Head to head
One processes your photo on your own machine. The other is a full listing studio that runs on servers. The right answer depends entirely on which of those two things you needed.
The short answer
Photomop runs on your own device, so photos are never uploaded and free exports come back at full resolution with no watermark. Photoroom runs in the cloud and does far more than cut out a subject: staging, shadows and templates. Photoroom's free licence is non-commercial and caps web exports at 2000 by 2000 pixels.
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 Photoroom 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 Photoroom’s own pages, the row says so rather than repeating what other sites claim.
| Photomop | Photoroom | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | 2000 by 2000 pixels on the web app, 750 by 550 pixels on iOS and Android |
| Watermark on a free export | No watermark on any export | Not published |
| Free allowance | No per-image credits and no export counter | 100 exports a month, and the free licence covers non-commercial use only |
| Account to use the free tool | Editing starts the moment the page loads | Yes, a free Space is created when you sign up |
| Paid plan starts at | $8.00 a month, or $5.00 a month billed yearly | Around $12.99 a month |
| Where it runs | Web on desktop, Web on mobile, Works offline once loaded | Web, iOS, Android, API, Figma plugin |
| 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.
This is the difference every other difference follows from. Photoroom is a cloud service: you upload an image, their servers run the model, and the result comes back down. That is why there is an export counter, why the free plan has a resolution ceiling, and why there is an API priced per image. Each of those exists because each export costs Photoroom real GPU time.
Photomop works the other way round. The model downloads to your device once, caches, and then runs there through WebGPU where the browser supports it and WebAssembly everywhere else. Your file is read from disk into the tab's memory, processed, and written back out as a download. It never reaches a server of ours, which is a stronger statement than a policy promising we will not look at it.
Photoroom's free tier is documented clearly, which is more than most of this market manages. It allows 100 exports a month. Exports from the web app are capped at 2000 by 2000 pixels and exports from the iOS and Android apps at 750 by 550 pixels. The free licence covers non-commercial use only, which is the clause that matters most: the seller Photoroom is built for is not covered by it.
Photomop's free plan has no export counter, no resolution ceiling that we impose and no watermark. The ceiling is your device: on a laptop, a full-size phone photo is routine, 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.
A great deal, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Photoroom stages products: it will put a bottle on a marble surface, generate a plausible shadow under it, expand the frame to a different aspect and drop the result into a branded template. That is the actual job of producing a listing image, and a background remover is only the first step of it.
There is a second, blunter gap. Photoroom stages a product, generates a shadow behind it and fills a scene around it, and we do none of that. Our upscaler and object remover are in build as well. If any of that is what you need this week, that is a real argument and this page is not going to talk you out of it.
For a photo of a mug you are selling, honestly, no. For an unreleased product, a client's campaign shot under an NDA, a document, a photograph of a person who did not consent to it being uploaded, or anything covered by an embargo, it matters a great deal, and the question is not whether a vendor is trustworthy but whether the upload happens at all.
This is where the on-device model stops being a technical detail and becomes the reason to choose. There is no upload step to opt out of, no retention window to read, and no data processing agreement to negotiate, because the image never becomes somebody else's problem. You can verify it yourself in about a minute: open your browser's network tab, run a tool, and watch that nothing goes out.
Photomop is free to use and the paid plan is published but not open for purchase yet, at $8 a month or $5 a month billed yearly. Nothing in the toolbox is reserved for the paid plan: it adds unattended batch over a folder, HD background packs and an API, which are the things that genuinely cost money to run.
The honest summary is that these are not the same purchase. Photoroom sells a production studio and prices it like one. Photomop gives away the editing because on your hardware it costs us nothing to serve, and charges for throughput and automation instead.
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 |
| Photoroom Pro | Around $12.99 a monthreported | Product Staging, Virtual Model, an AI credit allowance, batch export and high resolution exports. The figure is reported rather than read at source: Photoroom renders its plan prices in the browser, so we could not see a number in the page |
| Photoroom Team seat | $9.99 a month | One extra person on a team Space, added on top of a paid plan |
| Photoroom API | $20.00 a month | 1,000 images a month at $0.02 an image on the Basic tier, with a Plus tier at $0.10 an image and an annual Enterprise commitment above that |
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 you want a full-resolution export with no watermark and no export counter.
Pick this if you are producing listing images at volume and need staging, shadows and templates rather than a cut-out, and a commercial licence.
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, Photoroom 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.
No. Photoroom's own help pages state that the free licence covers non-commercial use only, and the free plan is capped at 100 exports a month with web exports limited to 2000 by 2000 pixels. Selling the products in the photos you edit is commercial use, so a seller on the free plan is outside that licence and needs a paid plan.
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 also why the tools keep working after you lose your connection. You can confirm it in your browser's network tab in about a minute.
Photoroom caps free exports at 2000 by 2000 pixels on the web app and 750 by 550 pixels on the iOS and Android apps. Photomop imposes no cap: the export comes back at the resolution of the file you brought, because there is no server cost for us to meter and therefore nothing to ration.
We could not confirm Photoroom's watermark policy on their own pages, so this page does not state one either way. Check it at photoroom.com before you rely on it. Photomop adds no watermark on any export, on any plan, at any resolution.
No. Product staging, generated shadows, AI fill and branded templates are Photoroom features with no Photomop equivalent. Photomop is a set of focused tools for cutting out, resizing, cropping, compressing, converting and batching. If the job is a finished styled listing image, Photoroom does more of it.
It depends what you are counting. Photoroom's servers are faster hardware than most laptops, but every job pays for an upload and a download first. On-device processing skips both, so once a model is cached the result lands without the round trip and does not slow down when their queue is busy.
Same cluster
Each one is built the same way: the vendor's own published facts, checked at source, next to ours.
Broad creative suite where background removal is one credit-metered tool among many across web and mobile
A Photoshop-shaped image editor that runs in a tab and processes every file on your own device
AI photo and video editor whose free web background removal exports at HD with no watermark
A suite of single-purpose online image tools for compressing, resizing, cropping and converting files
A cloud editor built around generative AI for images, video and audio, on the web and on phones
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.