Palette generators compared

The biggest difference between these tools is what you look at while you choose. Color Hunt and Adobe Color mostly show swatches. Paletton shows swatch layouts and, under Examples, a sample web page in light and dark versions. Coolors shows full-height columns and, in its Visualizer, built-in designs for UI, branding, typography, patterns and illustration. Huemint generates straight into mockups: logos, website layouts, gradients, illustrations and Bootstrap components. Realtime Colors repaints a whole landing page, a dashboard and a blog post.

Recolor is the only one of the seven that takes a page from you: a public address, or an HTML file you upload. That matters when a site already exists, because its own hero, buttons, charts and text react to a palette differently from any template. How to preview a color palette on a real website covers the ways to do that, with and without Recolor.

Coolors is a generator with a large library: Space for a new palette, locks, shades, color names, an image picker, color blindness simulation and a contrast checker. The free plan generates up to 5 colors and saves up to 10 palettes with an account; Pro, $3 a month billed yearly or $5 monthly, adds up to 10 colors, harmony methods, AI, all Visualizer designs and more export options. There are an iOS app, a Figma plugin and an Adobe extension. Coolors vs Realtime Colors and the Coolors alternative page go further.

Realtime Colors puts five colors in fixed roles, text, background, primary, secondary and accent, plus two fonts, on its own pages, with a light and dark switch and exports from CSS to shadcn and DaisyUI presets. It is free, with a Figma plugin and a VS Code extension; Recolor vs Realtime Colors compares it with Recolor in detail.

Huemint generates with machine learning, a transformer or a diffusion model, with a creativity setting, presets and a target contrast between colors. You can also upload an image of your own flat design and have it recolored. It has a public API for non-commercial use. None of its pages showed a price or a sign-in.

Adobe Color builds palettes on a color wheel with harmony rules (analogous, complementary, triad and more), from an image, or from the community palettes in Explore. Its contrast checker tests WCAG 2.1 AA and AAA, and a color blindness simulator flags conflicts. Creating, copying as code and sharing worked signed out; saving to a Creative Cloud library needs a sign-in, and applying palettes automatically in Adobe Express needs a paid plan.

Color Hunt is a curated collection of four-color palettes submitted by users, sorted by new, popular or random and tagged from pastel to Halloween. A click copies a hex code, and each palette offers a PNG download.

Paletton picks hues on an RYB color wheel with models from monochromatic to tetrad, five shades each, with vision simulations for eight kinds of color blindness and exports from CSS to Photoshop and GIMP swatch files. It is free and funded by ads and donations.

The jobs chain: find or generate a palette in one tool, then open it in Recolor to see it on the real site. Recolor reads Coolors links directly, as the URL format explains, and any hex codes typed after recolor.page/#.

Recolor (recolor.page) is for the step after choosing: seeing a palette on a page you care about. It loads public sites and uploaded HTML, repaints them live as you press Space, keeps text readable and exports 2 to 10 colors as code. It does not extract palettes from photos, keep a community library, pick fonts, generate with AI or simulate color blindness, and it has no app or plugin outside the browser. Its limits are on Limits.

Each tool was opened on its own site on October 8, 2026, logged out, and its generator, pricing, help or about pages read and tried: menus opened, exports looked at, links copied. Nothing was bought and no account made. A feature not seen that day is not listed, and prices are as each site showed them, Coolors' in US dollars.