Color analysis apps compared

Comparison · checked this year · we are in it

You should be suspicious of this page, because we make one of the four things on it. So here are the rules we held ourselves to. Every claim about the other three comes from their own public pages and we checked them all ourselves this year. We quote their positioning in their own words rather than summarising it into something more convenient for us. We don't quote prices, because a stale price is just a false claim with a date on it. And we don't rank anyone on accuracy, including ourselves, because there's no ground truth in this field to rank against – which is the claim you should be most suspicious of anywhere else you read about these tools.

Analyze my photo – free

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How we compared them

Four tools, judged on the things that are stable and checkable from the outside: whether you need an account before you get a result, whether it needs a photo or just answers, and what it hands back when it's done. Those are facts you can verify yourself in about ten minutes, which is the point.

We have deliberately left prices out. Every one of these has changed its pricing at least once, a stale price on a comparison page is just a false claim with a date attached, and a table that leads on price tends to quietly become a table about price. Go and look at the current number on their site.

We've also skipped accuracy, and that deserves an explanation rather than a shrug. There is no agreed ground truth for personal color analysis – professional analysts disagree with each other on the same face, so 'which tool is most accurate' has no honest answer available to anybody, including us. Anyone publishing an accuracy ranking for these tools has invented the benchmark. What we can compare is what each one does and asks of you.

If you want the academic version of that: the closest thing to a benchmark is Deep Armocromia, a dataset of expert-annotated face images built for exactly this task, published by Stacchio, Paolanti, Spigarelli and Frontoni in the ECCV 2024 Workshops. Its authors trained current deep-learning models to sort faces into four seasons and then into twelve, and the paper is candid that the twelve-way version remains hard. That is the state of the art on a purpose-built, expert-labelled dataset. It's worth holding in mind next time any tool, ours included, hands you a season with no caveat attached.

The four, in their own words

Quoted from each homepage this year, so you can see how each one positions itself without us paraphrasing it into something more convenient for us.

Vivaldi Color Lab: "Discover your season and get a color analysis report with our expert AI." Offers three separate things: the AI analysis, a set of virtual drapes for all twelve seasons, and a free color quiz. Has a premium tier. The drapes are the most interesting thing here and nobody else has them.
ColorMine AI: "Stop guessing. Start glowing. Find your perfect colors with the #1 AI Color Analysis App." Free six-question quiz that returns a season without a photo, plus a phone app. Leans hardest on the shopping angle of the four.
Palettehunt: "Get your season, undertone, and full 30-color palette in minutes – then see those colors on the real you in your own AI photoshoot." The photoshoot previews are genuinely the standout feature of the four. Their own three-step flow starts with "Sign in", so an account comes before a result.
siOsi: Ours. One photo, and the first look needs no account. The analysis is a face read rather than a color read: your season, your undertone as warm, cool, neutral or olive, your contrast level, and fifteen labs that are mostly about how makeup behaves on you rather than which colors to buy. Nine languages.

The thing the comparison actually turns up

Once you line all four up, the interesting split isn't which one is better. It's that three of them are answering a wardrobe question and one of them isn't.

Vivaldi, ColorMine and Palettehunt all take your face and hand back colors: your season, a palette, shades to shop. That's the category as it currently exists, and they do it well. siOsi does that too – season, undertone, contrast – and then keeps going into the thing none of them touch, which is how makeup actually behaves on your face. Twelve of our fifteen labs are about the makeup rather than the colors: whether your base oxidises warm as the day goes on, whether it throws flashback under a flash, how your blending and transitions read at conversational distance, how long any of it is lasting.

That matters because a palette answers "what should I buy" and stops there. It cannot tell you why the foundation you matched perfectly at 9am looks orange in photos at 6pm, or why your blush edge stays visible however long you buff it. Those are the questions people actually have in the mirror, and a season name has no opinion on them.

So the honest framing isn't that we score higher on a shared scorecard. It's that if your question is about your wardrobe, any of these four will serve you, and if your question is about your makeup, only one of them is trying to answer it.

What each one is best at

Nobody wins every category, and pretending otherwise is how these pages stop being useful.

Best if you want to try colors on before buying: Palettehunt. The AI photoshoot preview renders shades onto your own face, which is a genuinely nice answer to "but will it suit me". Two things to weigh: their own three-step flow starts with "Sign in", so an account comes before any result, and a render is a prediction of how a color would look rather than a measurement of how it does.
Best if you want a season from a quiz rather than a photo: ColorMine AI or Vivaldi. Both run a free quiz that returns a season from a handful of answers with no image at all. A quiz is working from what you tell it about yourself rather than from what a camera records, so treat the result as a starting hypothesis and check it against a window.
Best for the DIY draping approach: Vivaldi. The virtual drapes across all twelve seasons are the closest thing online to the in-person process, and the free quiz plus drapes combination is a genuinely well-thought-out funnel.
Best if your question is about makeup rather than clothes: siOsi, and not by a small margin – the other three are not competing here, because they do not do it. You get the season, undertone and contrast like everywhere else, plus twelve makeup labs and three geometry labs on the same photo. If the thing bothering you is your foundation going orange by six or your blush edge refusing to disappear, this is the only one of the four with an answer.
Best if you want to see a result before handing anything over: siOsi, with the detail stated properly: your first look costs nothing and needs no account, no email and no app install, and it is the full result including all fifteen labs rather than a teaser. Going beyond that first one does need an account. Palettehunt puts "Sign in" as step one of three, so the difference is when you are asked rather than whether – you see what the thing actually does before deciding.

Questions worth asking about any of them, ours included

Less about which to pick and more about how to read the result you get. These apply to every tool in the category.

Does it tell you how confident it is?: A season name with no confidence attached is hiding something, because plenty of faces genuinely sit between two seasons. A tool that says "probably Soft Autumn, low confidence" is more useful than one that says "Soft Autumn" flatly, even though it feels less satisfying.
Does it separate undertone from season?: These are different measurements and they can disagree. Getting them separately lets you notice when they do, which is usually the moment you learn something real about your coloring.
Does it handle olive?: Most tools offer warm, cool and neutral only, so olive skin gets rounded to neutral and the actual reason your foundation shopping is hard never gets named. Ask before you trust a result on olive skin.
What happens to your photo?: You are uploading your face. Check the privacy policy for how long it's kept and whether it trains anything. This is the question people skip and it's the one with lasting consequences.
Does the result change if you re-upload?: Try the same face twice with different lighting. Every tool in this category will wobble, ours included, because lighting genuinely changes what a camera records. A tool that returns wildly different seasons from two photos of the same face on the same day is telling you how much weight to put on it.

So which one

If you flatly will not upload a photo, take Vivaldi's or ColorMine's free quiz, and we mean that – you are not our reader and their quizzes are decent.

For everyone else, start with siOsi. The first look is free and needs no account, and it returns more from that single photo than the others do: season, undertone including olive, contrast level, and fifteen labs. If you then want to see a shade rendered on your own face before buying, add Palettehunt on top. Between them they cover the whole category.

And whichever you use, the daylight test still outranks all of it. Take the season you're given, hold two fabrics up under a window, and see whether you agree. Every tool here is a starting point, including ours, and any of us implying otherwise is overselling.

What ours does, plainly

One photo. Your first look is free and needs no account or email; after that you sign up, and signed-in accounts get a few free looks a month. You get your season with a confidence score, your undertone as warm, cool, neutral or olive, and your contrast level, each measured separately so you can see when they disagree.

Then fifteen labs, and this is the part that isn't really a color-analysis feature at all. Twelve are about makeup and three are about facial geometry: whether your base oxidises warm through the day, whether it throws flashback in photos, how your blending and transitions read at normal distance, how long things are lasting, plus your face, eye and lip mapping.

That's the honest pitch. If you want a wardrobe palette and nothing else, one of the other three may suit you better, and the section above says which. If you want to know why your makeup does what it does, that's what we built.

One photo, and your first look is free without an account.

Free color analysis The 12 seasons

Watch it done

Draping these two side by side, from color analysts on YouTube. Some use the “Dark” naming instead of “Deep” – same seasons.

I asked an AI to do my color analysis

Dominique Sachse

I tested my ChatGPT color analysis with a real expert

Dominique Sachse

I did my own color analysis at home, and you can too

Libby

Answered

What is the best color analysis app?

It depends on what you want, and any page that answers this with one name is selling something. For a free season with no photo, Vivaldi Color Lab or ColorMine AI. To preview shades on your own face, Palettehunt. For makeup analysis rather than just a wardrobe palette, siOsi. We make the last one, so weigh that accordingly.

Are AI color analysis apps accurate?

There's no agreed ground truth to measure against – professional analysts disagree with each other on the same face – so nobody can honestly publish an accuracy ranking, us included. What you can check is consistency: upload two photos of yourself in different light and see how much the answer moves. That tells you how much weight to give it.

Which color analysis tool is free?

All four have something free, with different shapes. Vivaldi and ColorMine both have free quizzes that need no photo. siOsi gives you one full analysis free with no account, then asks you to sign up, and signed-in accounts get a few free looks a month. Palettehunt asks you to sign in before the first result. Paid tiers exist across the whole category and change often, so check current pricing on their own sites.

Do I have to upload a photo?

It depends which one you use. Vivaldi and ColorMine both have a quiz that returns a season from answers alone. siOsi reads a photo, because the fifteen labs are measuring the actual image – oxidation, flashback, blending, wear – and none of that can be inferred from a questionnaire.

Can any of them handle olive undertones?

Worth checking individually before you trust a result, because most tools in the category offer warm, cool and neutral only. siOsi returns olive as a distinct undertone. If you have an olive cast, a tool that rounds you to neutral will not explain why your foundation keeps going wrong.