Polotno SDK and Pintura both allow developers to embed creative editing capabilities into web applications, but they target different use cases. Polotno SDK is a comprehensive design framework for images and videos with a JSON-driven architecture, templates, and rendering options that scale from browser to cloud. Pintura is a compact, high-performance image and video editing SDK built for fast, in-browser operations and upload workflows. Polotno is used to power full creative products. Pintura is used to enhance existing products with precise, lightweight editing.
Core philosophy
Polotno SDK offers a complete design editor that can be embedded directly into your product. It supports multi-layer compositions, templates, and schema-based automation. Developers can fully control the editor’s UI, connect custom asset sources, and render projects locally or in the cloud.
Pintura prioritizes simplicity and speed. It’s designed for web apps that need intuitive image or short-form video editing without external dependencies. Every action — crop, resize, filter, annotate, watermark, color-correct — happens client-side, with no server round-trips. Polotno enables creative systems and frictionless media edits.
Architecture and integration
Polotno SDK runs fully in JavaScript and can be hosted client-side, self-hosted, or connected to Polotno Cloud. The editor communicates through an open JSON schema, allowing developers to save, modify, or automate projects.
Pintura is a dependency-free, browser-native editor that works as a standalone JS module or through official adapters for React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, and jQuery. It integrates tightly with upload libraries like FilePond, Uppy, and Dropzone — allowing users to open Pintura during uploads, perform edits, and return optimized assets without server processing.
Polotno integrates deeper into creative workflows; Pintura integrates faster into upload and CMS pipelines.
Automation and templating
Polotno exposes all project data through its JSON schema. Developers can programmatically generate or modify templates, swap assets, or connect data feeds and AI systems to produce customized content at scale.
Pintura supports state-based automation. You can predefine crop ratios, default filters, watermark layers, or shape sets and initialize them at runtime. While not a templating system, it provides hooks to save and restore editor state, making it suitable for enforcing brand or compliance standards across uploads.
Polotno automates entire design projects. Pintura automates editor configuration and output.
Feature scope
Polotno SDK supports text, images, shapes, SVGs, videos, templates, animation, and export. It’s designed for mixed-media editing with precise positioning, reusable layouts, and hybrid manual-automated workflows.
Pintura focuses on direct image and video editing. It includes guided cropping, locked aspect ratios, rotation, resizing, flipping, filters, exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, color balance, annotations, shapes, stickers, watermarking, EXIF correction, undo/redo, history tracking, and responsive UI.
Both support accessibility, localization, and responsive interfaces, but Polotno extends further into creative automation while Pintura optimizes user-level precision.
Video capabilities
Polotno supports full video layers on the same canvas used for images and text. Developers can trim, resize, animate, mask, and export videos using local, self-hosted, or cloud rendering pipelines.
Pintura includes a Video Editor extension that provides trimming, splitting, cropping, rotating, flipping, resizing, and color effects for short videos. It shares the same core UI and rendering pipeline as the image editor, maintaining consistency across media types.
Polotno targets creative tools that produce or automate branded videos. Pintura targets fast, embedded video editors for short-form content.
Rendering and export
Polotno supports three rendering modes — browser, self-hosted, and cloud. Developers can render locally in the browser for interactive use, deploy a private rendering service for secure or high-volume workloads, or use Polotno Cloud Render API for automation and scaling. Images and videos use the same schema, making integration consistent across outputs.
Pintura performs all rendering client-side. For images, it uses WebGL and Canvas APIs to output PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, or SVG with adjustable size, scaling, and quality. The video extension adds support for browser-based encoders such as createDefaultVideoWriter, createMediaStreamEncoder, and createFFmpegEncoder, enabling short video exports entirely in the browser. For longer or more complex projects, Pintura recommends server-side encoding pipelines.
Pintura’s rendering is instant and lightweight; Polotno’s is flexible and scalable.
Accessibility and integration options
Polotno offers a modular UI that developers can customize or strip down. It integrates with authentication, storage APIs, and asset libraries, and can be styled to match any product.
Pintura ships fully responsive and accessible, supporting touch, mouse, and keyboard navigation. It can operate as a pop-up, inline editor, or modal, adapting automatically to screen size. It’s optimized for accessibility compliance and minimal UI latency.
Polotno scales as an embedded design system. Pintura embeds as a refined editing surface.
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Pricing and licensing
Polotno SDK uses transparent SaaS pricing billed monthly. The Team plan costs $199 per month and includes one domain with up to 10,000 editor loads, suitable for small companies under 10 employees. The Business plan is $399 per month, allowing unlimited domains and editor loads for teams under 50 employees. Enterprise starts from $599 per month and includes contract flexibility, enterprise support, and optional source-code access. Optional Polotno Cloud rendering costs $0.004 per image and $0.03 per video minute.
Pintura follows a one-time annual license model. The Hobbyist plan is $170 per year for individuals or small projects, the Development Team license is around $850 per year for larger teams or multiple products, and Enterprise starts around $7,500 per year. A combined Image + Video bundle starts from $1,250 per year for teams. Each license includes one year of updates, perpetual rights for the current version, and a price-lock guarantee on renewals.
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Feature comparison
When to use each
Use Polotno SDK if your product needs a fully featured design environment — multiple media types, template automation, rendering flexibility, and an embeddable editor UI that end users can design in directly.
Use Pintura if your goal is to give users a fast, polished editor for uploading and refining images or short videos, entirely within the browser, without maintaining infrastructure or backend rendering.
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Conclusion
Polotno SDK and Pintura both let developers embed creative functionality, but they serve very different depths of need.
Polotno is built for full design experiences — editors, template systems, and automation pipelines that merge user creativity with programmatic control.
Pintura is built for speed and simplicity — frictionless client-side editing that keeps uploads fast and infrastructure light.
Choose Polotno if you want to build a creative platform.
Choose Pintura if you want to make editing invisible.