Adobe and me They broke up a while agobut even before that, my Photoshop tab was never the only one open, there was always some editor I was poking around in. One of them was Pixlr, which I had honestly forgotten about among the sea of new editors over the years. It’s changed quite a bit since I first found it. Of course, the main driver of this change was AI, and it is now considered an AI publisher.
Pixlr has always been the most accessible and affordable option for anyone who doesn’t need something heavy for serious compositing work. I’ve been ignoring the revamped version for too long and finally decided to sit down with it properly.
So what is Pixlr really like now?
Browser-based from day one, now AI-first
Pixlr started in Sweden in 2008, built by a developer named Ola Sevandersson. It was a browser-based editor from day one, which was the whole talk; that I didn’t need to install anything, or spend a few hundred dollars on Photoshop, and I would just open a tab and edit. Quite radical for the time. Autodesk acquired it in 2011, then sold it to 123RF in 2017, and Sevandersson eventually returned to run it as CEO. It’s had a few different owners, but the philosophy has stayed more or less the same: keep image editing accessible.
What Pixlr is now technically is a suite rather than a single app. There’s Pixlr Editor for more advanced layer-based work, Pixlr Designer for template-based stuff, and Pixlr Express, which is the AI-powered fast editor and the one I’ve been using primarily. There are also some side products like Remove BG and a batch editor to process multiple files at once. I think most people would just open Express and never touch the others, which is pretty much how Pixlr is designed: choose the workspace that matches what you’re trying to do.
The free tier gives you most of the core features, a ton of AI credits, and unfortunately, free accounts will be subject to export limits, which is a pretty normal SaaS issue. The paid tier starts at around $2 a month, but the average user probably won’t need it.
Where Pixlr really competes with Photoshop
Half of the Photoshop-shaped Pixlr suite
The Pixlr Editor is the first of the collection of tools that I tried and it is a proper Photoshop replacement. The entire top menu reflects what you would expect with options for adjustments, filters and other common settings. Layers work as they should with blending modes, opacity, masks and all the non-destructive goodies. There’s a Lasso tool with multiple modes, a magic wand for selections, and open PSD files natively, which is useful if you have old work lying around.
However, spot healing is what I keep coming back to. It’s such a small tool considering the power of Pixlr as a whole, but it’s definitely the most used, and Pixlr implements it flawlessly. Settings are another thing I clicked on: curves and levels are here with proper histograms and per-channel control, along with the usual brightness and exposure. Then you have Dodge and Burn with separate ranges for shadows, midtones and highlights, which is the kind of feature I assumed would be paid for, but it isn’t.
There’s also Liquify for warping, a clone stamp, and a full filter menu with things like Gaussian blur, motion blur, vignettes, grain, glitch, and drop shadows. Sure, it’s not 100% of the Photoshop toolset, but honestly, are all of these things in the free tier? That’s pretty rare nowadays. Exports also cover the usual range (PNG, JPEG, WebP, PDF, TIFF, plus your own layered PXD), although it opens PSD files without being able to save them.
The AI side does a lot of the heavy lifting
And free credits will take you far
Pixlr Express is what most people open when they think of Pixlr these days, and it’s where all the AI stuff lives. The big change around 2023 was that Pixlr opted for AI, and the 2026 version relies heavily on it. All AI features run on a credit system and the free tier gives you 20 to start.
The Generative Fill and Expand tools impressed me the most. You know how it works: mark an area, type what you want, and the tool will fill in the blanks with an AI-generated image… or expand the blanks around the frame of your shot. I’d say it’s as good as Adobe’s, the only problem is that Pixlr isn’t as transparent about its training data as Firefly is. You can choose between different models depending on what you are looking for.
My favorites would probably be Super Sharp and Remove Noise. these are real quality of life characteristics that avoids a lot of the manual setup and again, I’d say it’s about on the same level as the Photoshop equivalents. The key is to start with an image that is basically no longer horrible. Background Removal is also good, but I think it needs some refinement as it left some uneven blurring on the edges of my subjects; however, it would be perfect for anything with cleaner lines than what I was working with.
Pixlr does more than its price suggests
I’ll probably still recommend Photopea and Affinity as my top picks for anyone who wants Photoshop-level power. But Pixlr really surprised me. It’s more affordable than most heavier editors, and the Express side handles the AI work without needing to look for a separate tool or even get subscriptions. For something that runs in a browser tab, it’s hard to argue.
