ColorDesigner vs iWantHue

ColorDesigner is a web and extension platform for creating color wheels, palettes, and gradients. Its listed 13 tools include a palette builder, gradient generator, color mixer, color wheel, converter, image palette extraction, image color picking, contrast checker, and color comparison. The palette builder creates tints, shades, tones, and complementary, analogous, split-complementary, triadic, and tetradic harmonies. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 12 tools, HEX export, up to five saved colors, five palettes, and one project. Pro is $37.20 a year, billed annually, excluding tax; it adds unlimited saved colors, palettes, and projects, plus export in HEX, RGB, HSL, LAB, LCH, OKLAB, and OKLCH. Subscription plans include a 14-day free trial; the one-time payment option has no trial. The Figma plugin creates tints, shades, harmonies, and stepped gradients from selected layers or local styles, but supports solid fills only. The Photoshop extension includes a color wheel, OKLCH support, harmonies, and stepped gradients with hue interpolation across color spaces.

iWantHue generates and refines color palettes for data scientists working with data visualization. Users can set hue, chroma, and lightness constraints, then sort colors by difference, hue, chroma, lightness, or randomly. Its calculations use CIE Lab, with HCL controls, and palette distribution uses either k-means clustering or force-vector repulsion. An option helps improve palettes for colorblind users. The web interface exports HEX, RGB, HCL, and LAB JSON, CSS color lists, and JavaScript settings. Developers can install the JavaScript package with npm for Node.js or browser use; its generator accepts a seed to reproduce a palette from a data attribute. The npm module also includes precomputed palettes from 2 to 15 colors, including colorblind alternatives. Very large palettes may include similar colors when the selected color space is constrained, though the first colors are arranged for the greatest possible distinction. The Fancy preset is limited to generic palettes of up to 10 colors. iWantHue is free.