Comparison

Pastel vs AppIconCreator

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Pastel

Easily capture, organize, and use color palettes for your creative projects. Analyze photos to extract dominant colors, or manually select them. Seamlessly sync your library across devices and export colors in various code formats or as pixel bitmaps.

Highlights
  • Capture color palettes from photos
  • Manual color selection
  • Drag and drop colors to other apps
  • iCloud sync across devices
  • Export colors in code formats (RGB, hex, Swift)
  • Create custom wallpapers
Features
Read full description

Capture and collect color palettes with Pastel! Pastel is an app for amateur developers & artists (like us!) that lets you build up a library of color palettes to use in your projects. With drag & drop on iPad, drag colors out into other apps that support dropped colors, like Pages and Keynote, or many third-party apps from your favorite developers, so you can use your Pastel library as your master color collection across apps. Seamlessly sync your library across devices with iCloud. Analyze photos from the photo library or from Files to determine their dominant colors — choosing specific colors manually if you wish — and save their color palettes to Pastel. Includes a variety of color pickers, like wheel, RGB sliders, and crayons, or pick named colors from your color library that you curate yourself. On iPad, drag and drop from the sidebar to any palette. Copy a variety of developer-focused code representations, like RGB, hex, Objective-C, Swift and SwiftUI. Paste hex codes into the sliders color picker. Copy a pixel bitmap representation of a palette to paste into your favorite pixel editor, share a screen-sized version to set as your wallpaper or Apple Watch face, or export a palette to Procreate®. Create beautiful, colorful wallpapers in various different 2D & 3D styles using Pastel's wallpaper creator. In the free version, try out the built-in library, and add your own palettes up to a limit of 8 items total. Upgrade to the unlimited version using in-app purchase. --- Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy policy: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/privacy

About

AppIconCreator

Features
Read full description

a simple way to create your appiconset from your iPhone or iPad... with all recommended images and contents.json in a folder. You only have to drag and drop that folder to your images.asset....

Screenshots

Pastel4 screens
AppIconCreator2 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: AppIconCreator at none against Pastel's 3. AppIconCreator also leads on iOS requirement (16.6 vs 18.0). Pastel's advantage is update cadence (monthly vs every 4 months) and device support (4 vs 2). On price and ads there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Pastel sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per month. AppIconCreator asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Pastel ships an update monthly, AppIconCreator every 4 months. The most recent releases landed on October 23, 2026 and October 9, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard4 real differences · 6 level
Pastel versus AppIconCreator: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPastelAppIconCreator
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.7 (1.4K ratings) — better—
Positive reviews76.2% of reviews—
Number of ratings1.4K — better—
Update frequencyMonthly — betterEvery 4 months
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
MonetizationFree with in-app purchases—
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro — betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS18.016.6 — better
Further details — not scored
Size12 MB14 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperSteven Troughton-SmithAndrea Schmerber

Bugs and requests

Pastel

Reported bugs

3 issues
  • Palettes disappearing after OS updates
  • Delays and freezes when using color wheel
  • Inconsistent behavior on different devices/OSes

Requested features

5 requests
  • Color contrast analysis tools
  • CMYK color support
  • Easier way to copy/paste color codes
  • Improved palette organization and management
  • Integration with more design apps

AppIconCreator

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

3 purchases

Pastel

Subscriptions2
  • Pastel (One Month)14 Days trial$1.991 Month
  • Pastel (One Year)14 Days trial$9.991 Year
One-time1
  • Pastel (Legacy Purchase)$19.99
None

AppIconCreator

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Pastel free?
Pastel is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is AppIconCreator free?
AppIconCreator is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Pastel or AppIconCreator have ads?
Neither Pastel nor AppIconCreator shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Pastel or AppIconCreator?
Pastel ships an update monthly, and AppIconCreator every 4 months. Most recently, Pastel was updated on October 23, 2026 and AppIconCreator on October 9, 2026.

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