Coolors alternative
The Coolors alternative built for UI design
Coolors is great for finding five colors that look good together. Atmos turns those colors into a complete UI palette with shade scales, semantic colors, and accessibility built in.
Coolors alternative
Coolors is great for finding five colors that look good together. Atmos turns those colors into a complete UI palette with shade scales, semantic colors, and accessibility built in.
Helping 30,000+ world’s greatest designers create beautiful designs.
Hitting the spacebar is a fun way to explore color, but shipping a product takes more than five swatches. These are the gaps designers mention most often.
| Feature | Atmos | Coolors |
|---|---|---|
| Built for UI palettes & design systems | ||
| Colors per palette | Full palette with shade scales | 5 (10 with Pro) |
| Perceptually uniform shades (OKLCH) | ||
| Semantic status colors | ||
| Palette contrast checking | WCAG 2 & APCA, included | Pro only |
| Design token export (Style Dictionary) | ||
| Version history | ||
| Free to try | 14-day trial + web demos | Free plan with limits |
Coolors shines at inspiration: hit the spacebar, lock what you like, and keep exploring. That works beautifully for moodboards and brand exploration, but an interface asks harder questions. What do disabled states look like? Which gray does a card border use? What color is a destructive action?
Atmos answers those questions structurally. From one primary color it generates a complete palette: brand colors, complementary accents, neutral grays, and semantic colors for success, warning, and danger states, each with a full shade scale ready for real components.
Try the Atmos color generatorChecking palette contrast in Coolors requires a Pro subscription. In Atmos, accessibility tooling is part of the core product: an integrated contrast checker supports both WCAG 2 and APCA (the contrast model behind WCAG 3), and a vision simulator shows how your palette looks with different types of color blindness.
Because contrast lives next to your shade scales, you can fix a failing combination by nudging a shade, and see every affected pairing update instantly.
Check contrast with WCAG 2 & APCAA five-color strip does not tell you what your blue looks like at 10% lightness on a hover state. Atmos generates perceptually uniform shades and tints in OKLCH, with easing curves that control how lightness progresses and hue transitions that keep dark shades from turning muddy.
The result is a scale where step 300 of your blue and step 300 of your green feel like siblings, which is exactly what tokens like `primary-300` promise your engineers.
Explore the shade generatorCoolors is genuinely excellent at what it was built for: fast, playful color exploration. If you are moodboarding, picking colors for a poster or a slide deck, browsing thousands of community palettes, or want a polished mobile app for collecting colors on the go, Coolors is a great fit.
If the palette is headed into a product interface, with components, states, and accessibility requirements, that is the job Atmos was built for. Many designers use both: find a spark in Coolors, then build the real system in Atmos.
Alex
@MetalHaze
Well, this is awesome!
Hennie
@andyhennie
I was convinced after this read. Their product is actually pretty neat.
SHOWROCK
@shonibareroqeeb
Since I’m not designing today, I have decided to share this simple powerful tool to make uniform color palette with clear accessible checks? Trust me, this will help you in your design system
Matthias Ott
@matthiasott.com
Just bought a lifetime license for Atmos because it is just sooo good for creating perceptually uniform color palettes – including a shade generator, a contrast checker, OKLCH support, CSS export, a Figma plugin, online sharing, and, and… 😍 👉 atmos.style (No affiliation, just genuine excitement! 😁)
Patrick Johansen
@patrickskov
another amazing tool for creating color scales in LCH.
Alberto Calvo
@intemperie.me
My new favorite is atmos.style, which works exactly as I expect, with access to OKLCH color space, P3 color gamut, and visual controls with curves and all the stuff you'd need to create something nice! 💖
Satori Graphics®
@satorigraphic2k
Love your tool and happy to spread awareness 👍🏻
jeremyelder
@jeremyelder
I like working in @atmos_style. Adding all of the variables and quickly selecting a swatch to key off of for contrast is fast.
Abhijeet
@iabhi1610
@atmos_style Best so far
Dusty Pomerleau
@dpom.bsky.social
hue-shifting on atmos is like a drug :)
Yes. Copy the hex values of your Coolors palette and paste them into Atmos. Atmos will treat them as your starting colors and can generate full shade scales, neutrals, and semantic status colors around them.
Coolors offers a free plan with ads and saving limits. Atmos works differently: every plan starts with a 14-day free trial that includes all features, and you can try limited demos of the tools directly on the atmos.style website. See the Atmos pricing page for plan details.
Coolors is an inspiration tool that generates palettes of up to 5 colors (10 with Pro). Atmos is a specialized toolbox for UI palettes: it generates complete palettes with shade scales, neutral grays, and semantic colors, checks contrast with WCAG 2 and APCA, simulates color blindness, and exports to CSS, Tailwind, Style Dictionary, and Figma.
Yes. The Atmos contrast checker is available as a free demo on the atmos.style website and supports both WCAG 2 and APCA (the model behind WCAG 3). Inside the app, contrast checking and the color vision simulator are part of every plan, never a separate upsell.
Yes. The fully featured Atmos Figma plugin brings your colors into Figma, so your design files always match your palette.
