About
Pika is a small, open source colour picker for macOS by designer and developer Charlie Gleason. Hit a global hotkey, pick any pixel on screen, and copy it in your format of choice: Hex, RGB, HSB, HSL, LAB, OpenGL or OKLCH. It weighs under 5 MB, lives quietly in the menu bar, and keeps a colour history with undo and redo.
What earns it a place here is the accessibility tooling. Pika compares your foreground and background picks as you work, reporting WCAG contrast ratios and APCA scores instantly, which makes it a working tool rather than a novelty. It runs on macOS 14 and later and also offers a pika:// URL scheme for automation. It is free from GitHub or Homebrew, with a $2.99 Mac App Store listing for anyone who wants to support development.
Alternatives
- ColorSlurp
Pick ColorSlurp if you want colour palettes that sync between your Mac and iPhone: it adds a palette manager, an iOS camera picker and WCAG and APCA contrast checks.
- Sip
Pick Sip if you organise colours into palettes for a team: it adds a palette editor, a colour dock and colour-vision simulation, with a free trial and no credit card.
- Digital Color Meter
Stay with Digital Color Meter if you only need to read a colour value: it is built into macOS and shows the value under the pointer in the colour space you choose.
At a Glance
- Requires
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Price
- Free and open source; $2.99 on the Mac App Store
- Get It From
- superhighfives.com/pika, GitHub, Homebrew and the Mac App Store
Curator's Note
“Small, focused and quietly perfect, this is what a single-purpose utility should be.”
Theo, Mac Dept.
