If you love design, you have probably heard of Coolors. Coolors is a random color palette generator that helps you create and collect color palettes.
The tool is quite popular among designers of all kinds. It is used in many design fields such as graphic design, UX design, interior design, game design, brand design, et cetera.
Coolors definitely helps you through the color palette generation process. However, in your design journey, you will find that you need more than Coolors.
Coolors can appear more like a game rather than a serious design tool. Clicking on the spacebar to create random color palettes, although fun and sometimes effective, can feel unfocused.
The other thing to note is that Coolors was also founded less than a decade ago. Even though that makes the app extremely innovative, it has fewer customization options compared to software created by more established companies.
Additionally, the free version of Coolors can be very cluttered because of the ads. To access Coolors Pro, the ad-free version with full functionality, you have to sign up for the $3/month subscription.
All these factors often push users to look for alternatives. In this article, I am going to discuss some of the best Coolors alternatives you can try.
Take a look.
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Best Coolors Alternatives
1. Adobe Color CC
Adobe is a well-established company known among designers globally for being the industry gold standard. Over the decades, Adobe has released a slew of digital products.
One of these products, the free web-based application Adobe Color CC, was initially released in November 2006 as Adobe Kuler. Adobe Color CC is a color palette generator just like Coolors.
From its early days as Adobe Kuler to the amazing application that it is today, Adobe Color CC has maintained and perfected a few great characteristics that help it stand out from the pack.
For one, unlike Coolors, the fully functional version of Adobe Color CC is completely free to use through color.adobe.com.
Adobe Color CC’s classic signature feature is its color wheel. This feature has been there since the beginning and it’s what distinguishes this web application from its competitors.
Coolors is quite simple and bare-bones. However, Adobe Color CC’s Color Wheel allows you to make highly technical and aesthetic choices for your color palette construction.
For example, using the Color Wheel, you can work with the following three different color models: RGB, HSB, and LAB. Within the color models themselves, you have incredible freedom while creating your color palette because of the granular HEX color codes functionality.
The precision offered by Adobe Color CC’s Color Wheel makes it ideal for creative professionals, design enthusiasts, and committed artists. This color wheel also allows you to generate color-blind-safe palettes, just like Coolors.
One more great thing about using Adobe Color CC is the ability to work seamlessly with other applications within the Adobe Creative Cloud system, such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, et cetera.
Coolors was created in 2014. In contrast to Coolors, Adobe has been around for decades during which it developed a great number of applications.
Adobe Color CC is a great choice for professionals who are already plugged into Adobe’s ecosystem.
2. Paletton
Paletton is a free color palette web application tool. Its slogan is, “In love with colors, since 2002.”
Formerly known as the Color Scheme Designer, Paletton emphasizes its accessibility to users of all design skill levels. Just like Coolors, it is very easy to use and indeed accessible.
Since its inception, Paletton has developed a very special way of approaching color palette construction. This is different from Coolors, which although great, is still perfecting what makes it unique.
Paletton emphasizes an artistic, intuitive approach that both delights the user and grows their skill. Simply pick a color you are interested in and go from there.
Use that single color to evaluate various possible color schemes using its unique color scheme designer and color scheme generator. These Paletton color schemes include monochromatic, triad, tetrad, complement, and free.
You can then use the single color that you chose, your newly generated color scheme, and Paletton’s color wheel picker to explore and produce various color palettes! While Coolors also generates color palettes, it doesn’t allow you nearly as much control throughout the process.
The Paletton Color Wheel isn’t just any kind of color wheel. It was uniquely designed for Paletton users of all skill levels to enjoy the palette selection process and achieve their color design goals.
One of the best things about Paletton is how it can be used within a classroom setting to teach art and design. This is because of its various fun yet professional features.
It is ideal for teaching because it grants control over these features to users of all skill levels, from professional designers to new artists and curious beginners. Enjoy!
3. COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers is a lovely online community where creatives from around the world share artistic concepts, especially color palettes. It’s a great alternative to Coolors if you are looking for a thriving community of design enthusiasts.
With COLOURlovers, you can create, share and browse palettes, and discuss creative trends with other members of the community. Although Coolors has a page where it posts trending color palettes, it can feel a bit impersonal.
Coolors is a random color palette generator. The application’s algorithm draws on color palettes from a database of thousands of palettes created by human beings to randomly generate new color palettes.
While Coolors’ process can be both exciting and efficient, COLOURlovers offers something different and more special. The creative ideas including color palettes that are shared within its community can be traced back to specific users.
In such a thriving creative environment, it’s easy to form one-on-one connections rooted in a shared love of art, color, and design. No wonder the tagline on COLOURlovers’ homepage says, “All in the spirit of love.”
COLOURlovers has very active forums it calls ‘Color Talk’ where you can share your work and receive advice and critique. The forums are divided into different categories such as interior design, web design, fashion design, wedding design, and print design and there’s even a craft forum.
COLOURlovers also has pages dedicated to different groups, channels, trends, and FAQs, all serviced by the community. It even has a regularly updated blog!
COLOURlovers’ COPASO, which stands for Color Palette Software, is an advanced color palette tool that is freely available. In case this tool is too complex for you, they offer a basic color palette tool for non-professionals.
Use COLOURlovers’ PHOTOCOPA feature to come up with color palettes inspired by photographs you like. This feature is similar to Coolors’ Image Picker which also allows you to extract color palettes from photos.
Coolors is focused entirely on generating color palettes. COLOURlovers is more versatile than that, offering a cool feature called Seamless Lite which makes it easy to design a seamless pattern (a pattern that can be repeated endlessly).
This feature dovetails well with COLOURlovers’ color palette generator tools. For example, an interior designer might use Seamless Lite to design the perfect wallpaper using a color palette initially generated by COLOURlovers.
4. Color Hunt
Color Hunt is an open collection of color palettes. It’s a free online resource used by hundreds of thousands of people globally each month.
Color Hunt has many amazing features that make it indispensable for artists, designers, and creative enthusiasts of all kinds. Its signature feature is that each color palette is hand-picked by curators.
You heard that right: every single color palette is hand-picked by Color Hunt’s curators from user submissions. This feature makes it a good alternative to Coolors, where all the color palettes are randomly generated from a database and therefore less polished.
Color Hunt was founded in 2015 by designer and artist Gal Shir. It started as a personal project to help his friends, and Color Hunt retained this cozy, intimate vibe even as it gained popularity.
Use Color Hunt’s color palette tool to create and save your own palettes. After that, you may choose to submit your color palette to the open collection.
Every day, the curators handpick and categorize the submitted color palettes to ensure that they fit well within each category. Each submitted palette is public property, owned neither by the creator nor Color Hunt.
Color Hunt maintains an astounding 31 categories into which the curators sort the color palettes. These diverse categories include Pastel, Retro, Vintage, Summer, Skin, Happy, Sunset, Halloween, Wedding, et cetera.
Hand-picking color palettes means that the categorization is extremely well done. The categories are therefore invaluable for artists, designers, and creative professionals who value precision.
This daily intensive curation keeps Color Hunt crisp and updated. The website’s simple and clean interface also contributes to this feeling.
On the other hand, Coolors lacks a categorization system.
One other delightful thing about the color palette selection process is that each day, the best submission is selected. On the day after, it is displayed on the homepage.
5. Gradient Hunt
The use of gradients in design has become quite popular over the past few years. The growth of the gradient design trend can be observed in almost every design field.
Hop on this trend using Gradient Hunt. Use it in place of one of Coolors’ features, Gradient Maker.
Gradient Hunt, a free resource, is ideal if your design work or project is focused on gradients.
Although Coolors’ Gradient Maker is adequate for most gradient design needs, Gradient Hunt is a bit better because it was created exclusively for gradient design. It aims to be the “ultimate resource for color gradients.”
Gradient Hunt was created in 2018 by Franco Maldonado, a designer and web developer who is only 15 years old! Although the two applications were created by two different people, Gradient Hunt’s product design is very similar to Color Hunt’s (#4 on this list).
For example, just like Color Hunt, its open collection is made up of gradients created by Gradient Hunt’s users themselves. Franco Maldonado, the founder, then maintains and reviews the gradients himself on a daily basis.
Gradient Hunt also has a delightful Chrome extension called Gradient Tabs. Add Gradient Tabs to your browser to see a random gradient chosen from the daily top gradients each time you open a new tab.
Finally and most importantly, unlike Coolors’ Gradient Maker, Gradient Hunt is completely free. To save a gradient on Coolors, you have to sign up for the $3 per month Coolors Pro subscription.
That’s not the case for Gradient Hunt. You can save gradients on your personal collection for free.
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6. iWantHue
iWantHue is a color palette generator made specifically for data science. Data scientists have very particular needs when it comes to data visualization.
The Coolors software has very general functionality and would be unable to meet these niche needs. Here’s where iWantHue comes in.
Color palettes for data science have to be clear, even, and of high quality. The attractiveness of the design, although important, does not matter as much as the clarity of the final image.
Data scientists who specialize in data visualization are always asking, “How effectively does this image communicate?” iWantHue was created with that question in mind.
For example, the colors on a data visualization diagram cannot be too dark or too bright because they would distract from the message of the image. iWantHue has the tools to help a data scientist fix color properties i.e. hue, intensity, and value, at the click of a button.
iWantHue was developed by Mathew Jacomy at the Sciences-Po MediaLab. The software emphasizes creating color palettes that contain optimally distinct colors for ideal visualization.
iWantHue has lots of cool features that optimize for all sorts of color palettes, including color-blind-friendly options. It also comes with a code snippet to generate your color palette in JavaScript to embed in web projects.
7. Material Design Palette
The Material Design Palette is another niche-focused color palette. It is used for Material Design, a design system created by Google in 2014 to bring unity and order into User Interface (UI) design.
Coolors software is often used for web design, which includes User Interface (UI) design. However, if you are committed to serious UI design, the Material Design Palette wins hands down.
This is because the Material Design Palette was created for the needs of Material Design.
There are a couple of other palette tools out there made especially for Material Design. Still, we chose the Material Design Palette because it’s the best to use if you’d like to create your palette from scratch but would also like a bit of help while doing so.
It’s very easy to use. Pick a primary and accent color, and then simply download the generated color palette.
Before the creation of Material Design was developed, UI design was quite a mess because there were few standards. Material Design changed all that.
The colors on this palette are strong and bold to create depth and contrast, in accordance with Material Design’s ethos for UI design.
Today, Material Design is available for both Android and iOS apps and websites. It is the dominant design system when it comes to UI design.
That’s why it makes sense to use this palette for UI design. It’s a great alternative to Coolors which is too unfocused to achieve precise UI design goals.
The Material Design Palette is also completely free! Coolors charges a subscription fee for a good number of premium features.
8. Happy Hues
Happy Hues is a hidden gem that many lovers of design will find invaluable! Happy Hues helps you find inspiration for the right color palette by trying it out on real world examples.
Coolors software is great for randomly generating a large number of color palettes. Still, one of Coolors’ main issues is that you have to pay the $3 monthly subscription fee to generate palettes using more than five colors and to save more than five palettes.
That’s before you get to the ads on the free version of Coolors, which you also have to pay to remove. On the other hand, Happy Hues’ web interface is clean and charming, and completely free to use.
To use Happy Hues, simply toggle between different provided color palettes and section colors to see what you like the most right on the webpage. Simply click on the colors you like the most to copy them to your clipboard.
Randomly generating color palettes on Coolors can be fun, but it can also get addictive. Well, Happy Hues can probably give Coolors a run for its money on this front!
Happy Hues is also fun to use because of the array of colors and how easy it is to change between them. However, Happy Hues produces a more calming effect than an addictive one.
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9. Pigma
Pigma is a truly beautiful iOS app. It is a color picker that you can use to capture a color you see in real life for use in your art or design.
Coolors has a similar feature called ‘Image Picker.’ However, to use Image Picker, you have to use your desktop to upload an image saved on your computer or use a stock photo.
Pigma is special because you don’t have to do any of that. You can capture colors on the go using your phone camera.
Find a color you like out in the real world. Open Pigma, point your camera at it, and the app will suggest a color name along with the color’s code and values i.e. HEX codes and RGB.
Beginning with a color you’ve identified, you can create as many color palettes or gradients as you want. If you’d like, there are color values for any part of the gradient.
You can also use Coolors’ Image Picker to extract beautiful color palettes. However, only with Pigma can you create gradients as well!
With Pigma, you can export your color palettes, color gradients, or even your single color, as a PDF. One more great Pigma feature is that it has a database of over 18,000 colors.
There’s a free version of Pigma and paid versions as well depending on your in-app purchases. The monthly cost can go as low as $0.49.
A yearly or lifetime purchase will cost you only about $5.99.
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10. Colormind – The AI-Powered Color Palette Generator
Colormind is a web-based platform that uses artificial intelligence to extract color palettes from photographs, movies, and popular art. Like most web tools for color palette generation, Colormind uses algorithms from the field of color quantization.
Colormind has a twist of its own, though. Compared to other similar web tools, it focuses on the final color palette more than on preserving the essence of the original image.
The difference between Colormind and Coolors is that Colormind’s color palettes tend to be more edgy and surprising, whereas Coolors’s color palettes are more mellow.
This difference is because Colormind’s palettes come from artificial intelligence (AI) which often creates novel combinations. As previously mentioned in this article, Coolors randomly generates color palettes from a database of thousands of palettes already created by human beings.
Colormind can be a great alternative to Coolors if you are looking for something new. You can also use Colormind for UI design with Bootstrap.
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Conclusion: What Is The Best Coolors Alternative?
Depending on your needs, you can pick the alternative you like.
If you are working on Material Design, choose the aptly named Material Design Palette. Teachers teaching art & design can try Paletton. For data visualization and similar purposes, iWantHue is most appropriate.
In conclusion, each of these Coolors alternatives is solid in its own way!
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