When you’re building modern interfaces, color isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about structure, accessibility, and consistency. Designers have long relied on tools like Coolors to create beautiful palettes, but what about developers who need clean outputs, format conversions, and accessibility checks?
Let’s compare two powerful tools: Coolors and HexTo — and find out which one better serves the needs of front-end and full-stack devs.
🧭 Quick Overview
Coolors is a well-known color scheme generator, popular for its random palette creation, mobile app, and inspiration gallery.
HexTo is a new all-in-one color utility built specifically for designers and developers. It focuses on accurate color conversion, WCAG accessibility, design token exports, and productivity.
⚖️ Feature-by-Feature Comparison
🎨 Format Conversion
- Coolors: Supports HEX, RGB, HSB, and HSL—but conversion is limited per palette.
- HexTo: Instantly converts any input (HEX, RGB, HSL, CMYK, HSB, alpha) to all formats, side-by-side.
✅ Winner: HexTo (more comprehensive, real-time conversion)
♿ Accessibility & Contrast Checking
- Coolors: Offers basic contrast checking between palette colors.
- HexTo: Built-in WCAG contrast checker with Pass/Fail labels, light/dark preview, and upcoming APCA support.
✅ Winner: HexTo (dev-grade accessibility tools)
🌈 Color Harmonies
- Coolors: Excellent at generating random schemes and exporting palettes.
- HexTo: Offers calculated harmonies like monochromatic, triadic, complementary, etc., with precise swatch previews.
🎯 Depends on your use case — Coolors for fast inspiration, HexTo for structured schemes.
📦 Design Tokens
- Coolors: No token system.
- HexTo: Create, name, and export design tokens in JSON — ideal for Tailwind, CSS-in-JS, and design systems.
✅ Winner: HexTo (developers love tokens)
📁 Export Options
- Coolors: Export palettes as images, PDFs, or copy formats.
- HexTo: Export colors as JSON, image swatches, or tokens — optimized for handoff to code.
✅ Winner: Tie — both are strong, but HexTo is more dev-friendly.
✅ Where Coolors Shines
- Easy to use, very polished UI
- Excellent for inspiration and creative exploration
- Has mobile apps and extensions
- Great for mood boards, visual designers
✅ Where HexTo Shines
- Built for developers — fast, clean, format-heavy
- Powerful contrast & accessibility tools
- Ideal for UI systems, design tokens, and color logic
- Open, no sign-in, privacy-friendly
🧠 So... Which Should You Use?
- If you’re a visual designer creating mood boards → go with Coolors.
- If you’re a developer, building UI components, design systems, or accessibility-first sites → use HexTo.
Best of all — use both together. Generate palettes in Coolors, refine and export with HexTo.
🚀 Try HexTo
HexTo is free, fast, and built with developers in mind.
→ Explore HexTo and streamline your color workflow today.