Coolors

Coolors.co is the dominant color palette generator on the design web — the tool every designer has bookmarked, used, and tested with for almost a decade. Built by Italian designer Fabrizio Bianchi as an indie project that grew into one of design tooling's biggest success stories. The pitch is simple: press spacebar to generate a five-color palette. The execution is what made it the category leader — fast, beautiful, free for the core feature, with Pro tiers for power users + agencies. What you get: spacebar-to-generate 5-color palettes, lock colors you like and re-generate the others, palette explorer with thousands of curated trending palettes, gradient + image + contrast + color blindness tools as side utilities, color extraction from uploaded images, palette export in HEX + RGB + HSL + CSS + Figma + Adobe formats, Pro tier with unlimited collections + advanced exports + no ads + collaboration. Mobile apps (iOS + Android) so you can grab a palette on the go. Browser extensions. Figma + Adobe + Sketch integrations. Where Coolors shines: literally any palette work. Picking brand colors? Coolors. Generating a quick palette for a landing page? Coolors. Browsing trending palettes for inspiration? Coolors. Extracting colors from a brand reference image? Coolors. The depth of the toolset — palette generator + explorer + extractor + utilities — covers virtually every color need for designers. And the free tier is genuinely usable, not crippled. Where it's not for you: if you want hand-curated brand-suitable palettes only (vs generated palettes), Branition Colors (covered above) or Pigment offer that. If you want HSL-precision single-color tweaking, cccolor by fffuel.co is more focused. If you need accessibility-first contrast pairs, Realtime Colors or Contrast (covered in this batch) are purpose-built. Coolors is the broad-spectrum tool — exceptional general-purpose, not the niche-specialist. Pricing: free tier covers the core palette generator + explorer. Pro is ~$3-5/mo or ~$36/year (verify current pricing on coolors.co) with unlimited collections + advanced features + ads-free + collaboration. Lifetime tier exists at higher price point. For 90% of designers, the free tier is enough. Honest take: Coolors is one of the great indie-tool success stories. Fabrizio built a genuinely beautiful product, kept it free for the core use case, and grew it into the dominant color tool by execution and consistency. If you've been doing design work for any length of time without using Coolors, you're missing the easy win. Bookmark it, use the spacebar trick, and stop fighting with Adobe Color's bloated UI.