Alternatives and competitors

Sites like Pexels

The 20 closest stock photography alternatives to Pexels, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 6 technologies behind it.

Looking for an alternative to Pexels? The closest matches are Pixabay, DepositPhotos and istockphoto.com. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.

Neighbours
k = 20
Sites searched
4,032
Vector
384-d
Query
13 ms

01 · Entity

About Pexels

Pexels pexels.com

Wikidata: free online media library

Top 1K · #880 English 6 technologies Crawled Nov 6, 2026
Visit Pexels

Summary by Claude

Pexels is a library of free stock photos and videos contributed by photographers, which users can download and use without paying royalties.

Who it’s for
Designers, marketers, bloggers and content creators
Business model
Advertising and sponsored placements

02 · Embedding space

Competitor map

Each alternative by how close its vector is to Pexels’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.

similarity × popularity

500pxEnvato®123RFDreamstimeGetty ImagesShutterstockunsplash.comistockphoto.comDepositPhotosPixabay

03 · Nearest neighbours

Alternatives to Pexels

Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to Pexels, thumbs down if it isn’t.

Only in English

We can’t read pexels.com’s homepage (bot protection page), so it’s compared on what Wikidata and Wikipedia say about it.

  1. 01
    Pixabay pixabay.com Top 1K English

    free online media library

  2. 02
    DepositPhotos depositphotos.com Top 10K English

    Royalty-free Images, Photo Stock, Video & Music | DepositPhotos

    Royalty-free stock images at affordable prices on DepositPhotos. Download stock photos for commercial use. Pictures, videos, music for every topic.

  3. 03
    istockphoto.com Top 10K English

    Stock Images, Royalty-Free Images, Illustrations, Vectors and Videos - iStock

    iStock has millions of exclusive stock photos, videos, vectors, and illustrations that are researched and shot by a diverse global community. © 2023 iStockphoto LP.

  4. 04
    unsplash.com Top 1K English

    Checking your browser before accessing unsplash.com

    website dedicated to sharing copyright-free photography under the Unsplash license

  5. 05
    Shutterstock shutterstock.com Top 10K English

    shutterstock.com

    American stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools provider

  6. 06
    Getty Images gettyimages.com Top 10K English

    Royalty-Free Stock Photos, Creative Images & Vectors | News, Fashion, and Entertainment imagery - Getty Images

    Discover Getty Images' unrivaled collection of royalty-free images to find the perfect stock photo, vector, or illustration that resonates with your customers.

  7. 07
    Dreamstime dreamstime.com Top 10K English

    Stock Photos & Images, Vectors, Video & Audio - Dreamstime

    Find the perfect stock photos, images and vectors for your project. Quickly search over 377 million images including free and public domain images.

  8. 08
    Vecteezy vecteezy.com Top 10K English

    Online marketplace where users can license stock photos, vector graphics, and stock footage

  9. 09
    123RF 123rf.com Top 10K English

    Stock Photos, Vectors and Royalty Free Images from 123RF

    Search and download from millions of HD stock photos, royalty free images, cliparts, vectors and illustrations

  10. 10
    Envato® envato.com Top 10K English

    Envato® | AI Tools and Unlimited Creative Assets

    Create and customize content with AI tools and unlimited creative assets for professional and commercial use.

  11. 11
    500px 500px.com Top 10K English

    photo sharing website

  12. 12
    Flaticon flaticon.com Top 10K English

    That request didn't go through. Our security filter flagged something. You don't have permission to access this page.

    database of icons

  13. 13
    imgsrc.ru Top 10K English

    Unlimited photo hosting @iMGSRC.RU

    Your free and unlimited host iMGSRC.RU presents Unlimited photo hosting

  14. 14
    Plex plex.tv Top 10K English

    streaming media service

  15. 15
    Internet Archive archive.org Top 1K English

    Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

    U.S. non-profit organization and digital archive

  16. 16
    flic.kr Top 10K English

    Flickr | The best place to be a photographer online.

    The nicest place on the internet is here for you: inspiration, community, creativity, art, passion, and a heaping scoop of weirdness await you. Join for free.

  17. 17
    Scribd scribd.com Top 1K English

    Scribd: Home to the world’s documents.

    Get to the source. Specialized knowledge on any topic, and answers you won’t find anywhere else. Home to the world’s documents, 300M+ and counting.

  18. 18
    Picsart picsart.com Top 10K English

    Picsart: The AI Creative Platform

    Picsart is an all-in-one creative platform with a wide selection of free AI design tools. Create content fast with expert-crafted templates, built-in asset libraries, and generative AI tools.

  19. 19
    Canva canva.com Top 1K English

    Canva

    online graphic design platform

  20. 20
    Postimages postimg.cc Top 10K English

    Postimages — free image hosting / image upload

    Provides free image uploading and hosting integration for forums. Free picture hosting and photo sharing for websites and blogs.

Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to pexels.com’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones Pexels uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.

04 · Fingerprints

Technology

What Pexels is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.

Built with

Live chat & support
  • Zendesk TXT v=spf1 include:mailgun.org include:_spf.google.com include:mail.zende…
CDN
Email hosting
Email delivery
  • Mailgun TXT v=spf1 include:mailgun.org include:_spf.google.com include:mail.zende…
DNS hosting
SaaS tools (verified in DNS)

Stack changes

No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what Pexels adds or drops shows up here.

SimilarSiteSearch

Competitors by meaning, stacks from the source. Data from public homepages and DNS.

About our crawler