In-browser photo editor
OpusImg vs Photopea
Photopea is a remarkable piece of engineering: a Photoshop-class editor running entirely in a browser tab, opening PSD files, free to use. It is also a very different kind of tool from OpusImg, and the choice between them is mostly a choice about how much control you want.
Claims about Photopea on this page were checked against their own live pages on . Pricing and limits change — verify anything you are about to act on.
Side by side
| OpusImg | Photopea | |
|---|---|---|
| Where files are processed | In your browser for the local tools; on our servers for the AI tools, labelled per tool. | In your browser. |
| What it is | Focused single-purpose tools with presets for real destinations. | A general-purpose layered raster and vector editor. |
| Pricing | Free forever for the local tools. Pro $9/month unlocks the AI tools and the API beta. | Free with advertising. A Premium account removes ads; pricing is shown inside the app's Account window rather than on a public pricing page, so no figure is quoted here. |
| Sign-up required | No account for the local tools. | No account for the free tier. |
| Advertising | None on any tier. | Yes on the free tier. |
| Watermark | None. | None. |
| Batch | Yes — a folder in, a ZIP out. | Scriptable, but not a batch-first workflow. |
| File support | JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC input, PDF in and out. | PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD, AI and the common raster formats. |
| API and embedding | No embed. Included with Pro, Business in beta: 1,000 operations/month, 20 MB maximum. | No image-processing API. Instead, free iframe embedding of the whole editor, with a paid whitelabel option and a self-hosted build. |
Where Photopea is better
- It opens PSD files with layers intact, along with XCF, Sketch and AI. Nothing else free does that in a browser, and for anyone receiving layered files from a designer it is often the only practical option.
- It is a real editor: layers, masks, adjustment layers, blend modes, selections, paths, text on paths, filters. Our editor is deliberately much simpler, and for anything that needs actual retouching Photopea is the tool.
- The free tier is the full editor with advertising rather than a crippled subset, which is an unusually honest free tier.
- It can be embedded in your own site by iframe for free, and there is a self-hosted build. That is a distribution model we do not offer at all.
Where OpusImg is better
- Focused tools with correct defaults. Compressing forty images or cropping an ID photograph to a national specification is a task, not a canvas, and a general-purpose editor makes it slower.
- Batch as a first-class workflow: a folder in, a ZIP out, without scripting.
- Destination presets — social sizes, passport specifications, print dimensions with bleed — that encode a requirement rather than leaving you to look it up.
- No advertising on any tier.
Both are local, so this is about scope
Photopea runs in your browser and so do OpusImg's local tools, which removes the usual privacy axis from this comparison entirely. Neither uploads your image to do ordinary editing work. The exception on our side is the AI tools, which are server-side and labelled.
What remains is a straightforward question: do you want a canvas or a task?
The general-purpose editor problem
A general editor can do anything, which means it knows nothing about what you are trying to do. Cropping to a passport specification in Photopea means looking up the country's dimensions, converting millimetres to pixels at 300 DPI, measuring the head height, and getting the background colour right. All of that is possible and none of it is the tool's job.
A focused tool encodes the requirement. That is worth a great deal when the requirement is fiddly and worth nothing when you actually needed to retouch a blemish, which is when you want Photopea.
Where we would send you to them
Layered files. Anything arriving as a PSD with a designer's layer structure should be opened in Photopea, not flattened by us.
Real retouching — cloning, healing, masking, compositing by hand. Our editor is not built for it and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.
Embedding an editor in your own product, which they support for free and we do not support at all.
Which to use
Use Photopea when
You need a real editor — layers, masks, retouching — or you are opening PSD, Sketch or AI files, or you want to embed an editor in your own site.
Use OpusImg when
The job is a defined task with a correct answer, you are working on a batch, or you want a preset that already knows the specification.
What we checked
Read on 7 September 2026. Photopea is a product of its respective owners and is not affiliated with OpusImg.
Try it here
Terms used on this page: Raster vs vector, Alpha channel, Bit depth, ICC profile.
See every comparison, or the OpusImg pricing these numbers come from.