Try Khroma Free — No Account Required to Train
Pick 50 colors you love and let Khroma's neural network build your personal color universe — completely free, unlimited palettes forever.
What Is Khroma?
Khroma is an AI-powered color palette generator that does something no other color tool does quite as elegantly: it learns your taste. Instead of surfacing random palettes or rule-based color theory suggestions, Khroma asks you to pick 50 colors you love — then trains a neural network specifically on your choices to generate unlimited palettes, gradients, image-color combinations, and typographic pairings that match your personal aesthetic.
Launched in 2018 by designer Adam Morse and developed using machine learning trained on thousands of designer-curated palettes, Khroma occupies a unique niche in the color tools ecosystem. Its premise is simple but powerful: color preference is deeply personal, and a tool that adapts to you will always outperform one that tries to please everyone.
The result is a tool that feels almost uncannily accurate after training. Designers who have trained Khroma report that the palettes it generates feel like suggestions from a knowledgeable colleague who has spent weeks studying their portfolio — not the generic harmonies you get from a color wheel app. For UI/UX designers defining interface color systems and brand designers building identity work, Khroma has become an essential creative partner.
Unlike Coolors or Adobe Color, Khroma does not generate palettes based on color theory rules (complementary, analogous, triadic). It generates palettes based on you. That distinction changes how you use it: you come to Khroma not to find a technically correct palette, but to find palettes you will actually love.
Key Features
Personalized Neural Network Training
The training session is the heart of Khroma. You browse a curated grid of colors and select 50 that resonate with you — no color theory knowledge needed. Khroma feeds your picks into a neural network that models your aesthetic preferences, then uses that model to filter and generate every palette it shows you from that point forward. Re-train any time your taste evolves.
Unlimited Palette Generation
Once training is complete, Khroma generates color combinations endlessly — all filtered through your learned taste profile. Browse as long as you like, scroll through thousands of combinations, and save any that catch your eye to your personal library. There is no generation cap, no credit system, and no paywall. The unlimited generation is entirely free.
Five Distinct View Modes
Khroma surfaces your personalized colors in five different contextual views: Palette (two-to-five color swatches), Gradient (smooth blends between two colors), Image (a color overlaid on a photo to test real-world feel), Type (text rendered in your color combinations to test legibility), and Poster (typographic compositions using your palette). Each view helps you evaluate suitability for different design contexts.
HEX & RGB Color Export
Click any color in Khroma to reveal its HEX and RGB values instantly. Copy to clipboard with one click and paste directly into Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or your CSS stylesheet. While Khroma does not yet support one-click export to design file formats, the color code retrieval is frictionless and fast. Every color is also labeled with its name for verbal communication in design reviews.
Search by Color Name or Hue
Khroma includes a search interface that lets you filter your generated palettes by color name (e.g., "dusty rose," "slate," "sage") or by hue range. This is particularly useful when you know you need a warm neutral or a deep blue and want to filter your personalized results rather than scrolling through everything. The search respects your trained preferences, so results still feel tailored to your taste.
Save Favorites Library
Mark any palette, gradient, or image-color combination as a favorite with the heart icon. Khroma stores your saved items in a persistent library accessible at any time. Your favorites are stored locally in the browser, so there is no account registration required to begin saving — though this also means clearing browser data will erase your library. The library doubles as a mood board for your current project's color direction.
Performance Ratings
Here is how Khroma scores across the dimensions that matter most to color-focused designers:
Pros & Cons
Advantages
- Genuinely personalized — palettes are filtered through your trained taste, not generic color theory
- Completely free with no generation limits or paid tiers
- Extremely low barrier to entry: no account needed to start training
- Five view modes let you evaluate colors in real design contexts (type, image, poster)
- Clean, distraction-free interface that stays out of your way
- Search by color name or hue to filter results efficiently
- Training takes under 5 minutes and dramatically improves output relevance
- Works entirely in the browser — no downloads or installs required
- Gradient view is especially useful for web/UI background generation
Disadvantages
- No account system means favorites are browser-local — clearing cookies deletes your library
- Export options are limited: no one-click Figma/Sketch/ASE palette export
- Cannot manually adjust or lock specific colors in a generated palette
- No color accessibility (WCAG contrast) checking built in
- Training is one-time per session — no incremental preference updates
- The tool has not received a major UI update since 2021; some feel it is under-maintained
- No API or developer integrations available
- Mobile experience, while functional, is less refined than desktop
Pricing Plans
Khroma's pricing model is one of its most appealing aspects: the tool is entirely free. There is currently no paid tier, no premium subscription, and no usage cap. The unlimited palette generation you get after training is the full product experience.
| Plan | Price | Features | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free (Full Access) | $0 / forever | Training, unlimited palettes, all 5 view modes, HEX/RGB export, search, favorites | Browser-local storage only; no account sync |
There is no paid plan to upgrade to — Khroma is a free tool built and maintained by its creator. This is both a strength and a consideration: the lack of a revenue model raises occasional questions about long-term maintenance, but it also means you get the complete experience at zero cost, forever.
Best Use Cases
UI / UX Design
Interface designers use Khroma to rapidly explore color systems that match their personal design sensibility. The Type view is invaluable for testing color-on-color legibility for button, text, and background combinations. Generate dozens of options in minutes and save the strongest candidates for A/B evaluation in your design tool.
Brand Identity Design
Brand designers use Khroma during the color exploration phase of identity projects. After training Khroma on colors that align with the brand's emotional brief, the tool generates palette suggestions filtered through a designer's own refined taste — bridging client direction and designer judgment in one step.
Web Design
The Gradient view makes Khroma exceptionally useful for web designers working on hero section backgrounds, CSS gradient strings, and ambient color atmospheres. The Image view helps validate whether a color palette feels appropriate when applied over photography — a common real-world web design scenario.
Illustration & Visual Art
Illustrators and visual artists use Khroma to build color palettes for illustrations, character design, and environment art. Because the palettes reflect their personal taste rather than algorithmic suggestions, the results feel natural and consistent with their existing body of work. The Poster view helps test palette harmony in composition-style layouts.
Khroma vs. Competitors
Khroma occupies a specific niche in the color tool landscape. Here is how it stacks up against the three most commonly compared alternatives:
| Feature | Khroma | Coolors.co | Adobe Color | Paletton |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Personalization | Yes — neural network trained on your picks | No — random generation | No — color theory rules | No — color wheel rules |
| Pricing | 100% Free | Free + Pro $7/mo | Free (Adobe account) | Free |
| View Modes | 5 modes (palette, gradient, image, type, poster) | Palette only | Palette, wheel, trends | Palette, preview page |
| Export | HEX / RGB copy | PDF, PNG, SVG, CSS, ASE | ASE, ACO, CSS, Figma | CSS, PNG, HTML |
| Accessibility Check | No | Yes (contrast checker) | Yes (accessibility panel) | No |
| Account / Sync | No account needed | Yes — cloud save | Yes — Adobe account | No account |
| Best For | Designers who want taste-matched palettes | Quick palette generation | Adobe ecosystem users | Color theory learning |
Khroma vs. Coolors.co
Coolors is the go-to tool for rapid palette generation with a spacebar-driven workflow that generates random harmonious palettes instantly. It wins on export options (PDF, PNG, ASE, CSS, Figma plugins) and collaborative features. Khroma wins decisively on personalization — Coolors' palettes are generic by comparison. The two tools are actually complementary: use Khroma to identify your taste direction, then use Coolors to refine and export. Coolors' contrast checker is also a meaningful advantage for accessibility-conscious designers that Khroma currently lacks.
Khroma vs. Adobe Color
Adobe Color is the obvious choice if you live inside the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. Its integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (through the ASE/ACO export) is unmatched, and its Accessibility Tools panel provides WCAG contrast checking in real time. However, Adobe Color is rule-based — it generates palettes mathematically from a color wheel. Khroma's AI-personalized approach produces more surprising, emotionally resonant results. If you need to hand a palette off into Illustrator immediately, use Adobe Color. If you want to discover palettes you didn't know you'd love, use Khroma first.
Khroma vs. Paletton
Paletton is a classic color theory teaching tool — excellent for understanding complementary, triadic, and tetradic relationships, and for generating technically sound traditional color harmonies. It offers a useful preview page for visualizing palettes on mock website layouts. But Paletton's output is deterministic and theory-driven, lacking any personalization. Khroma's AI approach produces palettes that feel far more contemporary and designer-forward. Paletton is better for learning color theory; Khroma is better for discovering palettes you'll actually use in client work.
Final Verdict
Our Recommendation — 4.3 / 5
Khroma is one of the most thoughtfully designed AI tools in the design toolkit — not because it is technically complex, but because it does exactly one thing exceptionally well: it learns your color taste and reflects it back to you at scale. The five view modes mean you can evaluate colors in real design contexts, not just as abstract swatches, and the completely free pricing means there is zero barrier to adding it to your workflow.
The weaknesses are real and worth acknowledging. The lack of account sync means your favorites library is fragile (browser-local). The export options are basic compared to Coolors or Adobe Color. There is no WCAG accessibility checking. And the tool appears to receive infrequent updates, raising mild concerns about long-term support.
But for what it does — generating unlimited, genuinely personalized color palettes at no cost — Khroma is unmatched. We recommend it as a core exploration tool at the beginning of any color-heavy design project, used in tandem with Coolors or Adobe Color for the export and accessibility checking stages. Train it once, save the palettes you love, and use those as the foundation for a color system that feels authentically yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
When you visit Khroma, you are presented with a grid of colors and asked to select 50 that appeal to you. Khroma feeds these choices into a neural network that has been pre-trained on thousands of designer-curated palettes. Your 50 selections fine-tune this model to represent your personal aesthetic preferences. From that point on, every palette Khroma generates is filtered through your model — meaning it surfaces combinations the neural network predicts you will like based on your training choices. The more thoughtfully you pick your 50 colors, the more accurate and useful the results become. You can re-train at any time by revisiting the training page.
Yes, Khroma is 100% free with no premium tier. There is no subscription, no credit system, and no usage cap. Once you complete the training session, you can generate unlimited palettes, gradients, image combinations, typographic pairings, and posters forever at no cost. The tool was built and released as a free resource by designer Adam Morse, and it has remained free since its 2018 launch. There is currently no indication that a paid plan will be introduced.
Yes — this is one of Khroma's key limitations. Your favorites library and your trained model are stored in your browser's local storage. If you clear your cache, cookies, or browser data, you will lose your saved palettes and your training. To safeguard your favorites, manually copy the HEX codes of palettes you love into your design tool, a color reference document, or a notes app before clearing browser data. Some users keep Khroma open in a pinned tab to avoid accidental data loss. There is no cloud backup or account system that would protect your data across sessions or devices.
Coolors and Khroma solve different problems. Coolors generates random harmonious palettes quickly — great for rapid brainstorming when you have no color direction yet. Khroma generates palettes that match your established taste — better when you know your aesthetic and want relevant suggestions fast. Coolors also wins on export (PDF, PNG, ASE, Figma plugin) and has a contrast checker for accessibility. Many designers use both: Khroma for the initial exploration and taste-matching phase, and Coolors for refinement, locking specific colors, and exporting to client deliverables.
Yes. Khroma generates color combinations (HEX/RGB values) which are not copyrightable — colors themselves cannot be owned. You are free to use any color or palette Khroma generates in commercial client work, brand identity projects, UI design, web design, or any other professional context without restriction. There are no licensing considerations for color values. The same applies to gradients and typographic compositions shown in Khroma's view modes — these are for reference only, and you would recreate the design in your own tools using the color codes Khroma surfaces.
