read or view them in order.

Sofurry is definitely the best art site for writers. It has been undergoing a lot of updates recently, so I look forward to seeing where it goes from here. It too, is a good art site.

Weasyl: A new growing furry art site

With all the other features I've mentioned that other sites have, Weasyl seems less impressive. But it still has a lot more features than FA does. It has a lot of features mentioned previously.

There is a well implemented folder system

Users can suggest tags

There is a tag filtering system

Art streams can be posted

The ability to add other users as "friends"

There are character profile submissions like Inkbunny's character sheet submissions

The literary submissions can be typed in rather than submitted via a document file

The site does have a couple of unique features.

There is a collection system

The system is meant for dual ownership of a picture. On most art sites, the commissioner and the artist post a copy of the same picture. The viewers don't know which picture on which to comment or add to their favorites, and the website has to store twice the files on their servers.

While I never considered this to be a big problem, Weasyl attempts to fix it by having collections

The artist (or commissioner) uploads the post normally and the commissioner (or artist. I've seen this go both ways) sends a request for the post to be added to their collections gallery.

If permission is granted, the post is added to the collections gallery of the other party, and both parties on the post in a weird way.

The system does have obvious flaws.

The uploader of the post gets control of making the description of the post

they get all the alerts for the comments on the post

the other party does not get these alerts (as if it isn't their post like it should be)

and I think the original uploader can take down the post which would taken it out of the other party's collections anyways.

So the person that has the picture in their collections has just as much control over the post as someone that has it in their favorites does.

I still think it's an interesting idea, and a unique feature that could have some potential with a bit of work. But at the moment user's don't have a reason to use it.

Literary submissions accept google docs.

I haven't tried this, but it sounds like a feature sent from heaven. No other art site has this feature, and they really should.

The site isn't much better than Inkbunny or SoFurry, but like SoFurry, the site staff are working hard to add more stuff to the site. So I look forward to seeing where it goes too. I think it has a lot of potential.

DeviantArt: The giant among online art communities

I am hesitant to put DA on this list at all because of the massive amount of features this place has bursting from every seam. But I'll just list the features I think are worth noting.

The group system.

SoFurry already has a nearly flawless group system, but DA has one too.

The site feature that lets artists sell prints of their work from the post page itself.

Useful premium features for those that pay for premium

I've never used these, but they look really handy.

Most importantly is DA offers tons of features to non paying customers so it's not just a half functional site like writing.com.

The gallery organization tools.

I can't stress how amazingly useful these are so pay attention.

Users can go into their galleries and drag posts around to rearrange them like icons on a desktop. (Super bloody useful. All art sites should do this)

The folder system lets users create a new folder just from a little sidebar without having to go to a special folder creation page (again like on a desktop)

Users can just click and drag posts into folders to organize them or move them there from time of posting. (there are multiple solutions to do things like on a desktop)

Premium users can make subfolders.

Users can click, drag, and rearrange their favorites. (this is also super bloody useful)

Users can create folders to organize their favorites (This is important all other art sites out there. Make a note of this one)

Users can drag favorites to these from their favorites gallery, or add them from the drop down arrow on the little favorite button on each post)

Great watch system

Users can add a user to their friends list when they watch them, but they can have multiple friend lists to keep track of them. For example, I have a list of just artists that draw pretty dragons. Functionally, this is purely for the sake of organization to help the user remember why they watched another user in the first place

When the user chooses to watch another user, from a dropdown checklist, they can choose exactly what they want to watch. For example, some artists just draw pretty stuff, but I don't want to see their journals. I can check that I do want to see submissions only.

You can even use this to add an artist to a friend list like "artists to check" then choose to receive no notifications from them. Then you can go back to this list to find all those artists that have galleries you want to explore. This is a helpful feature to have as crazy as it seems.

Great alert system

Users can choose to have alerts sorted by date or by the artist that posted them

The user can choose to have alerts stacked by either of these sorting methods. So the user can have a stack of alerts for each artist they can look at one at a time.

If users don't want to have stacked alerts, they can choose to have unstacked alerts like every other art site.

Instead of those stupid check boxes, users can cut out the middle man and just hit the "X" button in the top right corner of the post to remove it from their alerts.

Users look at posts and remove the notification of the post, from the post page itself. When they do that, the site sends them to the next post, at which they can leave a comment or whatever before hitting the "remove notification" button to send them to the next one. It's streamlined and awesome.

This alert system allows users to keep track of way more artists than any other art site does. But this creates the issue of being overwhelmed with alerts. At time of writing, I have about 5,000 notifications on DA. I honestly clear out these notifications on the other art sites much more frequently because on DA, the task is much more daunting with the obligation of leaving comments for a bunch of friends. This might just be a fault of my own behavior, but DA's notification system is really worth looking into.

On the notification page, the user can see the upcoming birthdays of friends.

DA also has a tag system, but I don't know how it works because unlike all other sites, it doesn't actually show the tags even to the artist (or author in my case) that posted it.

DA has a chat system too, and I question the purpose of it just as much as that of the chat system sofurry has.

There is a "muro" system. This is basically the picture equivalent to the text editor for posting. Users can draw something in this site tool itself then post it.

I don't see the point to most of those text editor posting systems. I prefer to use my own tools. They will always be better than the tools the website offers because the creators of the tool specialised in making it. The creators focussed completely on making that system as useful as possible. Every text editor in art sites is severely stripped down. But I didn't mind them, because if I ever had to use them, I could just cut and paste my work. But you can't do that with photoshop (I'd assume). So what is the point of this system that is barely an upgrade from MS paint that you can't even use offline?

There is a badge system in which users can buy badges with points for one another, or just send each other the free Llama badge.

This is very similar to the Achievement system on other websites, and like that system, I find the badge system to be an unnecessary annoying feature.

DA has this interesting feature called Sta.sh

On Sta.sh users can create draft submissions and leave them there to post later. (I guess this is helpful if you run a periodic webcomic or something and want to post it exactly at a certain time).

Users can write submissions here using and extensive text editor that rivals that of SoFurry.

Users can use Sta.sh to store 2 gigs (more if premium) of uploads before submitting them. This is probably why it's called stash.

The Sta.sh system works like a massive system for draft submissions that aren't finish or ready to be posted for some reason. It's kind of cool, and handy for some people I suppose.

Now despite the praise I've given this feature, I don't actually like it. While it might help some users with posting procrastination problems or those with a regular posting schedule, I don't find it to be very helpful personally. That's fine. DA has lots of features I don't find useful. But unlike those, DA forces users to use this Sta.sh system. This means users have to waste time posting it to this stash thing THEN getting to posting it to the site like normal. A system meant to streamline posting made it more cumbersome. They wanted users to use this as storage so they would get used to using this system for posting to DA exclusively. For writers, they want them to actually compose their work in this stash system rather than the word processing program of their choice. That's really ballsy and stupid to assume you operate something that users use exclusively to all other competing tools. It doesn't help them. It makes you look like a dick. Let users choose how they want to handle their content and web experience. Just make it a smooth process all the way around.

Deviant Art has been around for a while. It has become enormous. With the multimillion user community it has, the name DEVIANTart no longer seems appropriate. I'd called it "Default Art" since it's probably the largest art community website on the Internet.

But because of this position of fortune, DA has had the time and resources to add all kinds of crazy features for its users. While I love a lot of them, there are so many that I would call the end result a complete mess. The site manages to be very easy to use and navigate, but there are tons of odd features clinging off of everything like toys on a baby's activity center.

I've pointed out several features DA has that completely baffle me. I suppose this is the risk one takes when setting out to make a bunch of features for users. But it's important to keep in mind what users will find useful.

I still find DA to be my favorite art site. I just don't use it much since it doesn't have mature furry art. But for general art, I think it is still the best despite the ribbons of useless features strung all over the website.

VCL: The ruins of an ancient online furry civilization.

I'm not really sure why I'm including this in the list. I'm not a member and I rarely use it. But I've gone too far to leave a couple of straggling opinions behind.

VCL claims to be "The Largest Furry/Anthropomorphic Artwork Site on the Internet." when it shows up in a google search. I'm sure it was long ago back when SoFurry was called YiffStar, and my art was only made in my free time at elementary school. But now I doubt it still holds this title. In fact on the website homepage it has the word "largest" crossed out followed by "(hahaha, no)".

The search function is no longer operational. Instead one must use google search to find work in site's directories.

The site doesn't have much in the way of features. It's basically just an art gallery arranged like an old internet html index page. Users can upload art with a description and have it arranged into an index… directory.. thing. That's about it really as far as I can tell.

It has an artist directory. In which one can find countless colored pencil furry artists that submitted lots of great work in the early 90's but having long since gone silent.

Apparently the website is still operational and still in heavy use. New art is being submitted constantly. But with the huge easily accessible gallery of work from decades ago, the place still feels like a time capsule of furry art.

Whenever I visit the website, I feel like I've just walked into an ancient city, still intact but long since abandoned. A sense of mystic awe and wonder as I gaze at what was once a great empire, now a quiet towering shell, neglected by man as the relentless sands of time march on.

Maybe I should join or donate to the site. Soon the homepage might as well read "my name is ozymandias…"

e621: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

Ugh… I've gone from greatness to the sewers in the space of a single line break. I don't want to dwell on this site too long. I'm not a member and I've rarely used it. But I want to make this as complete as possible. So even if my opinions of this place are terrible, I might as well put them with the rest. Keep in mind my ignorance of the site's policies. So correct me if I get something wrong.

If you want the short version of my opinion, this comic sums it up very nicely. http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5456887/

The website has an enormous catalogue of furry art. I think the reason for this is that users can upload art even if they are not the artist. They can put the source the art is from, but I often don't even see as much as that. So art can just be taken from wherever and posted here. And all the pages have ads generating income on them even if the poster of the artwork didn't own it. I'm not sure how legal this is, but earning income from rule34 commissions, is technically illegal under copyright law, so who knows if this place will ever get sued.

The huge problem I have is that the source of the art is not required and there seems to be little to no verification required to prove whom owns the art. I don't like copyright law, but failure to properly source one's material feels like an internet crime to me. And the mechanics of this place facilitate this gathering of other people's artwork while the site site earns advertising revenue off of it. But I only have wild speculations of rampant art theft on this site, so don't take my word for it.

The only compliment I can give to this place is the tag system. Users can add tags to work no matter how minute or inaccurate they are. There are a ridiculous number of tags on any post. You can find what art was drawn in black and white, or every picture that contains a character wearing a necklace. You could have a g-rated picture of a cartoon dog with the tag "gay" even if it doesn't apply to the character. While I'm sure this probably irritates the artists, it gives this site the best search results I've ever seen for furry art even with the flaws.

The website is probably popular because unlike most furry art sites, mature art is visible whether or not the user is a member of the website or not. So for teenagers or whoever wants to see furry porn with as little effort as possible, this is the place to go. Ethical issues aside, this is the easiest place for non furries to find furry art. That's where trouble starts.

The place seems like a casual porn hub to me. Artists can't write journals or give commision prices. They can just post art. This cripples the possibility of making a good art community. This is a site for people that want to find art, not a site to give the artist appreciation for their work or for artists and viewers to enjoy each other's company.

This viewer first, artist second framework doesn't seem to be attracting pleasant users. The website sits along with 4chan for loathsome places of the internet. With a userbase of people new to furry porn or those that don't care about the artist, the comments are worse than youtube's. A day browsing the comments on this site could bring any humanitarian to the brink of suicide.

This site shows what bad things can happen without a 18+ art filter for guests. This is why on other art sites, you have to be a member to view mature art. Otherwise the site becomes the fast one stop shop for people looking for porn. People looking for porn is fine. Many of the above art sites are practically founded on that. But there's a difference between an art community with porn, and a bunch of people looking for porn giving their opinion on it. This is one reason why Tumblr is better without a comment system. e621 wins the first place "most detrimental comment system" award. Without the comment system, it would be a decent site.

If the stars have aligned under a blue moon tonight, maybe someone on the site staff might see this journal. I hope this comparison from my perspective is at least somewhat educational.