For example, in ToonBoom you can have a brush with a bitmap texture and color it in with a vector layer. It has a good combination of vector and bitmap layers and brushes.

TV Paint focuses solely on bitmap based (mostly frame-by-frame) animation while you can definitely do traditional hand-painted work in ToonBoom.

It depends on how far you want or need to go with more a simulated natural media approach of drawing and painting. It’s a bit like comparing Photoshop to Painter. TV Paint does have more natural feeling media tools, though. You can animate traditional frame by frame and combine these techniques with digital puppets. Harmony is not only a digital puppet animation app – it does far more than that. Harmony Advanced and Premium have bitmap painting tools, however, and quite painterly drawing is possible. Harmony Essentials does NOT offer any bitmap painting tools – only vector tools. I personally have not tried harmony or TV paint, but like I said ToonBoom worked beautifully. It was a great program and worked very well for what we needed it to do. When I was in college (computer animation) we had to take several traditional animation classes as well, and the college I attended had ToonBoom.

I am sure each program has it is special features and such, but when doing traditional hand drawn animation, all the specials are not really needed. I think it comes down to preference in most cases.

Toon boom harmony frame by frame