Comparison

Pastel vs TrackOSC

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

TrackOSC

This app transforms your iPhone into a wireless motion-tracking camera. It streams real-time pose, face, text, and animal tracking data over your local network as OSC messages. All processing is done on-device, ensuring your video never leaves your phone.

Highlights
  • Live tracking overlays (body, hand, face, text, animals)
  • Per-detector toggles for performance
  • Front/back camera support with selfie mirror
  • Portrait/landscape orientation lock
  • Automatic OSC receiver discovery (Bonjour)
  • Hide-video mode for stage use
Features
Read full description

TrackOSC turns your iPhone into a wireless motion-tracking camera. Point it at a person and it streams live tracking data – body poses in 2D and 3D, hand poses, face landmarks, recognised text, animals, people, barcodes, outlines, the horizon and rectangles – over your local network as OSC (Open Sound Control) messages, ready for TouchDesigner, Max/MSP, Processing, openFrameworks, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Unity, or anything else that speaks OSC. All processing happens on-device with Apple's Vision framework. No video ever leaves your phone – only numbers. WHAT IT TRACKS • 2D Body: a 17-joint skeleton in pixels • 3D Body: a 17-joint skeleton in metres – real depth from a single camera, with each joint's pixel position alongside • Hand: 21 joints per hand, up to two hands • Face: the face box, head rotation and jawline contour, and Face Landmarks: the full 76-point constellation – eyes, pupils, brows, nose, lips, jaw • Text: recognised text with its bounding box • Animal: cat and dog boxes, and Animal Pose: full 25-joint cat and dog skeletons • Human: whole-body boxes that keep counting people at distances where pose estimation gives up • Barcode: QR codes and 1D/2D barcodes with position, corners, symbology and payload • Contours: every edge outline in the frame as closed polylines • Horizon: the horizon's angle and a line across the frame • Rectangles: screens, paper, doors – a box plus four corners FEATURES • Live tracking overlays on the camera view, colour-coded per detector • One chip per detector – run just what you need for the best frame rate; 3D Body runs in its own lane so it never slows the others • Front or back camera, with a natural selfie mirror (wire data is never mirrored) • Portrait and landscape, with an orientation lock for phones mounted on tripods and rigs • Automatic discovery of receivers on your network via Bonjour – or type any IP and port • Hide-video mode: tracking overlay only, on black – for stage and installation use • Free, notarised macOS companions – a Receiver with 2D and 3D views, a Recorder that records and replays the stream, a Speaker that reads it aloud, and a Router that turns it into MIDI, Shortcuts, key presses and HTTP – plus open-source receiver examples for Processing, Python, p5.js, TouchDesigner, Max/MSP, Pure Data, openFrameworks and SuperCollider, all from the project page COMPATIBILITY TrackOSC speaks exactly the same OSC wire format as VisionOSC and PoseOSC, so existing receivers and patches work unchanged. The newer detectors arrive as additional messages that older receivers simply ignore. Coordinates are in pixels, origin top-left, with the frame dimensions in every message. PRIVACY No accounts, no analytics, no ads. Camera frames are analysed on the device and discarded; tracking data is sent only to the destination you choose. TrackOSC is open source: https://github.com/JGL/TrackOSC

Screenshots

Pastel4 screens
TrackOSC1 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: TrackOSC at none against Pastel's 3. TrackOSC also leads on review sentiment (100% vs 76%) and rating (5.0 vs 4.7). Pastel's advantage is ratings volume (1.4K vs 2) and chart position (#177 vs unranked). On price, ads and iOS requirement 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. TrackOSC asks for nothing beyond the download.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

TrackOSC holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.7. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Pastel has 1.4K ratings behind it against 2, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 76% of Pastel's written reviews are positive against 100% of TrackOSC's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Pastel ships an update monthly, TrackOSC fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on October 26, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard8 real differences · 3 level
Pastel versus TrackOSC: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPastelTrackOSC
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.7 (1.4K ratings)5.0 (2 ratings) — better
Positive reviews76.2% of reviews100.0% of reviews — better
Number of ratings1.4K — better2
Update frequencyMonthlyFortnightly — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
MonetizationFree with in-app purchasesFree — better
Best chart rank#177 — better—
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro — betteriPhone
Requires iOS18.018.0
Further details — not scored
Size12 MB4 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperSteven Troughton-SmithJoel Lewis

Customer experience

Pastel

All ratings1,443 ratings
Positive92.9%
Neutral2.8%
Negative4.3%
Written reviews202 reviews
Positive76.2%
Neutral10.4%
Negative13.4%

TrackOSC

All ratings2 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews1 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

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

TrackOSC

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

TrackOSC

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Pastel free?
Pastel is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is TrackOSC free?
TrackOSC is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Pastel or TrackOSC?
TrackOSC is rated higher. Pastel averages 4.7 out of 5 from 1.4K ratings, while TrackOSC averages 5.0 from 2 ratings.
Do Pastel or TrackOSC have ads?
Neither Pastel nor TrackOSC shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Pastel or TrackOSC?
Pastel ships an update monthly, and TrackOSC fortnightly. Most recently, Pastel was updated on October 26, 2026 and TrackOSC on October 24, 2026.

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