Colorion — curated color palettes with one-tap HEX copy

• Colorion

  This page

  PricingRoughly even

  • Free, with no pricing page on the site at all
  • No sign-in, no registration and no project cap to hit
  • A partner card for an unrelated launch-audit tool sits in the library

• Coolors

  PricingRoughly even

  • Free generator with a project limit
  • A paid Pro tier removes ads and unlocks palettes, gradients, fonts and team workspaces
  • The most fully commercial of the four

• Color Hunt

  PricingRoughly even

  • Free to browse and copy, with no account
  • Ad-supported rather than subscription-supported
  • No paid tier to upgrade into

• Adobe Color

  PricingRoughly even

  • Free to use with a Creative Cloud account
  • Deeper saving and hand-off assume a paid Creative Cloud plan
  • Accessibility and library features sit inside the Adobe ecosystem

1. Colorion — official palette library
2. Colorion — base colors reference
3. Colorion — Material palette subdomain
4. Colorion — palette gallery subdomain
5. Colorion — palette generator subdomain
6. Colorion — terms of use
7. Coolors — official site
8. Color Hunt — official site
9. Adobe Color — official site

Free tier

Yes

Pricing summary

There is no paid tier, no credit system and no upgrade prompt anywhere in the browsing flow: you land on the library, filter it, copy what you want, and nothing asks you to sign in or enter payment details. That is worth stating plainly because it is unusual in this category, where the two best-known alternatives both push towards a subscription for saved palettes, team workspaces or design-application hand-off. The trade for Colorion is monetisation of a different kind: a featured card in the library promotes an unrelated launch-audit product, and the surrounding subdomain network links out to other properties in the same publisher's portfolio. Neither changes what the library contains or what you can copy from it, but both are worth knowing when you read the front page. The things most likely to change are the featured placement and the subdomain line-up, so treat the free, accountless library as the stable fact and confirm anything commercial on the site itself before relying on it.

Reviewed on 19 September 2026 · Colorion — terms of use

• A palette library sorted by mood rather than by colour

  The library holds roughly thirty thousand palettes, paginated thirty at a time, and the primary axis of navigation is neither hue nor popularity but mood: pastel, vibrant, earth, neon, ocean, sunset, monochrome, vintage, ui, warm, cool, muted, minimal, jewel, primary, dark, light and tropical. That is a more useful default than it first appears. Filtering by hue makes you commit to a colour before you know what role it plays, whereas filtering by "muted" or "jewel" gets you to palettes that suit the register you are after, at which point the hues are already harmonious.

• One-tap HEX copy on every swatch

  Each swatch carries its own click-to-copy target, so the unit of work is a single value rather than a whole palette. That suits how colour actually arrives in a codebase — you need the one dark neutral from a card, not the entire set — and it removes the modal-and-select dance most palette sites put between you and a value. The palette page also shows the full set together for when you do want all five.

• Palette export as JSON

  The export is the feature that moves Colorion out of the inspiration bucket and into the tooling bucket. A palette you like can leave the site as structured data rather than as something you retype, which is the difference between a mood board and a token file. For a small team without a design-system pipeline, that is often enough to seed a variables file without opening a design application at all.

• Colour extraction from a reference image

  Drop an image onto the library and it detects the colours in it, which is the fastest honest answer to the most common brief in the industry — match this. The practical uses are unglamorous and constant: pulling the palette out of a client’s existing logo, reading the colours off a photograph before a redesign, or checking what a competitor’s site is actually built from. Because it is a real sample rather than a guess, the result is defensible in a way that a hand-picked approximation is not.

• A base-colors reference for starting from a brand colour

  Sitting alongside the library is a base-colors page for the situation where you already have one colour and need the rest. That is the opposite direction of travel from browsing — you are not choosing a palette, you are extending a fixed point — and having both in the same product means you do not have to switch sites when the brief changes from "find me something" to "work from this".

• A wider subdomain network for adjacent colour jobs

  Colorion is not one site. Alongside the main library the publisher runs a set of specialist subdomains, and they are genuinely separate products rather than sections: a Material-style palette set, a colour palette gallery, gradient inspiration, a palette generator, two-colour combinations, mobile palette sets, and a group of UI snippet tools covering animated buttons, CSS loaders, toggles and tooltips. They share a brand and a design language, and they are worth knowing about rather than discovering by accident — but each has its own job, and the main library is what this page is about.

• Free and accountless, with nothing gated

  There is no sign-in, no registration and no project limit anywhere in the navigation, so browsing, filtering, copying and exporting all happen without identifying yourself. That matters for agency and in-house work where a review login is friction nobody wants to explain, and it is a deliberate contrast with the subscription-shaped alternatives in the same category.

1. 1

   Start from the register, not the colour

   Open the library and go to the mood tags before you go anywhere near a hue. If the brief says calm, start at muted or minimal; if it says premium, start at jewel, dark or monochrome. Ruling out two thirds of the library by feel is faster than scrolling it, and it keeps you from anchoring on a single colour before you know what the palette needs to do.

2. 2

   When you have a reference, extract instead of browsing

   If there is already an artefact in the conversation — a logo, a photograph, a competitor’s homepage, a mood image the client sent — skip the library entirely and drop it into the reference field. Sampling the actual colours gives you a palette that is already provably on-brief, and it turns the first review from "I like it" into "this is what your existing material is made of".

3. 3

   Copy the values you need, not the whole set

   Because each swatch copies independently, take only the roles you can actually deploy: one surface neutral, one text neutral, one accent. Five-colour palettes are compositions, and a UI rarely needs all five at full saturation — the discipline of picking three is what keeps a palette from looking like a theme rather than a design system.

4. 4

   Export to JSON before you start hand-copying

   The moment you know a palette is going to be reused rather than referenced once, export it. Structured data can be pasted into a token file, diffed in a pull request and handed to a developer without a screenshot in the loop, which is where the real time savings are. Retyping HEX values from a page is the failure mode this feature exists to prevent.

5. 5

   Check the pair before you commit to it

   A palette that looks composed on a card is not automatically a palette that works as text on a background. Take the two values you intend to use for text and surface, run them through a contrast checker, and find out at design time rather than at accessibility-review time — the composition tells you the palette is pleasant, it does not tell you it is legible.

• UI designers starting a screen with no brand system

  The hardest moment in interface work is the first hour, when there is a layout and no colour decision behind it. Browsing by mood gets you to a defensible five-swatch starting point without inventing anything, and one-tap copy means you can be evaluating real colours in your file within a minute of opening the library rather than assembling a palette first.

• Brand and identity designers working from a reference

  When a client arrives with a logo, a photograph or a legacy site and says "build on this", the honest starting point is what the existing material actually contains. The reference-image extractor turns that into a palette you can show rather than a palette you assert, which shortens the conversation considerably and removes the accusation of having invented a direction.

• Front-end engineers who own the tokens

  JSON export alongside per-swatch HEX copy is a developer-shaped feature, and it shows: values arrive in a form that can go into a variables file instead of a screenshot that has to be transcribed. For a design engineer picking up the colour layer of a project that has no design system yet, the library is a legitimate source of the first values rather than a mood board to interpret.

• Product and marketing teams producing assets without a designer

  Slides, social images, landing pages and newsletters all need a palette that does not look improvised, and they need it faster than a design request takes to turn around. Mood tags lower the skill floor enough that someone with no colour training can land on something coherent, and the reference extractor means the result can still be anchored to the brand.

• Anyone learning how palettes are actually composed

  Because the palettes are finished compositions rather than random hue sets, reading a few dozen of them is a quiet education in how light-to-dark relationships and accent placement work. Filtering the same mood across many pages makes the patterns visible in a way that generating a single palette from a wheel never does.

A browsable library, not a generator

The core of the product is a catalogue: roughly thirty thousand palettes, paginated, filtered by mood, each with copyable HEX values. It is worth being precise about this because it determines whether the site suits you — there is no colour wheel, no harmony rule engine and no swatch locking on the main library. The generation-shaped jobs are handled by separate properties in the same network instead.

The numbers at review time

When we reviewed it the library reported thirty thousand palettes served thirty at a time, with eighteen mood tags and a shuffle control for browsing without a filter. The mood counts are uneven in a way that reads as organic rather than curated to a target, which is the expected shape for a library that has accumulated submissions over years. The total moves as palettes are added, so treat it as the current size rather than a fixed figure.

A publisher network, not a single site

Colorion is the centre of a family of subdomains covering Material palettes, a colour palette gallery, gradient inspiration, a palette generator, two-colour combinations, mobile palettes, and a group of UI snippet tools for animated buttons, CSS loaders, toggles and tooltips. They are independently useful and easy to mistake for unrelated sites, since each carries its own layout. Knowing they share a publisher is mostly useful for judging what you are relying on when you bookmark one.

Free, accountless and ad-adjacent rather than ad-funded

There is no sign-in or registration in the site’s navigation, and no pricing page — browsing, filtering, copying and exporting all work without identifying yourself. The site is not ad-supported in the usual banner sense; instead a featured card in the library promotes an unrelated launch-readiness tool, and outbound links to the publisher’s other properties appear around the edges. Treat that as the funding model to expect while the library stays free.

Uploads happen only when you choose to extract

Browsing sends nothing but a page request. The one flow that involves your own material is the reference-image extractor, where an image you drop in has to be read by the service to return its colours. That is the point at which anything of yours leaves your machine, so it is the flow to think about if the image is confidential — the rest of the site does not ask for a file at all.

What it is not

Not a design system, not a token manager and not a collaboration surface. There is no project structure, no shared workspace, no version history and no design-application plugin, so the hand-off to a team still runs through whatever you export or copy. It also stops short of print-oriented deliverables — no ASE, no PDF, no swatch books — which is the boundary between this and the more commercially built tools in the category.