Online Tool Store
· 6 min read
3 Image to SVG Vectorizers, Compared
Manesh Jayawardhana
CIO & Co-founder
Someone sends a logo as a 400px PNG and you need it on a banner. Scaling it up gives you a soft, blocky mess, and the vector original left with an agency three years ago.
Vectorizing traces the shapes in a raster image and rebuilds them as paths, so the result scales to any size. It works beautifully on flat artwork with clean edges and much less well on photographs, where “tracing” becomes an interpretive act. Knowing which of those two jobs you are doing decides which tool to reach for.
How to judge a vectorizer
Flat artwork or a photograph? A logo has a handful of solid colours and hard edges — the ideal case. A photo has thousands of shades, and the honest output is a posterized approximation, not a faithful copy.
How much colour control do you get? Reducing the colour count is what separates a usable SVG from a 4MB file full of near-identical paths.
Where does the file go? Some vectorizers upload to a server, some run locally. For an unreleased logo that distinction is worth checking.
Batch or single? One file is a two-minute job either way. Twenty files is where upload limits and account requirements start to matter.
The comparison
| Tool | Best for | Free tier | Watch out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vectorizer.com | Batches of up to 20 files | Free, no registration, no paid tier | Uploads are held for an hour before deletion |
| Vectorizer.kiwi | Choosing black-and-white or full colour | Free, no signup | 8 MB upload cap; processing appears server-side |
| Recraft | Editing the result in a design workflow | Free tier within a paid product | Account required |
Facts checked August 2026; tools change their plans. Table covers only the 3 alternatives — our tool gets its own section below.
Vectorizer.com
The most straightforward. It converts raster images to SVG with no registration, describes itself as completely free for everyone on equal terms, and accepts up to 20 files at once — comfortably the best batch handling here. There is no premium tier at all, which is unusual enough to be worth stating.
Files are uploaded rather than processed locally, and all uploaded data is deleted after an hour. That is a reasonable policy, clearly stated, but it is still an upload — worth weighing for client artwork under NDA. Conversion speed depends on the image’s size and complexity.
Vectorizer.kiwi
Three distinct modes: black-and-white vectorization, full-colour vectorization, and an upscale mode with adjustable scale factors. Picking the mode up front is genuinely useful, because a black-and-white trace of a line drawing produces far cleaner paths than a colour trace of the same file. Always free, no signup required.
Uploads cap at 8 MB, which rules out large scans. The site does not state explicitly where processing happens, though references to virtual computers suggest it happens on their servers rather than in your browser.
Recraft
The most capable, and the least free-standing. It accepts PNG, JPG and WebP and outputs SVG or Lottie animations, then lets you edit the result in place — including reducing the colour count to simplify the image, which is exactly the control that matters most. It integrates with Figma, Framer, Google Docs and Chrome, so conversion happens inside the tool you were already using.
It requires an account, and the free tier sits inside a paid product rather than standing alone. If vectorizing is one step in a design workflow you already run, that trade is easy. If you want one SVG and no signup, it is the wrong shape.
Image Vectorizer
Ours converts an image into a scalable, posterized SVG with adjustable colour and detail levels, entirely in your browser — the file is never uploaded, which is the meaningful difference when the artwork is not yours to distribute.
“Posterized” is the honest description: it reduces the image to flat colour regions rather than attempting a photorealistic trace. For logos, icons and flat illustration that is exactly right, and the colour and detail sliders let you trade file size against fidelity. For a detailed photograph, expect a stylised result rather than a reproduction, and expect no batch mode — one image at a time. MDN’s SVG documentation is the place to look if you want to understand what the output actually contains.
Which one to pick
- Twenty files at once — Vectorizer.com.
- A line drawing that should stay black and white — Vectorizer.kiwi’s B&W mode.
- Vectorizing as part of a Figma workflow — Recraft.
- Artwork that must not leave your machine — the tool below.
How to do it with Image Vectorizer
- Open the Image Vectorizer and select your image.
- Lower the colour count first — most images need far fewer colours than they start with.
- Adjust the detail level until edges look right without the path count exploding.
- Export the SVG and check it at the size you actually need it.
The walkthrough is in how to convert a photo into a vector SVG. Other image tools are in the tools directory.
You might also need
If the source image has a busy background, the Background Remover first will produce a much cleaner trace — vectorizers spend most of their path budget on backgrounds nobody wanted.
Going the other way, the SVG to JPG converter flattens a vector back to a raster for places that will not accept SVG.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free image vectorizer that doesn’t need an account?
Yes. Vectorizer.com and Vectorizer.kiwi both work without signing up, and ours needs no account and no upload. Recraft is the exception — it requires an account.
Why does my vectorized photo look like a poster?
Because that is what tracing a photograph produces. Vectorizing groups pixels into flat colour regions, and a photo has too many subtle gradients to survive that intact. Flat artwork vectorizes faithfully; photographs become stylised.
Why is my SVG file bigger than the PNG?
Too many colours or too much detail. Each additional colour region is more path data, so a high-detail trace of a complex image can easily exceed the original. Reduce the colour count and the file shrinks quickly.
Final thought
Decide whether you want a faithful trace or a stylised one before you start adjusting sliders. Logos want fidelity and few colours; photographs only ever give you interpretation, and the tools that pretend otherwise just hand you a larger file.