Illustrations express your ideas.
When used well, illustrations can inform, correlate your thoughts and feelings, set the emotional appeal, and reduce the user’s cognitive load.
Plus, they’re catchy and memorable and can help grow brand awareness, tell a story, and make it easier for people to recognize your brand.
If you’re not able to draw illustrations yourself, you can get a graphic designer to do it for you. However, you may not have the budget for that, which is where illustration sites come in.
unDraw is a popular illustration website that designers and novices alike use to design better and give their workspace the opportunity to speak for itself.
However, some of its users have raised issues about unDraw not having too many illustrations to choose from, one style that may be too cute or playful for some sites, and you have to stick to their look and feel.
Others say that unDraw is way overdone and doesn’t give off a unique look. Still, some users feel the license doesn’t offer things like the right to compile vectors, assets, or images to replicate a competing or similar service in any form or distribute the assets in packs.
Fortunately, there are a number of unDraw alternatives that offer free illustrations to help you add more flair to your design game.
With that in mind, here are the 10 best unDraw alternatives that offer regular and kooky illustrations you can pepper into your content regardless of your budget.
Best unDraw Alternatives
1. ManyPixels
ManyPixels is a great resource, like unDraw, that offers unique designs from different creators. Its images are free to use but you can’t recompile the files to sell elsewhere.
The on-demand design outsourcing platform offers quality designs and a large library of royalty-free vector illustrations you can download to use on your project.
You can download full SVG format illustrations and even choose default colors before downloading them so they can match the look and feel of your project.
ManyPixels also has an illustration gallery but is better than the one at unDraw, and offers free PNG and SVG illustrations. You can adapt the graphics to your own brand colors before downloading the illustrations, and you don’t need to attribute or reference the author of the illustrations.
There’s a whole slew of gorgeous illustrations on a wide range of topics on ManyPixels, all of which you can download and use for your commercial and non-commercial projects.
The platform offers new illustrations every week, and you can use them on blog posts, landing pages, social media graphics, newsletters, and other brand assets.
For a flat monthly fee, you get unlimited designs no matter where you’re based in the world. What this means is that the price remains the same regardless of the number of revisions or requests you send in.
You don’t pay any extra charges because everything is included in the monthly price. And there are no hidden fees.
ManyPixels also doesn’t have a limit of one request at a time or N requests per week or per month. Each design work is custom-made, tailored, and personalized to your needs, and is based on creative input from ManyPixel’s designers.
No two requests will ever look the same. Plus, in terms of timing, some requests take as short as five minutes, while others can take five days to complete based on the complexity of the request. On average, you should get your design back in 1-2 business days.
ManyPixels’ contracts are also flexible and scalable as your business grows. Whether you’re a small business, agency, or marketing team, you can use ManyPixels to get quality designs that won’t harm your business while saving money.
Their team of designers is vetted so you can take care of your requests or those of your clients – if you’re an agency – and focus on your core business.
For marketing teams, ManyPixels ensures that you reach your marketing goals without struggling with graphics. Once you provide the ideas and concepts, their design team will work towards delivering top-notch marketing materials for your projects.
And you don’t have to worry about HR hours, admin, or contracts – ManyPixels offers quality designs in a hassle-free experience from start to finish.
2. Open Doodles
Open Doodles is another great library of illustrations that are free to use, and you can edit, copy, remix, share, or even redraw for your projects without copyright restrictions or database law issues.
The set of hand-drawn vector illustrations allows you to download source files or play with the built-in generator if you want to create your own designs. unDraw doesn’t offer the option to use a built-in generator.
Plus, the library of sketch-type illustrations of people is available for free and you can use it with your personal or commercial projects.
The site embraces the Open Design format, and you can use the images however you want without restriction under CCO license, database, or copyright law.
The creator of this program, Pablo Stanley, designed it to make designers’ work easier and show the value of illustration in their project mockups.
Open Doodles is a great platform for people who need images but are not ready to hire illustrators.
You can invite anyone to modify, transform, adapt, copy, and reimagine your work through collaboration, which Stanley believes is the ultimate form of creativity.
Some doodles are also direct scans of sketches he draws in his free time or during meetings, conference calls, and more, while others are sketches done on his iPad using Procreate, made into a library with global styles in Sketch, and exported as PNG or SVG.
You can also download the individual source files and assets on Dropbox so you can see exactly how everything was done and organized.
3. Absurd Design
Absurd Design offers a series of illustrations that combine a deep sense of naivety, childishness, and absurdity to give people a chance to think up creative imaginations and artistic visions.
You can use the set of free surrealist illustrations for your articles, presentations, landing page messages, or apps, and more. The main idea is to spark creativity in you and help you appreciate both the beauty and imperfection of how something hand-made can be applied as the perfect design feature.
The illustrations are not only highly creative but also outlandish and lucrative for businesses that want to leave their clients or visitors with a sense of awe and wonder.
If you like original yet quirky illustrations, Absurd Design is worth considering. You also get more than 10 absurd illustrations that you can download and use for free in PNG format, provided you attribute them with a link to their website.
The free download also includes 11 black and white PNG illustrations, which you won’t find in unDraw as it uses specific colors in its graphics. Plus, you can use these designs with attribution.
If you want colored versions, SVG, and PNG formats, you can sign up for the membership plan and access them. The premium membership also gives you access to more images and different file formats.
Absurd Design is focused on playfulness as a way of inspiring imagination. There are many niches within which you can design your site and make all the difference to your visitors.
4. Freepik
Freepik is a popular site from where people draw graphic resources for several uses including animations. The platform has beautiful illustrations you can use for websites and presentations among other projects.
You can do a keyword search for illustrations to find suitable designs for your project and download the vector graphic that’s suitable for your needs.
A search engine is included that will help you find high-quality vectors, photos, icons, PSD files, illustrations, and more for your creative projects.
There’s a wide array of vectors in many design styles compared to unDraw, which are created from user-submitted content and styles created by in-house designers. The images are also free for personal and commercial use as long as you attribute Freepik with a link to their site.
All the images you get are downloaded in a zip file, which contains JPG, EPS, and AI file formats. You can also pay up for the premium plan and get rid of the need to attribute the images to Freepik’s website.
The site provides everything from brochures and greeting card templates to PSAs, brand announcements, pamphlets, and many more.
You also get to use the native template editor, which unDraw lacks, to customize your templates based on your content and ideas.
Freepik also offers Stories by Freepik, a collection of free concepts in form of illustrations that you can customize and/or animate in your web browser. You can export your animated illustrations as GIF images, code, or videos, and download them for free in PNG or SVG formats.
This version is great for all sorts of concepts and situations related to education, business, data, the internet, and people. You also get four illustration styles including flat, or flat with hand-drawn details, isometric, and linear with a retro touch.
5. Humaaans
Humaaans is a free illustrations library that allows you to pick, mix, and match graphics of people.
While unDraw offers animals and objects, Humaaans is mainly about 2D people. You can quickly replace people’s colors, clothes, positions, and even hairstyles in Humaaans, which you can’t do in unDraw.
The platform is focused on the human aspect of design, with an emphasis on the human connection. Its creative artworks can fit any of your design projects wherever you need to add some liveliness or emotion.
Plus, Humaaans works very well when you use full-blown hero sections or icon placements. You can mix and match illustrations of background scenes or people and create your own graphic.
Whether you want to use Humaaans for personal or commercial designs, it’s free to use with the CC 4.0 license, meaning you can use the images for anything.
The library of files is easy to access once you click Get the Library. You’ll be directed to a shared Dropbox folder that contains all the image files you need to start creating great designs.
The file types in the Dropbox folder include PNG, SVG, and PNGX2, along with a Sketch artboard that you can use with the platform. Humaaans is also available as a library in Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and InVision Studio.
Check out the: Best alternatives to Humaaans.
6. Ouch
Ouch is a project of Icons8, a company that provides free vector illustrations for different projects and user interfaces. The platform has different styles, some of which are similar to unDraw, and you get free images in the PNG format.
Unlike unDraw, whose selection is clearly limited, Ouch offers a wide range of free illustrations for the user interface. You can filter by categories just as you would on unDraw, or by illustration style where you’re allowed to choose among 20 different illustrators.
However, you’ll need to reference the author through a link, which you can insert in the footer on your site or app, for example.
Ouch vector categories come with several illustrations that you can use for your open source project, app, website, or blog. However, if you want to remove the attribution and get access to more file types like SVG and image packs, you can pay for the premium monthly subscription.
The platform helps creators and designers who don’t draw to overcome the lack of quality vectors, illustrations, and graphics. Recently, the Icons8 team has started expanding in other areas including free illustrations for personal and commercial use.
Ouch offers creative and unorthodox vector graphics such as flat and geometric illustrations, cartoonish vectors, and textured graphics.
These illustrations are sorted by different categories ranging from technologies and finance to eCommerce, medicine, and user experience states like Sign up, message sent, success, subscribed, and more.
7. DrawKit
DrawKit is the brainchild of James Daly, who creates beautiful and fully customizable illustrations you can use on your next project, website, or app.
The site offers packs of 10 smooth, animated, looping scenes to make your project stand out from the crowd. The platform offers SVG illustrations in two styles, compared to unDraw’s that offer one style and are perfect for UI and modern design.
You can get illustrations covering various categories including business, education, abstract, health and medical, finance, art, and more. Each vector is available in Monochrome and Bright Color, while free downloads include PNG and SVG files in different sizes.
You can use the licenses on both personal and commercial projects without attributing them to the author. And you can use a wide range of image packs with up to 100 images for purchase if you need something more detailed.
The site offers access to over 50 free illustrations in two separate styles, all under MIT license, and you can download fully editable PNG and SVG files from lots of categories.
The hand-drawn icon and vector resource site also have paid illustrations, which you can search for by theme, and get inspiration from talented designers.
8. Skribbl
Skribbl is another collection of hand-drawn illustrations you can get for your project, app, or website in PNG format. If you want SVG illustrations, you’ll have to buy them from the site, though.
The illustrations in this platform are contributed by a global creatives community, and they come with personal and commercial use licenses.
The growing collection of hand-drawn, freely usable illustrations is brought to you by aspiring creatives, and you can use their illustrations for any purpose whatsoever, without attribution.
Skribbl’s founder wanted to make it possible for other users to find beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations without the hassle of attribution while giving aspiring creatives the opportunities to build their careers and earn paid commissions or pitch for live briefs.
The advantage of using Skribbl over unDraw is that it offers a wide range of categories including activities and hobbies, animals and nature, business and trends, food and drink, and health and body.
All hand-drawn illustrations are hand-selected to ensure the best quality of illustration. There are free art classes if you want, which are delivered by the creative community so that art education is available to everyone.
Skribbl is free to use and is covered under Skribbl’s license.
9. Handz
Handz is another CC0 licensed library of diverse hands gestures illustrated in 3D, compared to unDraw, which are pure illustrations without 3D elements. You can get over 320 combinations of hands in three different sleeves, 8 different skin colors, and 12 different gestures.
You also get PNG renders you can use in Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Illustrator, Studio, and other designer software along with Sketch files and Blender files.
You can use Handz illustrations for free in your commercial projects like websites, apps, newsletters, posts on social networks, and more.
The premium version offers everything in the free version including the 320+ PNG files, sleeve variations, color skins, and more, along with hand gestures with tablets, Samsung Gear, Apple Watch, Mac screens, and more.
You can express yourself with any color skin you want, and get more variations by customizing the colors to suit your needs.
You can also play, combine, create, and repeat the process to get more creative with your illustrations. Some of the libraries in Handz include Characterz, Avatarz, Iconz, and Animalz, all of which offer a diverse library of 3D illustrations, icons, avatars, and cute animals.
10. Paper Illustrations
Paper Illustrations was created by IconScout and provides handcrafted illustrations using paper cut-outs that are free for personal and commercial use.
You get 20 illustrations to use in landing pages or for onboarding in mobile apps, demo images that show you how to blend the illustrations in your designs, PNG and EPS files all in different categories.
Paper Illustrations vector images are used on the landing pages, and you can blend with your design for user onboarding or on mobile apps. Over 10,000+ exclusive assets are included such as icons, 3D assets, and illustrations.
You also get a larger library and categories than unDraw has to offer, with over 4500 vector icons in Monochrome, Line, solid, and thin line style.
You can also animate your SVG icons and illustrations using a tool to convert them to Lottie animations. Through the Lottie editor, you can tweak your animations on the fly.
There are plugins for every tool that you use, which gives you access to millions of assets so you can work faster and better. The icon editor also allows you to edit the icon before you download, and make edits to the icon color, stroke, size, and more for a great presentation.
Wrapping Up
Illustration offers many designers and visual creatives a gateway through which they can start their journey towards becoming creative professionals.
If you’re sick and tired of using the same old web illustrations or graphics on your app, website, or project, you don’t have to struggle any longer.
Instead of settling for stock photos or heavily pixelated graphics that are used on many other websites, you can check out what other illustration websites have to offer.
Any of these 10 best unDraw alternatives can give you the free or paid options you need to help you find illustrations in various styles and add a modern and trendy touch to your design projects.
