What is the best free alternative to Upscayl?
Segment Anything Playground is the closest free alternative to Upscayl: same AI Image Editing & Enhancement sub-category, and it is free. Browser playground to try Meta SAM 3, SAM 3D and SAM Audio
Best free Upscayl alternatives
Looking for a free alternative to Upscayl? Here are 9 ai image editing & enhancement worth trying — 9 with a free tier. Upscayl itself is free.
| Tool | Upscayl (you searched) | Segment Anything Playground | Affinity by Canva | Krita AI Diffusion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | free | free | free | free |
| Best for | Free open-source desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux) using Real-ESRGAN on a Vulkan GPU | Browser playground to try Meta SAM 3, SAM 3D and SAM Audio | Professional photo, vector and layout suite now free for everyone | Free plugin adding generative inpaint, outpaint, ControlNet and upscaling to Krita |
| Visit | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ |
Upscayl alternatives — straight answers
Are there free Upscayl alternatives?
Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: Segment Anything Playground, Affinity by Canva, Krita AI Diffusion, BAGEL (ByteDance), Step1X-Edit. None of them are paid-only.
Is Upscayl free?
Upscayl is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.
How were these Upscayl alternatives chosen?
They are the other tools in AI Image Editing & Enhancement, then the rest of Content & Media Generation, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.
All Upscayl alternatives
Browse AI Image Editing & Enhancement →✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Browser playground to try Meta SAM 3, SAM 3D and SAM Audio.
- Browser playground to try Meta SAM 3, SAM 3D and SAM Audio
- Text or click prompts to segment and track objects in images and video
- SAM Audio isolates sounds from a mix via text, visual or time prompts
- Model weights also open-source
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Professional photo, vector and layout suite now free for everyone.
- Professional photo, vector and layout suite now free for everyone
- Free on-device AI tools: scene decomposition, mixed-light correction, motion blur reduction, generative upscale, image to 3D
- Generative Fill, Expand and image generation require Canva Pro
- Runs locally on Mac and Windows
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Free plugin adding generative inpaint, outpaint, ControlNet and upscaling to Krita.
- Free plugin adding generative inpaint, outpaint, ControlNet and upscaling to Krita
- Live painting mode; runs locally with Flux or Stable Diffusion models
- Optional cloud generation
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Apache-2.0 7B-active unified model for understanding, text-to-image and image editing.
- Apache-2.0 7B-active unified model for understanding, text-to-image and image editing
- Free-form manipulation, multiview synthesis and world-navigation tasks
- Free weights and demo code
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Apache-2.0 instruction-based image editing model from StepFun.
- Apache-2.0 instruction-based image editing model from StepFun
- v1p2 (Nov 2025) adds native reasoning and reflective correction
- Free weights; ComfyUI-compatible
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — MIT-licensed CLI, Python library and HTTP server for automatic background removal.
- MIT-licensed CLI, Python library and HTTP server for automatic background removal
- Supports u2net, BiRefNet and BRIA-RMBG models with alpha matting
- GPU acceleration for NVIDIA and AMD; batch folder mode
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — MIT-licensed high-resolution segmentation and matting model for clean background removal.
- MIT-licensed high-resolution segmentation and matting model for clean background removal
- Dynamic resolution up to 2304x2304; ONNX and TensorRT exports
- Free Hugging Face weights and demo
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Apache-2.0 model for text-to-image, instruction editing and in-context generation from multiple references.
- Apache-2.0 model for text-to-image, instruction editing and in-context generation from multiple references
- Runs in about 17GB VRAM; CPU-offload mode under 3GB
- Free weights and Gradio demo
Clipdrop
AI Image Editing & Enhancement
✦ WhyA Upscayl alternative — Free background removal, object cleanup and text removal with no cost.
- Free background removal, object cleanup and text removal with no cost
- Relight tool for AI-driven photo relighting
- Universal resizer for social formats plus 2x/4x upscaler