Head to head
Fotor has one of the strongest free offers in this category, and it runs on servers. Photomop runs on your own machine. That is the whole trade, stated plainly.
The short answer
Fotor's background remover is free, needs no sign-up, adds no watermark and offers an HD download, with uploads capped at 60 MB and 8192 by 8192 pixels. Photomop is an on-device studio: models run in your browser tab, so photos are never uploaded and exports come back at the size you brought.
Updated
Not every tool in the catalogue has a working page yet: upscale image, remove object and passport photo are still being built. Everything else runs today, on your own device. We put that first rather than at the bottom, because it is the thing most likely to send you to Fotor instead, and you should find it out here rather than after you have opened a tab.
Side by side
Every cell below is a fact one of the two of us publishes. Where we could not read a number on Fotor’s own pages, the row says so rather than repeating what other sites claim.
| Photomop | Fotor | |
|---|---|---|
| Where processing happens | On your own device, in the tab | On their servers, after your photo is uploaded |
| Free export resolution | No cap we impose. Your device sets the ceiling | Uploads are capped at 60 MB and a maximum of 8192 by 8192 pixels |
| Watermark on a free export | No watermark on any export | No watermark on the standalone background remover, which offers a free HD download. Exports from the broader editor on the Basic plan are watermarked |
| Free allowance | No per-image credits and no export counter | The Fotor Basic account plan carries limited free credits and 512 MB of cloud storage |
| Account to use the free tool | Editing starts the moment the page loads | No sign-up is needed to use the background remover |
| Paid plan starts at | $8.00 a month, or $5.00 a month billed yearly | Not published |
| Where it runs | Web on desktop, Web on mobile, Works offline once loaded | Web, iOS, Android, Windows |
| Works with no connection | Yes, once the page and any model are cached | No, the image has to reach their servers |
Slide the table sideways to see every column.
Fotor is a cloud service and does not pretend otherwise. Its background remover page describes deep neural networks doing the work and makes no claim about running anything on your machine, so the file goes up to Fotor's servers, is processed and comes back down. That is the standard arrangement in this category, and it is why the free offer has a file size ceiling attached to it.
Photomop works the other way round. The model downloads to your device once, caches there, and then runs inside the tab through WebGPU where the browser supports it and WebAssembly everywhere else. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and written back out as a download. It never reaches a server of ours, which you can confirm in your own network tab.
Better than most, and it deserves saying plainly. Fotor's own feature page states that the background remover needs no sign-up, adds no watermark, and offers a free HD download. Uploads are accepted up to 60 MB and 8192 by 8192 pixels. For a free cloud tool that is an unusually generous set of terms, and it is one of the strongest free offers in this category.
It is worth being precise about what that covers, because Fotor draws a line. The standalone background remover is the thing described as watermark-free with an HD download. The broader editor on the Basic account plan is described separately, and exports from that carry a watermark. So the generous terms apply to the cut-out tool, not to everything Fotor makes.
Partly readable and partly not. The static plan cards show a Fotor Basic account plan at $0, carrying limited free credits and 512 MB of cloud storage. Above that sit Pro, Pro+ and Max, and their prices are rendered in the browser rather than in the page: the pricing page returned unfilled placeholders where the numbers should be. So no Fotor subscription price appears here.
Aggregator sites do quote a range for those tiers and they do not agree with each other, so none of them is repeated on this page. What we could see of the entitlements is partial: concurrent generations, AI chats and storage tiers vary by plan. Fotor's own support site also returned an access error, so how unused credits roll over is unconfirmed too.
Fotor publishes two hard numbers and they are the ones that will bite first. An upload cannot exceed 60 MB, and it cannot exceed 8192 by 8192 pixels. For most phone and camera files that is comfortable headroom, but a large scan, a stitched panorama or a print-resolution product shot can go past either. Batch background replacement is also gated behind the Pro+ tier.
Photomop's ceiling is different in kind rather than in size: it is your own hardware. There is no file size cap and no pixel ceiling that we impose, and on an older phone we run inference at a reduced size and composite the result back onto your untouched full-resolution original, so the download is still the size you started with. Big files simply take longer.
Given how good Fotor's free offer is, the honest answer narrows to two situations. The first is confidentiality: an unreleased product, a client shot under an NDA, a scanned document, a photograph of somebody who did not agree to it reaching a server. Fotor is a cloud service, so the upload is the whole mechanism, and no free tier makes that question go away.
The second is size and volume. Past 60 MB or 8192 pixels on a side, Fotor will not take the file at all, and batch background replacement sits behind Pro+. On your own device neither limit exists, because there is no upload to size-check and no queue to ration. The caveat stands: our upscaler and object remover are in build and Fotor covers both today.
What each one costs
Both ladders in full, monthly and yearly, because the large number on a pricing page is almost always the yearly rate and almost nobody pays it in month one.
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Photomop Free | $0 a month | Every tool at full resolution, with no watermark on the way out |
| Photomop Pro | $8.00 a month, or $5.00 a month billed yearly | Unattended batch over a folder, HD background packs, an API with 1,000 images a month, early access to new tools. Not open for purchase yet |
| Fotor Fotor Basic | $0 a month | Limited free credits, 512 MB of cloud storage, and watermarked exports from the broader editor. The standalone background remover is stated separately as watermark-free with an HD download |
| Fotor Fotor Pro | Not publishedreported | Fotor's paid tier, sitting below Pro+ and Max. No price is shown here because Fotor renders its plan prices in the browser rather than in the page, and the pricing page returned unfilled placeholders where the numbers should be on 10 August 2026 |
Slide the table sideways to see every column.
Both columns are the same length on purpose. If ours were twice as long you would be reading an advert.
Pick this if the photo should not leave your machine, or the file is past 60 MB or 8192 pixels on a side.
Pick this if you want a strong free cut-out today, with no account and no watermark, and the upload does not bother you.
The honest version
The case against us is short and worth saying out loud: upscale image, remove object and passport photo do not have a working page yet, so those jobs need another tool today, and there is no hosted API today, so a workflow that needs one has to look elsewhere. If either of those is the thing you need this week, Fotor is the better answer today and this page is not going to argue otherwise.
Questions people ask
The things people search for once they have narrowed it down to these two.
Fotor's own feature page states that the background remover needs no sign-up, adds no watermark and offers a free HD download, with uploads accepted up to 60 MB and 8192 by 8192 pixels. That is one of the strongest free offers in this category. The broader editor on the Basic plan does watermark exports.
It depends which part you use. The standalone background remover is stated as watermark-free with a free HD download. The broader Fotor editor on the Basic account plan is described separately, and its exports carry a watermark. That distinction is real, so check which tool you are actually working in.
This page does not say, because the figure could not be read at source. Fotor's pricing page is a client-rendered app and returned unfilled placeholders where the Pro, Pro+ and Max prices should be. Aggregator sites quote a range and disagree with each other, so none of those numbers is repeated here.
Uploads are capped at 60 MB and at 8192 by 8192 pixels, according to Fotor's own background remover page. That covers most phone and camera files comfortably. A large scan, a stitched panorama or a print-resolution product shot can exceed either limit, at which point the upload will not be accepted.
No. Every tool runs on your own device inside the browser tab. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed there, and written back out as a download. Nothing is sent to us, which is why the tools keep working when your connection drops. You can confirm it in your browser's network tab.
Fotor lists a Bulk Background Remover, a Signature Background Remover and a Video Background Remover alongside the single-image tool. Batch background replacement is gated behind the Pro+ tier, so bulk work is not free. Photomop's batch edit page works today, though it does not cover upscaling, which is still in build.
Same cluster
Each one is built the same way: the vendor's own published facts, checked at source, next to ours.
A background remover attached to Icons8's large library of icons, illustrations, photos and music
Background removal for images and short video, sold as one-time credit packs instead of a subscription
A suite of single-purpose online image tools for compressing, resizing, cropping and converting files
An AI visual content platform covering cut-outs, retouching, passport photos and video background removal
A Photoshop-shaped image editor that runs in a tab and processes every file on your own device
Resize, crop, compress, convert and batch edit all work right now, on your own device, at full resolution and with no watermark. No account, nothing uploaded. Read how the on-device pipeline works if you want to check that claim before you trust it with a client’s photo, or the pricing page for where the paid line falls.