The Tile Wizard was designed for the main purpose of testing your tiles to see how they look together as they would be in your game.( To help me learn to make pixel art tiles) This program does not actually build map files for your games.
It also allows for basic pixel editing of each tile, undo and redo actions, and saving and loading of palettes you create in the program. These are not the only features. It has two ways to test tiles. Default Mode and Override Mode. Default Mode takes your active tile and tiles it by itself in a corner of the program. Override Mode allows you to individually place any of your tiles wherever you want in the same corner of the program. Also this corner of the program updates automatically every time you edit your tiles so you can see how your editing instantly affects the tiling.
It also has a Color Quickbar for storing 10 colors to switch between with the 1-0 keys or the - and = keys(great for two shortcuts with your drawing tablet) on your keyboard. It was made with the Java programming language and should be cross-platform.
(1) I just finished enhancing the program to support more than 32x32 pixel-sized tiles. 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, and 64x64. You can only use one size of tile throughout each instance of the program.
(2) Also just added was the ability to have as many tiles as you need instead of being restricted to four.
These two new features will be available within an hour of this posting.
Animations are a feature that I will be working on very soon, after adding a new window that you can open to test tiles in a large area( the size of the main program).
I personally am not familiar with graphics programs so I cannot say how these programs differ other than that The Tile Wizard is very simple in terms of editing, but is very helpful in terms of testing your tiles together and making simple edits to get things looking right quickly. There are more features that you can find on my website
http://www.twodimensionalgames.com or on The Tile Wizard Software post of this forum.