Looking for the best color picker extensions for Chrome?
ColorZilla is our top recommendation for most people — a free, all-in-one eyedropper trusted by around 4 million users that grabs any on-screen pixel, lists every color a page uses, and builds CSS gradients.
But the best Chrome color picker depends on your workflow.
Want something simple? Use Eye Dropper. Need pixel-perfect precision? ColorPick Eyedropper. Extract a complete website color palette? Site Palette. Working with Tailwind CSS? Frontend Hero.
The extensions below are grouped by workflow, making it easy to find the right tool for your design process.
The best color picker extensions for Chrome
All-in-one color pickers
Complete color picker extensions for everyday design and development workflows.
- ColorZilla for all-in-one color picking and page-wide color analysis
- Color Picker for Chrome for a simple all-round free alternative
Simple eyedroppers
Quickly sample and copy colors without unnecessary extras.
- Eye Dropper for fast color picking and reusable palettes
Precision color pickers
Zoom-enabled tools for selecting the exact pixel every time.
- ColorPick Eyedropper for pixel-perfect color selection
Palette extraction
Generate complete website color palettes and export them to your design tools.
- Site Palette for full website palette extraction
- Colorway for free palette creation and sharing
Developer tools
Generate developer-friendly color values and streamline frontend workflows.
- Frontend Hero for Tailwind CSS colors and developer tools
Accessibility and contrast
Verify that your chosen colors meet accessibility requirements.
- Silktide Accessibility Checker for WCAG contrast testing
Built-in Chrome tools
Chrome’s native tools for quick one-off color sampling.
- Chrome DevTools EyeDropper for built-in color picking without an extension
Beyond color picking
Go beyond choosing colors by testing whether they actually attract attention.
- Attention Insight for AI-predicted visual attention before launch
How we chose
We weighted four things: does it grab the exact color you point at, how fast is the copy-to-clipboard flow, what formats it exports (HEX, RGB, HSL, Tailwind), and whether it’s genuinely free or quietly gated behind a login. We also checked maintenance status and watched for copycat listings – the color-picker category is full of near-identical clones, so we link the canonical extension every time. No tool paid for placement.
One more thing worth knowing before you install anything: Chrome ships a native color picker. More on that at the end.
At-a-glance comparison
Extension | Best for | Pricing | Output formats | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ColorZilla | Best overall | Free | HEX, RGB, HSL + gradients | ~4,000,000 |
Eye Dropper | Simplest | Free | HEX, RGB, HSL, JSON export (HSV view only) | ~1,000,000 |
ColorPick Eyedropper | Precision / zoom | Free (ad-supported) | HEX, RGB | ~800,000 |
Color Picker for Chrome | Free all-rounder | Free | HEX, RGB | ~700,000 |
Site Palette | Palette extraction | Freemium (login) | Figma, Sketch, ACO, SVG | ~90,000 |
Colorway | Palettes + sharing | Free | HEX, RGB, HSL + share URLs | ~20,000 |
Frontend Hero | Developers / Tailwind | Paid (lifetime) | HEX, RGB, HSL, Tailwind | N/A |
Silktide | Accessibility / WCAG | Free | Contrast pass/fail (WCAG) | ~50,000 |
All-in-one color pickers
These extensions combine eyedroppers, color history, palette generation, and export options into a single tool, making them ideal for everyday design, development, and UI workflows.
ColorZilla is the veteran everyone benchmarks against, and it earns it. The eyedropper grabs any pixel – including outside the browser window, at any zoom – and the built-in Webpage Color Analyzer lists every color a live page uses and maps each one back to its element. Throw in a genuinely good CSS gradient generator and color history, and it covers most jobs in one extension.
It’s completely free, no account, with the same toolset on Chrome and Firefox. One caveat: it hasn’t shipped an update since May 2024, so it’s a touch stale next to actively maintained pickers – but it’s still one of the most complete options available.
Color Picker for Chrome is a popular, no-cost middle ground: a straightforward eyedropper that captures any on-page color and returns HEX and RGB codes with a clean, beginner-friendly popup. It doesn’t try to do gradients or page-wide analysis – it picks colors well and stays out of your way. A good pick if ColorZilla feels like overkill but you still want something dependable and free.
Simple eyedroppers
Need to grab a color and keep working? These lightweight extensions focus on fast, distraction-free color picking without unnecessary features or complex interfaces.
When you just need a color and nothing else, Eye Dropper is the answer. Click, sample, copy as HEX, RGB, or HSL, while also offering an HSV view – and every pick auto-saves to a reusable palette you can export as JSON. It also includes an HSV view for inspecting colors. It’s privacy-focused (no data collection, no tracking) and fully free, in active development since 2010. Heads up: several 2025-era reviews report that an update hid or changed the in-page picker and muddied the UI, so behavior may differ from the version you remember. Still the cleanest no-frills option for stockpiling colors off the web.
Precision color pickers
These tools provide zoom-enabled sampling and pixel-level accuracy, making them ideal for selecting exact colors from detailed interfaces, icons, illustrations, and other visual elements.
For busy, high-contrast layouts where one pixel off ruins the swatch, ColorPick Eyedropper‘s zoomed preview lens is the standout. You drag a magnified loupe over the page and click the exact pixel you want, reading HEX and RGB as you go – far more reliable than free-handing it on a cramped UI. Around 1 million users and a 4.2 rating back it up. It’s free but ad-supported, and reviewers flag the occasional intrusive ad plus the odd compatibility hiccup after Chrome updates. Worth it when precision matters more than a spotless interface.
Palette extraction
Analyze an entire webpage and generate reusable color palettes in seconds. They’re perfect for design inspiration, competitor research, and building consistent color systems.
Eyedropping swatches one at a time is fine. Lifting an entire site’s palette in one click is better. Site Palette analyzes the current page with several algorithms (Color Cube, Median Cut, Material Design mode, live viewport extract) and hands you a coherent palette you can export to Figma, Sketch, Adobe Swatch, or SVG – and its companion Figma plugin imports palettes straight in as local variables, no hex copy-paste. The catch: it’s now gated behind a mandatory account plus subscription (roughly $2.50/month or $30/year; a 24-hour trial; verify the current pricing before subscribing). Reviews flag login loops, which is why the rating sits lower than the tool deserves. Best-in-class for palette extraction if you can live with the account wall.
If you want palette-building without a login, Colorway is a fully free eyedropper-and-palette tool. It samples colors anywhere on screen, builds palettes with HEX/RGB/HSL, generates tints and shades, keeps a color history, and spins up shareable palette URLs – no registration, no setup. It leans on the browser’s built-in EyeDropper API for clean, privacy-safe sampling. A tidy, modern pick for designers who want palettes and sharing without paying.
Developer tools
Go beyond basic color picking with extensions that provide CSS values, multiple color formats, Tailwind support, gradients, and other developer-friendly utilities.
Most pickers hand you a hex code. Frontend Hero hands you bg-red-500. It’s one of the few extensions that outputs picked colors directly as Tailwind CSS classes – alongside HEX, RGB, and HSL – which is a real time-saver if you live in a utility-first codebase. And it’s more than a picker: it’s an 11-in-1 toolbar bundling a CSS inspector, font detector, spacing measurement, Tailwind scanner/converter, and screenshots, so it can replace a stack of single-purpose extensions. Unlike most tools in this guide, Frontend Hero is distributed directly by its developer rather than through a public Chrome Web Store listing. It’s paid, but sold as a lifetime license (no subscription) and works across Chrome, Edge, Brave, and other Chromium browsers. The obvious choice for frontend devs shipping Tailwind.
Accessibility and contrast
Great color choices also need to be accessible. These tools help you check contrast ratios, identify accessibility issues, and verify that your designs meet WCAG guidelines.
Picking the perfect color is half the battle – the other half is whether anyone can read it. Silktide‘s free checker includes an on-page color picker built specifically for accessibility: choose any two colors (or sample them from the page) and it tests the pair against WCAG contrast thresholds, telling you pass or fail at AA and AAA. It also bundles 200+ WCAG checks, plain-language fix guidance, and color-blindness and low-vision simulators so you can see how your palette holds up. Free, beginner-friendly, ~50,000 users. If your color decisions need to clear contrast requirements – and they do – this is the picker to keep installed.
Built-in Chrome tools
Chrome includes a built-in color picker inside DevTools that’s perfect for quick inspections, debugging, and occasional color sampling without installing another extension.
Chrome DevTools EyeDropper
You may not need an extension at all for the simplest case. Chrome ships a native EyeDropper API and a color picker inside DevTools – open it and you can sample a pixel, convert between HEX/RGB/HSL, and even run a built-in contrast check for accessibility. Many of the modern extensions above (Colorway included) actually build on this same browser API under the hood, which is what makes their sampling fast and privacy-safe. The reason to install an extension anyway: persistent palettes, page-wide color analysis, gradient tools, Tailwind output, and a one-click toolbar flow the native picker doesn’t offer.
Beyond color picking
Choosing the right colors is only part of the process. These tools help you understand whether your color choices support a clear visual hierarchy and naturally guide users’ attention.
The right color code is a start. Whether that color actually draws attention where you want it – your CTA, your headline, your key visual – is a different question entirely, and a color picker can’t answer it.
That’s a job for an AI attention heatmap. Attention Insight predicts where people will look on any live page – desktop or mobile, no code, no traffic – in seconds, no need for a full eye-tracking lab. Its model is trained on 5.5M+ eye-tracking fixations and 550M+ gaze points, achieves up to ~96% accuracy versus real eye-tracking, and has been proved by MIT, returning an attention heatmap, focus map, focus score, clarity score, and percentage of attention per area of interest. So you can test, optimize, and decide whether your chosen palette earns the attention it’s supposed to – before you ship. It’s a different category from the color pickers above, but a natural next step once your palette is locked.
Want the complete toolkit? See our hub guide: Must-Have Chrome Extensions for UI/UX Designers (2026).
Related guides:
Limitations to keep in mind
A few honest caveats. Ratings and install counts can change over time and vary by source, so treat the numbers here as directional. The color-picker category is flooded with copycats – several extensions share names like “Color Picker” or “Eyedropper,” so always confirm the publisher before installing. Some tools that read as free are gated: Site Palette now requires an account and subscription, and ColorPick Eyedropper is ad-supported. And every extension is a permission you’re granting – audit your toolbar periodically and remove pickers you no longer use.
FAQ
What is the best free color picker extension for Chrome? ColorZilla, for most people. It’s free with no account, grabs any on-screen pixel, analyzes a page’s full color set, and includes gradient tools. If you want something lighter, Eye Dropper and Color Picker for Chrome are both solid free alternatives.
Does Chrome have a built-in color picker? Yes. Chrome includes a native EyeDropper API and a color picker in DevTools that samples pixels, converts color formats, and checks contrast. Extensions add the extras: saved palettes, page-wide analysis, Tailwind output, and faster one-click access.
Which color picker is most accurate for exact pixels? ColorPick Eyedropper. Its zoomed preview lens lets you target a single pixel precisely, which matters on busy or high-contrast layouts where free-handing the cursor leads to the wrong swatch.
Can a Chrome extension extract a whole color palette from a website? Yes. Site Palette analyzes a page and exports a full palette to Figma, Sketch, Adobe Swatch, or SVG. Colorway is a free alternative that builds and shares palettes without a login.
Is there a color picker that outputs Tailwind CSS? Frontend Hero outputs picked colors directly as Tailwind classes (like bg-red-500), alongside HEX, RGB, and HSL – making it the standout pick for developers working in Tailwind.
How do I check if my colors meet accessibility standards? Use Silktide Accessibility Checker. Its on-page picker tests any two colors against WCAG AA and AAA contrast thresholds and includes color-blindness and low-vision simulators so you can verify readability, not just guess at it.
