Free Tools That Work Without a Signup

Genuinely free web tools that open and work, no account, no email wall, no trial. Each one's catch, where it has one, is noted.

32 sites Updated Curated by Guy Malachi

Search for a free tool and most of what comes back won't do anything until you hand over an email. Not because the tool needs an account to work, because the email is what's actually being sold. Applying that one filter strictly removes something like four out of every five results, which is how a list this short ends up taking real effort to build.

What survives is a mix. Some are polished products someone maintains full-time. Others are one person's weekend project that happens to do its job better than anything commercial. A few are single-purpose pages with no ambition beyond the one thing they do, which is usually exactly what you want at the moment you need them.

Two edge cases I had to rule on. An account required only to save your work is allowed, since it doesn't stop you at the door. The note says so wherever that applies. Ads are allowed too, and noted, because a tool has to be paid for somehow and that's the honest version of the trade.

This list is open and I'd like it to get better. If you've built something that clears the bar, or you use something that should be here, tell me and I'll add it. Things get dropped when they add a signup wall, start watermarking, or go quiet, which happens more often than you'd hope, and is most of why a list like this needs maintaining rather than just writing.

Images and design 8

Editing, compressing and converting images, and picking colors.

  1. Photopea - Free Online Photo Editor photopea.com Runs locally Photoshop in a tab: layers, masks, smart objects, and it opens PSD, AI, Sketch and XD files. Your files never leave the machine, the whole editor runs in the browser, so it's safe for work you can't upload anywhere. Ad-supported, nothing to sign into.
  2. Squoosh - Image Compressor squoosh.app Runs locally Compress an image with a before/after slider so you can see exactly what you're giving up. Runs entirely in the browser, nothing is uploaded anywhere.
  3. SVGOMG - SVG Optimizer jakearchibald.github.io Runs locally Strips the junk out of exported SVGs with a live preview of each optimization, usually halving the file size of anything Illustrator produced. Runs entirely in the browser and works offline once loaded.
  4. SVG to PNG Converter - SVG Viewer svgviewer.dev Drop in an SVG, set the size, get a PNG. Also previews and tidies up SVG source. The step you need whenever something refuses to accept a vector.
  5. Realtime Colors - Preview Palettes on a Real Site realtimecolors.com Try a palette and type scale on a realistic page layout instead of on swatches. The fastest way to find out a color combination doesn't work.
  6. SVGcode - Convert images to SVG vector graphics svgco.de Runs locally Traces a raster image into an SVG. Runs locally with nothing uploaded, and installs as an app if you want it offline. Good on logos and silhouettes, mediocre on photographs, which is true of every free tracer.
  7. ResizeFlow.cc - Free Online Image Resizer, Converter & Batch Compressor resizeflow.cc Runs locally Batch resize, crop and convert images entirely in the browser, nothing uploaded. Handles HEIC, which is the one that matters when moving iPhone photos anywhere else, and exports a whole folder as a ZIP. Strips EXIF automatically. Ad-supported.
  8. Free social post editor · Picorn picorn.com Design social images and carousels in the browser and export PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF with no watermark and no account. An account is only needed to save a project or use the AI features, so you can make something and take it away, you just can't come back to it later.

Diagrams and whiteboards 4

Sketching an idea, or drawing something precise enough to ship.

  1. Excalidraw - Virtual Whiteboard excalidraw.com A whiteboard with a hand-drawn look that suits thinking out loud. Your drawing stays in the browser unless you start a live session, and those are end-to-end encrypted, so the server relays without being able to read it. Collaboration works from a shared link with nobody signing up.
  2. diagrams.net - Free Diagram Editor app.diagrams.net Full-featured diagramming: flowcharts, network diagrams, org charts. Choose 'device' at the storage prompt and the file stays on your machine and it never asks for anything again. Pick a cloud option instead and you're signing into that provider, so the first screen is the one that matters.
  3. tldraw • very good free whiteboard tldraw.com An infinite canvas that opens instantly, no account, no project setup. Precise where Excalidraw is deliberately sketchy, so it comes down to whether you want a diagram that looks drawn or one that looks drafted. Open source, and share links work without either person signing up.
  4. Mermaid Live Editor - Diagrams from Text mermaid.live Write a diagram as text, watch it render, export SVG or PNG. Useful for anything that belongs in version control, since the source is text you can commit.

PDFs and files 5

Converting, compressing and moving files between machines.

  1. TinyWow - Free File Tools tinywow.com Roughly 200 file tools in one place across PDF, image and video. Files are uploaded and processed on their servers, then cleared after a short window, so it's the wrong choice for anything confidential and a good one for everything else. Free and ad-supported.
  2. PDF24 Tools - Free Online PDF Tools tools.pdf24.org Merge, split, sign, OCR, compress and convert PDFs, with no watermarks, page limits or account. Files are uploaded to do the work. They also publish a free desktop version that does the same things offline, which is what to use for anything you can't send out.
  3. Wormhole - Simple Encrypted File Sharing wormhole.app Send files up to 10GB with a link that expires. Files are encrypted in your browser before upload and the key travels in the link fragment, so they're stored on a server but not in a form anyone there can read. No account on either end.
  4. PairDrop - Local File Transfer in the Browser pairdrop.net AirDrop for whatever's on your network, phone to laptop, any OS. Files go directly between the two devices rather than through a server, though a server does the initial introduction.
  5. Staticvert - Free Online File Converter staticvert.com Runs locally Converts images and documents entirely in the browser, nothing gets uploaded. Images in and out plus PDF, DOCX, XLSX and TXT, which makes it the one to reach for when the file is something you'd rather not hand to a server. Ad-supported.

Developer tools 10

Testing, decoding and converting the things you'd otherwise do by hand.

  1. JSON.pizza - JSON Viewer json.pizza Paste JSON, get a readable collapsible tree. No formatting options to configure, which is the point.
  2. regex101 - Regex Tester and Debugger regex101.com Test a pattern against your actual strings and watch which token matched what, which is the point now that most regex is generated rather than written. Note the PHP and PCRE flavors process on their server while the JavaScript one runs in the browser, so mind what you paste.
  3. CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife gchq.github.io Runs locally Chain encoding, decoding, encryption, compression and parsing operations together in a pipeline. Entirely client-side, which is the reason to use it over the scattered single-purpose sites: whatever you paste stays on your machine. Built by GCHQ.
  4. transform.tools - Convert Between Formats transform.tools Converts between formats you'd otherwise hand-write: JSON to TypeScript, CSS to Tailwind, HTML to JSX, and a few dozen more.
  5. Bundlephobia - Cost of Adding an npm Package bundlephobia.com Shows what an npm package will actually cost your bundle in kilobytes and download time before you install it. You're only ever giving it a package name.
  6. PageSpeed Insights pagespeed.web.dev Google's own speed test, run against a public URL. Gives you lab measurements plus real Chrome user data for the site, which is the part other speed tools can't provide. No account for any of it.
  7. DNS Checker - DNS Check Propagation Tool dnschecker.org Checks whether a DNS change has propagated by querying around a hundred servers worldwide, which is the actual question when you've moved a domain and it works for you but not for someone else. No account, no limits.
  8. JSON Web Token Debugger jwt.io Runs locally Paste a token, see the header, payload and signature status. Decoding happens in your browser, which matters more than it sounds: plenty of the alternatives post your token to their server, and a token is a credential.
  9. Free Monitoring Tools testomato.com Six site-diagnostic utilities: SSL check, DNS lookup, HTTP response inspector, SLA calculator, content extractor and a markdown-for-agents check. All work on public URLs, so there's nothing of yours to send. Run by a monitoring company, which is what they're for, though nothing is gated.
  10. Crontab.guru - The cron schedule expression generator crontab.guru Type a cron expression and it tells you in plain English when it runs, plus the next few dates it will fire. You could ask an AI instead, but this gives the same answer every time and takes a second, which is what you want for something you check repeatedly.

Comparing text and lists 2

Finding what changed between two versions of something.

  1. Diffchecker - Compare Text Online diffchecker.com Paste two blocks of text and see what changed, highlighted line by line. Free tier is ad-supported and works without an account. Assume the text reaches their servers, so treat it like anything else you paste into a website.
  2. List Compare - Find Differences Between Lists molbiotools.com Paste two or more lists and get the overlaps, the differences and a Venn diagram. Sounds trivial until you need it, at which point nothing else does it this fast. Buried on a molecular biology site, but the tool itself is general-purpose.

Everything else 3

Useful, and belonging to no category in particular.

  1. VidClean - Free Video Editor & 28 Free Tools, No Account, No Watermark vidclean.net A Descript-style editor where you cut video by editing the transcript, plus 28 standalone tools for transcription, silence removal, subtitles and conversion. No account, no watermark, no cap on the core tools. Files upload to their servers and are deleted after about 90 minutes.
  2. Mailinator - Disposable Email Inbox mailinator.com A throwaway inbox for the signups you can't avoid. Invent any address at the domain and read it immediately. Public inboxes are genuinely public, though: anyone who guesses the address can read it, so never use it for anything you'd mind a stranger seeing.
  3. Desmos - Online Graphing Calculator desmos.com A graphing calculator good enough that schools use it. Everything works without an account, and saving a graph is the only thing that needs one.

Keep this list

Here's what happens:

  1. Install Thrive Tab, a free Chrome extension
  2. This list appears on your new tab page
  3. Any link on it opens with a keyboard shortcut, from any app ▸ see
  4. When the curator updates the list, yours updates too
extension Add to Chrome - it's free

Thrive Tab is a free Chrome extension. You can install it from the Chrome Web Store by clicking the button above.

What "a keyboard shortcut away" means

No matter what app you're in, one keystroke opens the search, type a few letters and you're on any site you've added to your board.

This is how the global keyboard shortcut works ↑

Want to share your own list?

Install Thrive Tab to build and share your own list of curated sites and content that people can subscribe to.

Get Thrive Tab - it's free