Photopea Review 2026

What is Photopea?

More than 50 file formats open in a single browser tab, including layered PSD, Illustrator AI, Adobe XD, Figma FIG, Sketch, GIMP XCF, Krita KRI and CorelDRAW CDR, according to Photopea's official GitHub README. That list is the real reason designers search for photopea vs photoshop free online editor: a client sends a PSD, you are on a Chromebook or a borrowed laptop, and you need to change one headline before lunch. Photopea, built and run by Ivan Kutskir, handles that job for nothing, with ads paying the bills. This review looks at what you actually get, where the free version pinches, and when Adobe's ₹733.96 a month is still the better spend.

A client PSD on a Chromebook: the job Photopea was built for

Picture a social media freelancer in Pune. A brand team sends a 40-layer festival banner as a PSD and asks for a Hindi version of the tagline. Installing Photoshop for a ten-minute edit makes no sense, and GIMP will flatten some layer effects on import. Photopea opens the file in the browser, keeps the layer tree, text layers and most blend modes, and lets you save straight back to PSD for the client.

That workflow suits students, small agencies, D2C founders who edit their own product shots, and developers who need to slice an asset out of a design file without a Creative Cloud seat. The interface copies Photoshop's layout closely (tool bar on the left, layers and history panels on the right, the same shortcut keys for most tools), so anyone trained on Adobe software is productive within minutes. People who have never used a layer-based editor will find it as dense as Photoshop itself.

Photopea PSD file editing online: what survives the round trip

As an online PSD editor, Photopea goes further than most browser tools. The official learn pages document layer masks, smart objects, adjustment layers, fill layers, layer styles and Refine Edge for hair-level cut-outs. Selection tools include the Photopea magic wand, Quick Selection, lasso variants and colour-range selection, which covers most product-photo clean-up.

A few points to keep in mind before trusting it with a client master file:

• Fonts: text layers stay editable, but if the original font is not available, Photopea substitutes one. Upload the brand font first to avoid reflowed copy.
• Smart objects: you can open and edit embedded smart objects, which is handy for mock-up templates sold on marketplaces.
• Raw photos: the README lists DNG, NEF, CR2, CR3, ARW, RW2, RAF and ORF, so camera files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Olympus bodies open without a converter.

Sketch files, XD and XCF support in one tab

The official blog marks the milestones: Sketch import arrived in version 2.6, XD support in 3.5, and Illustrator files in 5.0. Today the README groups formats into complex documents (PSD, AI, INDD, XCF, Sketch, XD, FIG, KRI, CLIP, SAI, CDR, AFPHOTO, PDF, SVG, EPS and more), raster images (PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, JXL, TIFF, EXR and others), raw camera formats, and animated or video files. GIF, MP4, WEBM and MKV open with each frame as a layer and can be exported back to GIF or MP4.

For a Windows user who receives Sketch files from a Mac-based designer, this matters a lot, because Sketch itself only runs on macOS. XCF support also makes Photopea a bridge for teams where one person works in GIMP. Treat imports of niche formats as "good enough to inspect and export", not as a perfect conversion. Complex InDesign or CorelDRAW layouts may need checking line by line.

Photopea vector shapes, Photopea AI and the newer tools

Raster work is only half of it. The learn section has separate chapters on creating and editing Photopea vector shapes, path structure and vector graphics, and the blog announced bitmap vectorising. You can build a simple logo, export it as SVG and open it later without losing anchor points.

On the Photopea AI side, the home page lists one-click background removal and a tool that replaces part of a picture from a text description (the tutorials call these Remove BG and Magic Replace). A February 2024 tutorial says Premium users can run AI features hundreds of times a month, and anyone who runs out can paste an API key from Dezgo, an outside image-generation service, under Edit, Preferences, so that further use is billed to their own Dezgo balance. Photopea does not publish the free AI allowance or name the models on its own pages, so test it on your own images before relying on it for paid work. Adobe's Generative Fill, backed by Firefly and monthly credits, is the more mature option today.

Photopea plugins, scripting and the embed API

Developers get more here than they might expect. Photopea scripting accepts JavaScript in the style of Photoshop's scripting model, documented on the official Scripts page since version 2.9. The Photopea API lets a website embed the editor in an iframe, pass in files through a URL configuration and receive the edited result back. Third-party Photopea plugins and wrappers for that API also turn up on GitHub. Photopea's accounts page says plain iframe embedding is free; a paid Distributor account, priced by expected monthly views, removes the ads and branding (white-label mode), and a self-hosted copy costs $500 to $2,000 a month, paid a year ahead. For an Indian SaaS team building a print-on-demand product, that can save months of canvas-editor work.

Photopea Premium: what it takes to remove ads, and the price question

The free version shows ads around the canvas. According to Photopea's accounts page, Premium lets one logged-in user work without ads and "may have other benefits", and the AI tutorial adds a much larger monthly AI allowance. Team Premium lets one owner pay for a group, with every member getting Premium at a lower cost per head. Both are bought from the Account window inside the editor, and we found no separate INR price. Schools have their own route: embed Photopea on the school website with a Distributor account, and the Schools page says that ad-free, white-label setup starts at $450 a year for the whole school.

We have deliberately not printed a Premium price. Photopea shows its rates only inside the Account window, its public pages list no figures, and DevMixa does not quote a price it cannot confirm from an official source. None of the official pages we read mention extra history steps or extra Peadrive storage for Premium either, so do not pay expecting them. Open the Account window to see the current billing options before you buy. Because every editing tool is already free, the real question is whether ads and AI limits bother you enough to pay.

Photopea vs Photoshop free online editor: a side-by-side table

Photopea vs Photoshop for someone paying in rupees

Adobe's India plans page puts the Photoshop single app at ₹733.96 a month on an annual plan, which works out to about ₹8,800 a year. The Photography plan at ₹638.38 a month adds Lightroom and 1 TB of storage. Those prices buy things Photopea does not offer: a native desktop engine that handles huge files, Firefly-powered generative tools, Camera Raw, and first-party support.

For occasional edits, the maths runs the other way. A student editing a college fest poster or a founder resizing product shots twice a week can do the same work in Photopea for free. Canva's Pro Lite plan (₹1,590 a year in India) is the other cheap route, but Canva is template-led and does not open PSD layers the way Photopea does.

When you need a Photopea alternative offline: GIMP and Affinity

Photopea's learn pages say you can load the site, disconnect from the internet and carry on editing, because the editor runs on your own CPU and GPU. Its tutorials also show how to install it to your device as a browser app, and the 4.2 release added local storage. The catch is that you need a connection to open it in the first place, and anything that talks to an online service (AI tools, Peadrive, Google Drive or Dropbox) will not work while you are offline. If you travel often, work on spotty connections or want a program that starts with no network at all, pick a desktop editor:

• GIMP: free and open source on Windows, macOS and Linux, with XCF as its own format. The learning curve is steeper.
• Affinity: now owned by Canva and free for individuals on Windows and Mac, with a polished interface and good PSD import.
• Photoshop: the paid option if you already need Adobe's other apps.

Why Photopea slows down or crashes on big files

Since all processing happens in the browser, performance is tied to your RAM, your browser and the number of open tabs. Most crashes on large documents come from the browser running out of memory, not from a bug in the editor. Close other tabs, use a recent Chrome, Edge or Firefox, flatten layers you no longer need, and switch off aggressive ad blockers that break the page. Photopea's own help article on "Photopea doesn't work" covers these cases.

Your files, the privacy page and commercial work

Photopea's combined terms and privacy page says files you open are never sent anywhere and do not leave your device, unless you choose a cloud storage, in which case they travel only between your device and that account. Logging in stores your name, email and Premium payment records, and an account unused for six months is deleted. The page does not cover AI features, and the Dezgo option suggests generation happens on an outside server, so keep sensitive images away from AI tools. On ownership, the terms are short and clear: your work belongs to you, you can sell it without paying Photopea a share, and you need not credit Photopea. We found no mention of watermarks on exports. The bigger practical risk for agencies is font licensing inside client PSDs, not Photopea itself.

Three things to do in your first Photopea session

• Drag a real client PSD into the tab and check text layers, smart objects and layer styles against a screenshot of the original.
• Upload your brand fonts once, so future text edits do not reflow.
• Install it as a browser app from the menu, then decide after a week whether the ads justify a Premium month.

Support is thin by Adobe standards: an email address, a subreddit and a public GitHub repository for bug reports and feature requests. Photopea is not fully open source, so the GitHub repo is for discussion only.