Every online AI-to-PNG converter does the same thing: it uploads your artwork, flattens it to a bitmap, and sends the bitmap back. CloudConvert says so in its own description — it “rasterizes your vector files”. This one keeps the artwork as artwork until the moment you export it.
Why an .ai file opens here at all
Since Illustrator 9, every .aifile has carried a complete PDF representation of the artwork alongside Illustrator's own data. That is the default — the “Create PDF Compatible File” checkbox — and it is why a real .ai file literally begins with the bytes %PDF-1.5.
So there is no guesswork and no reverse engineering involved. The same parser this site uses for PDFs reads your Illustrator file directly, recovering text as text, paths as paths, and placed images as images.
Transparency you actually control
This is the most common complaint about AI-to-PNG converters, and it has a simple cause. Illustrator writes an opaque artboard rectangle into the file. A converter that flattens the page bakes that white rectangle into your PNG, and no amount of exporting gets it back out.
Because the artwork opens as separate objects here, the background is just another object. Click it, delete it, export — and the PNG has a true alpha channel behind your logo or icon.
Any resolution, because the source is still vector
Rasterisation happens last, at export time, from live vector data. Enlarging the canvas before you export re-renders the artwork at the new size rather than stretching pixels, so a small logo can become a 4000 px asset with clean edges. A converter that rasterises on upload can never offer this, because by the time you ask, the vectors are gone.
Artboards become pages
A multi-artboard Illustrator file arrives as a multi-page design. Use the page timeline to move between artboards and export the one you need. If you would rather have every artboard in a single download, the AI to SVG converter returns a ZIP with one file per artboard.
The same conversion in code
This page is built on the public SDK. Because .ai is PDF underneath, the importer needs no special case:
import { pdfToJson } from "@polotno/pdf-import";
import { createStore } from "polotno/model/store";
// An .ai file is a PDF container - pass the bytes straight in.
const buffer = await file.arrayBuffer();
const json = await pdfToJson({ pdf: buffer });
const store = createStore({ key: "YOUR_KEY" });
store.loadJSON(json);
await store.waitLoading();
// Export at 2x the artboard size, straight from vector data
const dataUrl = await store.toDataURL({
pageId: store.pages[0].id,
pixelRatio: 2,
});Full API reference: PDF Import and the Import & Export overview.
