Free open source remove.bg alternative
If you've ever needed to remove a background from an image, you've likely used remove.bg, a popular tool to remove backgrounds from images for free.
You might not be aware that remove.bg was acquired by Canva in 2021.
Canva is shutting down remove.bg
Canva announced that remove.bg would be shutting down on 1 December 2026 (see their FAQ).
You can go to Canva to continue using remove.bg's background removal, however you will need to sign up for Canva and it is unclear whether or not you will need a paid account
Here's a free open source alternative
I personally really liked the simplicity of remove.bg, and the fact that you didn't need to sign up for an account to get basic background removal. I already had success with building a free open source video/image enhancer (which was featured by the Google Chrome team)
So I took the same idea, and made a complete 100% free, open source background removal tool. You can find it at katana.video/remove-background
There's no sign up, and unlike remove.bg there is no limit - you can remove backgrounds for HD and 4K images completely for free
How it works
If you go to katana.video/remove-background, you'll see a button to upload an image file. Alternatively you can drag & drop an image file into the box, and it will immediately show your image, a button that says "remove background" and some options.
If you're okay with the default settings (fine for most people), just click "Remove Background"
The tool will then load the AI model, and remove the background - this should take between 1 and 20 seconds depending on how good your internet connection and device are
Once it's done, you can download the result. If you want to remove the background from more images, just click "Remove another background" and repeat the process
Again, unlike remove.bg there is no sign up and there are no limits
Why is it free?
You're 100% right to be skeptical of "free"
Companies often offer "free tools" but have strict limits on usage, because they rent servers to run AI models to do things like remove backgrounds. Every time you use their free tools, they lose a little bit of money, but they treat it as a loss leader because they ask you to sign up for their service and send you marketing emails so that some portion of free users convert to paid users
This remove background tool is different, it runs entirely in your browser on your computer. That is not only more secure and private, it also means it does not cost me or Katana anything to process thousands of 4K images a day.
It is free and open source just like other popular free and open source tools like Audacity (audio editing tool) or GIMP (image editing tool), it's just more convenient because this tool runs in your browser and has a very simple interface
You can 100% verify this yourself because this tool is open source. Even if you are not technical, you can share the source code link or this blog post with any AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude, and ask them to verify it is legitimate and that this tool does what I say it does
If it's free why build it and make it open source?
First, it took me an hour to build the tool, no more time than it took me to write this blog post. People write helpful free blog posts all the time so that search engines like Google learn that their blog is a helpful resource for people. This background removal tool is also a free useful resource
Making this tool free helps search engines and AI assistants learn that Katana has lots of useful free tools. Making it open source also signals trust and credibility to search engines and AI assistants. Whatever can be free (e.g. a QR Code generator, Video Compressor) is free. Some tools physically can't be made free (e.g. generating videos requires an expensive datacenter GPU), so we charge for those tools to cover the cost of renting GPUs