Best Free Color Picker Extensions for Chrome Compared

You may not need an extension at all: Chrome's DevTools has a good eyedropper built in. Extensions are quicker for everyday use, and a few do more than pick a single color. Here's how the main options compare.

Built into Chrome: the DevTools eyedropper

1. Right-click the page and choose Inspect.
2. In the Styles panel, click any color swatch to open the color picker.
3. Click the eyedropper icon and click anywhere on the page.

You get the color in HEX, RGB or HSL, plus a contrast ratio when you're editing a text color. It's free and needs nothing installed, but takes a few clicks each time.

Popular eyedropper extensions

• ColorZilla is the long-running favorite: an eyedropper, a color history, and a gradient generator. It can also analyze a page's colors.
• ColorPick Eyedropper shows a zoomed view of the pixels under the cursor, which helps with picking from thin lines and small text.
• Eye Dropper is a simple, open-source picker with a color history.

They all copy HEX and RGB values in a click. Choose by how you work: zoom for precision, history if you reuse colors.

Getting a whole palette

Sometimes you want all of a site's colors, not one at a time. Color Palette Extractor pulls the colors a page uses, ranked by how often they appear, and copies them as HEX or RGB. It's quicker than picking colors one by one when you're studying a brand or matching a design.

Free web tools, no install

• The image color picker picks colors from an image you upload.
• The color palette generator builds matching palettes from a starting color.
• The contrast checker tests whether two colors are readable together.

Picking colors outside the browser

• Windows: Microsoft PowerToys includes a Color Picker that works anywhere on screen (Win + Shift + C by default).
• Mac: the built-in Digital Color Meter app shows the color under the cursor.

Which to use

• Occasional picks: DevTools.
• Daily design work: ColorZilla or ColorPick Eyedropper.
• A site's whole palette: Color Palette Extractor.
• Colors in apps or images outside Chrome: your system's picker.

As with any extension, check that a color picker only asks for what it needs. Picking a color on the current page doesn't require access to your browsing history.