Comparison
HueGrade vs Paletton
The classic color-scheme designer: a color wheel with monochromatic, adjacent, triad and tetrad schemes and fine manual control.
What Paletton is good at
Paletton gives you more direct control over a harmony scheme than almost anything else, and it has been doing it reliably for well over a decade. The preview modes and the ability to nudge individual scheme members are still excellent for learning how harmony actually behaves.
Side by side
| Paletton | HueGrade | |
|---|---|---|
| Color model | A traditional RGB/HSV color wheel. | OKLCH and OKHSL throughout — perceptually uniform, so equal steps look equal and a lightness change doesn't shift the hue. Gradients interpolate in OKLCH rather than sRGB. |
| Harmony | Monochromatic, adjacent, triad, tetrad, with manual adjustment. | Complementary, triadic, analogous, monochromatic and split-complementary from a base color, with per-swatch locks so you can keep what works and reroll the rest. |
| Validation | Preview modes for seeing a scheme in context. | WCAG contrast on every pair, color-blind simulation, a light/dark theme prediction, and five interface previews with the palette mapped onto real roles. |
Use Paletton when
You want deep manual control of a wheel-based harmony scheme and you already know the vocabulary.
Use HueGrade when
You want the same harmony rules in a modern perceptual color space, with contrast checked as you go and a code export at the end.
Try the equivalent here
Common questions
- What is a modern alternative to Paletton?
- HueGrade covers the same harmony schemes — complementary, triadic, analogous, monochromatic — but computes them in OKLCH rather than an RGB wheel, so lightness steps stay perceptually even, and checks contrast on every pair while you build.
- Why does the color space matter?
- In sRGB, two colors with the same numeric lightness can look very different in brightness, and a gradient between two hues passes through a grey middle. Perceptual spaces like OKLCH fix both, which is why every modern browser now supports them.