Alternatives to ColorBrewer
A web tool for choosing sequential, diverging and qualitative color schemes for maps and charts. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
ColorBrewer
A web tool for choosing sequential, diverging and qualitative color schemes for maps and charts.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as ColorBrewer.
Chroma.js Color Palette Helper
A web tool for designing perceptually balanced, colorblind-safe palettes for data visualization.
Chroma.js Color Palette Helper lets you design custom perceptually balanced, colorblind-safe scales instead of choosing from a curated set, but is not open source.
Data Color Picker
A web tool that builds visually equidistant color palettes for charts, maps and dashboards.
Data Color Picker builds custom equidistant palettes with divergent and single-hue modes and SVG export, limited to eight colors and not open source.
HCL Wizard
Web tools for designing HCL-based color palettes and checking them for color vision deficiencies.
HCL Wizard designs HCL palettes with a color vision deficiency emulator and matches the colorspace packages for R and Python.
iWantHue
A web tool that generates palettes of clearly distinct colors for data visualization.
iWantHue generates distinct categorical colors with a colorblind-friendly option and JSON, CSS and JavaScript export, but offers no map preview.
Leonardo
Adobe's web tool for generating accessible color themes and scales from target contrast ratios.
Leonardo is also open source and offers data visualization scale tools built from contrast targets, aimed more at design systems than cartography.
Viz Palette
A web tool for testing data visualization color palettes, including color vision deficiency simulation.
Viz Palette tests chart palettes for color vision deficiencies and copies them as JavaScript arrays, but does not provide or generate schemes itself.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Coblis
A browser-based simulator that shows how an image looks to people with color vision deficiencies.
Sim Daltonism
A color blindness simulator for Mac and iOS that filters a screen region or camera view.
Paletton
A long-running web color scheme designer built around a color wheel and classic harmony rules.
Accessible Palette
A web tool for building color systems with consistent lightness and WCAG contrast across hues.
ColorBox
A web tool for building accessible color scales from adjustable hue, saturation and brightness curves.
