Comparison
HueGrade vs Coolors
The best-known color palette generator on the web — spacebar to regenerate, lock the colors you like, browse a huge community palette library.
What Coolors is good at
Coolors defined the interaction the whole category now copies, ours included: five swatches, spacebar to reroll, a lock on the ones you want to keep. It has an enormous palette library, native iOS and Android apps, a browser extension, and years of polish behind it. If you want a beautiful palette in ten seconds with no thinking, it is very hard to beat.
Side by side
| Coolors | HueGrade | |
|---|---|---|
| Generating a palette | Spacebar regeneration with per-swatch locks, plus a large browsable library of community palettes. | The same spacebar-and-lock loop, plus harmony rules generated from a base color, and a curated gallery you can filter by mood. |
| Accessibility | A contrast checker for a chosen pair of colors, and a color-blindness simulator. | Every pair in the palette is checked at once by the Palette Doctor, which names the failing combinations in plain English and offers a one-click fix that keeps your hue. Protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia simulation across the whole palette. |
| Getting it into code | Export to code, images and documents from the generator. | CSS variables, Tailwind v4 `@theme` and v3 config, SCSS, JSON and DTCG design tokens — plus semantic naming, so you export `--color-primary`, not `--color-1`. Palettes also grow into full 50–950 Tailwind scales. |
| Working from what you already have | Build a palette from an uploaded photo. | From a photo, and from a live website URL — paste any address and pull its colors, gradients, type scale and assets. A CSS debt linter also reads your existing stylesheet and finds the near-duplicate colors already in it. |
| How the recommendation is made | Generation is algorithmic and instant. | Deterministic color math with published arithmetic — no AI, no black box. Every score on the site can be traced to the WCAG formula or the OKLCH conversion that produced it. |
Use Coolors when
You want inspiration fast, you want to browse thousands of community palettes, or you want a native mobile app. Coolors is stronger than us on all three.
Use HueGrade when
The palette has to survive contact with a real product — text has to be readable on it, it has to work in dark mode, it has to leave the design tool as code, and someone has to be able to justify it in a review.
Try the equivalent here
Common questions
- Is HueGrade free like Coolors?
- Yes. Every tool on HueGrade works free with no sign-up, including the generator, the contrast checker, the palette diagnosis and code export. Pro is optional and covers one-click repair, semantic token export, the audit report and print-ready PDF.
- What is the best free Coolors alternative?
- It depends what you need it for. For browsing inspiration and native mobile apps, Coolors itself is still the strongest option. If you need the palette to pass WCAG contrast, work in both light and dark themes, and leave as CSS or Tailwind tokens, HueGrade is built specifically for that part of the job.
- Can I open a Coolors palette in HueGrade?
- Yes — paste the hex codes into any HueGrade tool, or use a share URL of the form /generate?colors=ff0000-00ff00-0000ff. Nothing is imported or stored; the palette lives in the URL.