For web developers & web designers who are tired of reinventing the wheel every single sprint
"The best tool is the one you don't have to think about."
There's a specific kind of frustration that only developers and designers know. You're mid-flow, building something, and then you hit a wall — a CSS property you can't quite recall, a color palette that isn't clicking, an SVG file that exported bloated and broken, a font pairing that should work but doesn't. And then the tab spiral begins. Ten searches, fourteen tabs, three Stack Overflow threads, and fifteen minutes gone.
Some of this friction is unavoidable. But a surprising amount of it isn't.
There's an entire ecosystem of sharply built, single-purpose websites that exist precisely for these moments. They're not platforms. They're not SaaS products with dashboards and onboarding flows. They're tools — lean, focused, often built by one person who had the same frustration as you and decided to do something about it.
Most of them don't advertise. They spread word-of-mouth, live in bookmark folders, and surface only if someone happens to mention them in a GitHub thread or a Discord server. That's exactly why they stay useful. They don't try to be everything.
This is a survey of twenty of them — genuinely useful, well-built, verified — with enough context to understand not just what they are, but why they work and when you'll actually reach for them.
Part One — The Ones That Solve Specific Pain, Immediately
1. caniuse.com
The browser compatibility oracle you should always have open
caniuse.com — https://caniuse.com
Every front-end developer has deployed something that broke on Safari. Every one. Usually because they used a CSS feature or JavaScript API that Chrome has supported for two years but Safari added quietly in a point release four months ago, if at all. The rhythm of browser support is genuinely difficult to track, and no amount of experience fully insulates you from it.
Can I Use is the canonical answer to "does this actually work everywhere I need it to?" You type a feature — CSS Grid subgrid, container queries, color-mix(), :has(), any of the hundreds of entries — and you get a color-coded compatibility table across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and their mobile counterparts. Versions. Partial support flags. Notes about known bugs in specific builds.
What developers underutilize is the ability to import your own Google Analytics data into Can I Use and see support percentages calculated against your actual audience, not global averages. If you build enterprise B2B tools where your users are on corporate Windows machines running an older Chrome, or if you build for markets where mobile browser diversity is higher, the global numbers can mislead you. The personalized view cuts through that.
The site is maintained diligently, updated regularly, and has been around long enough that its data has become the industry's shared reference point. There's no reason not to have it on your shortcut bar.
2. Squoosh.app
Image compression that respects your intelligence
squoosh.app — https://squoosh.app
Unoptimized images remain one of the most persistent and avoidable reasons websites load slowly. Everyone knows this. And yet images still get exported from design tools at full resolution, uploaded, and served. The gap between knowledge and practice is usually friction — and Squoosh eliminates that friction completely.
Built by the Google Chrome Labs team, Squoosh is a browser-based image compression tool that runs entirely locally. Your image never leaves your machine. You drag a file in, and you immediately see a side-by-side, split-screen comparison of the original and compressed versions, with real-time controls for format, quality, and resize dimensions. You can switch between MozJPEG, WebP, AVIF, OptiPNG, and other codecs on the fly, and watch the file size and visual quality update as you adjust sliders.
The split-screen interface is the key design decision here. It trains your eye. After a few sessions with Squoosh, you develop intuition for where the quality cliff is — the point at which compression artifacts become visible — and that intuition improves your judgment in every tool you use afterward.
It also supports batch-like workflows through its CLI version for anyone integrating compression into a build pipeline. But for the moment you have a single hero image that your client uploaded at 14MB, Squoosh in the browser is the fastest path to something reasonable.
3. bundlephobia.com
Know the real cost of what you're installing
bundlephobia.com — https://bundlephobia.com
The npm ecosystem is extraordinary in its scope and problematic in how easy it makes it to ignore cost. npm install whatever is fast, painless, and almost completely opaque about what you're actually adding to your bundle. Bundlephobia makes that cost visible before you commit.
You search for any npm package and get back its minified size, its gzipped size, an estimate of download time on different connection speeds, and — critically — its dependency tree. That last part is where things get interesting. A package that appears to be 12KB might carry 340KB of dependencies that get pulled in alongside it. Bundlephobia surfaces this, and for many packages, it's the moment you realize you need a lighter alternative or just to write the function yourself.
It also lets you compare packages side by side, which is useful when you're evaluating three date libraries or two animation solutions and weight is a deciding factor.
The psychological effect of using Bundlephobia consistently is that you begin to treat bundle size as a first-class concern rather than an afterthought. You stop reaching for packages reflexively and start asking whether they're worth it. That instinct componds. Over time, it produces leaner applications and better judgment about when a dependency is actually paying its way.
4. regex101.com
Regular expressions without the mystery
regex101.com — https://regex101.com
Regular expressions are one of those things developers claim to know until they actually need to write one under pressure, at which point the knowledge evaporates and is replaced by vague dread. Regex101 doesn't fix the underlying complexity of regex — nothing can — but it transforms the experience of working with it from opaque to transparent.
You write a pattern, paste in a test string, and the site highlights matches in real time. But what separates Regex101 from a basic regex tester is the explanation panel: it parses your expression and produces a human-readable description of what each component does. (?<=\s) is explained. [A-Z]{2,} is explained. Every quantifier, group, lookahead, and modifier gets labeled in plain language. If your understanding of regex is mostly pattern-matching from memory, this panel forces you to actually understand what you wrote.
It supports PCRE, JavaScript, Python, Golang, and other flavors, which matters because subtle behavior differences between engines create bugs that are maddening to track down without being explicit about which flavor you're targeting.
It also stores a history of your expressions, generates code snippets in multiple languages, and has a quiz feature for actually learning regex rather than just copying patterns. Most developers use about 5% of what Regex101 offers. All 5% is worth using.
5. transform.tools
The polyglot converter you'll use constantly
transform.tools — https://transform.tools
There's a category of development task that is tedious, mechanical, and completely unworthy of your attention: converting one data format into another. JSON to TypeScript interfaces. SVG to JSX. CSS to JS objects for styled-components. GraphQL schema to Flow types. GraphQL queries to TypeScript. JSON to Rust structs. The conversions are predictable; the doing of them is a waste of focus.
Transform.tools collects an impressive number of these conversions into a single, clean interface. Paste something in on the left, get the converted output on the right, copy and continue. The tool handles the conversion logic correctly and consistently, which is more than you can say for a lot of hand-rolled approaches.
The reason developers don't already know about this is that there's no strong search signal for it. You don't Google "SVG to JSX converter" with enough frequency to develop a reliable go-to site, so you end up finding a random online tool, hoping it works, and not bookmarking it because you assume you won't need it again. You will. Bookmark Transform.tools and stop solving the same problem twelve different ways.
Part Two — For Designers Who Write Code
6. coolors.co
Palette generation that's actually fast
coolors.co — https://coolors.co
Color theory in practice is harder than color theory in theory. You can understand complementary relationships, know what warm versus cool palettes communicate, have strong opinions about saturation — and still stare at a blank artboard for twenty minutes unable to generate something that works together.
Coolors solves a specific version of this problem: the blank-canvas moment. You open the site, hit spacebar, and a five-color palette generates. Hit it again. Again. Within ten presses, you've usually seen something that's at least in the right direction. Lock colors you want to keep and regenerate the rest. Adjust hue, saturation, and brightness with sliders. Export as CSS variables, Tailwind config, Figma palettes, or several other formats.
The palette exploration feature is underused — it shows thousands of palettes already rated and collected by other users, organized by mood and category. If you're building something that needs to feel "trustworthy" or "energetic" or "minimal," browsing these can shortcut a long deliberation.
What Coolors does well is remove the paralysis of infinite options by making iteration effortless. The spacebar interaction is one of the best pieces of UX in any design tool. Simple, immediate, surprisingly generative.
7. fontjoy.com
Font pairing via machine learning
fontjoy.com — https://fontjoy.com
Typography is one of the design decisions with the highest asymmetry of impact. Good type pairings go unnoticed by most users — bad pairings register immediately as "something feels off." And yet most developers and many designers rely on the same five safe pairings they've used for years, or pick fonts that technically match without ever achieving contrast or character.
Fontjoy uses deep learning to generate font pairings that balance similarity and difference — the two qualities that make combinations work. Fonts need enough shared visual DNA to cohere, and enough contrast in weight, proportion, or personality to create hierarchy. The algorithm attempts to optimize for both.
You can control a "similarity" slider from "very similar" to "very different," lock any of the three roles (display, header, body), and shuffle through alternatives. The preview renders actual text in the suggested pairing, not abstract specimens, so you see immediately how it reads rather than how it looks in isolation.
The honest limitation: the tool draws from Google Fonts, so the selection reflects those constraints. It won't surface Baskerville or Caslon or anything that isn't in Google's library. For projects with specific licensing requirements or access to commercial type, it's a starting point for direction rather than a final answer. But as a thinking tool for composition, it's fast and often surprisingly good.
8. haikei.app
SVG background generators that actually look good
haikei.app — https://haikei.app
Organic background shapes — waves, blobs, layered peaks, scattered circles — have become a dominant visual language in modern web design. The problem is that making them well requires either Illustrator proficiency or time you don't have. Most developers default to stock SVGs that don't match the palette, or they skip the texture entirely and ship flat color.
Haikei is a collection of SVG generators for exactly these shapes. You pick a generator type — waves, blob scatter, stacked waves, low poly, gradient mesh, and more — adjust the parameters (complexity, color range, orientation, seed value), and export as SVG or PNG. Each generator has its own set of controls that make sense for what it's generating.
The color integration is where it earns its place in a real workflow: you can enter your existing hex values, and the tool generates shapes that stay within your palette rather than forcing you to remap colors after export. This sounds minor and is actually the thing that makes the tool useful rather than just fun to play with.
The output is clean, the SVGs are reasonably optimized, and the range of generators is wide enough that you can generate distinct visual textures for different sections of the same page without the elements feeling like they came from the same template.
9. animista.net
CSS animations on demand
animista.net — https://animista.net
CSS animations are the kind of thing you either know deeply or reach for libraries to handle. If you're in the latter camp — or even if you're in the former but want to preview variations quickly — Animista is the reference you've been missing.
The interface is built around browsing: you select an animation category (entrances, exits, attention, text, background), then a specific type within that category, and the site previews it live on a visible element. You adjust duration, timing function, delay, and direction through controls, and the preview updates in real time. When you've landed on something you want, you copy the CSS with one click.
The generated CSS is clean. It uses vendor prefixes where still needed, doesn't inject extraneous properties, and the @keyframes blocks are readable. You can drop them directly into a stylesheet without modification.
What this solves is the gap between knowing an animation exists and knowing its exact implementation. Writing a slide-in-from-left animation from scratch isn't hard — it's just unnecessary when you can grab proven, cross-browser CSS in ten seconds. For one-off animations on specific elements, Animista is faster than any library import and produces less payload.
10. svgomg — by Jake Archibald
The SVG cleaner your export process needs
svgomg — https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg
When Illustrator, Figma, or any other design tool exports an SVG, what it produces is technically correct and practically bloated. There are unnecessary XML namespaces, editor-specific metadata, redundant group elements, floating-point coordinates with ten decimal places, and inline style declarations that could be attributes. None of this affects how the SVG looks. All of it adds to file size and makes the markup hostile to read or animate.
SVGOMG is a browser-based GUI for SVGO — the SVG optimization library — built by Jake Archibald. You paste or upload an SVG, toggle optimization options (each is clearly labeled with a brief explanation of what it does), and see the before-and-after file size in real time. Typical reduction is somewhere between 50% and 80% of the original file size.
The offline capability, implemented via Service Worker, means it works even without a reliable connection — useful if you're working in environments where internet access is inconsistent. The UI is clean and the option explanations are actually informative rather than just labels.
For developers who work with inline SVGs in React or Vue components, running exports through SVGOMG before bringing them into the codebase should be a standard step. It's not exciting work, but the cumulative effect on page weight is real.
Part Three — Development Infrastructure
11. roadmap.sh
Structured orientation in a field that never stops moving
roadmap.sh — https://roadmap.sh
Web development's greatest problem for practitioners at every level is not a shortage of learning materials — it's the absence of a reliable map. The ecosystem is large, fragmented, and changes faster than any individual can track. Knowing what to learn, in what order, and why certain skills are prerequisites for others is itself a skill that takes years to develop. Roadmap.sh attempts to give that map away.
The site provides visual, interactive learning paths for frontend, backend, full-stack, DevOps, and numerous specific technologies. The maps are thoughtfully structured — not just lists of technology names, but actual dependency graphs that show how concepts relate and which foundational knowledge enables more advanced work.
What distinguishes Roadmap.sh from blog posts that cover the same territory is the community maintenance. It's the sixth most starred project on GitHub, actively updated, and reflects current industry consensus rather than one person's opinion. When the ecosystem shifts — when a framework falls out of favor, when a new tooling paradigm becomes standard — the roadmaps tend to reflect it.
For senior developers onboarding juniors, the roadmaps are also useful as reference documents: shared vocabulary for conversations about skill gaps and growth trajectories. For developers mid-career who feel the specific anxiety of not knowing what they don't know, they provide something rare: a structured account of the territory.
12. devhints.io
Cheat sheets that don't condescend
devhints.io — https://devhints.io
Documentation is thorough by design and useful for learning. It is not optimized for the moment when you remember 90% of something and need to confirm the last 10% quickly. For those moments — and they are frequent — documentation is too slow, too verbose, and too organized around comprehensive coverage rather than fast lookup.
Devhints is a collection of cheat sheets: dense, well-organized, reference-formatted summaries of popular tools, languages, and frameworks. There are sheets for Vim, Git, Bash, ES6, React, Vue, Sass, Flexbox, Docker, Kubernetes, regular expressions, and dozens more. Each is written to be useful in under sixty seconds — the format assumes you know the concept and just need the syntax.
The sheets are particularly well suited for tools you use infrequently enough that syntax decays between sessions. Docker commands, Git rebase flows, Bash parameter expansion — things you know how to think about but whose exact form you forget. Devhints is faster than a Google search and more reliable than the first Stack Overflow result.
The site is open source, contributions are welcome, and the curation quality is consistently high. It's a modest site with no paid tier, no upsell, and no content algorithm. Just dense, accurate reference material.
13. tiny-helpers.dev
The directory of things you needed to exist
tiny-helpers.dev — https://tiny-helpers.dev
Tiny Helpers is not a tool itself. It's a carefully curated directory of small, single-purpose, free web development tools — the category this entire article occupies. Created and maintained by Stefan Judis, it collects tools for CSS, JavaScript, SVG, performance, accessibility, color, fonts, typography, and more.
The value of having a directory rather than doing your own web searches is that curation has already happened. Someone evaluated whether each tool actually works, whether it's free, and whether it serves a clear use case. The result is a filtered collection of tools that are genuinely useful rather than the mixed results you get from a Google search for "CSS animation generator."
Within Tiny Helpers, you'll find tools you won't encounter through normal browsing — small utilities built by individual developers, open-source projects with no marketing budget, single-page applications that do one specific thing with precision. Many are open source, meaning you can inspect the implementation.
It's less a destination than a discovery mechanism. Spending twenty minutes browsing it periodically gives you a set of tools you can reach for when specific problems arise.
14. omatsuri.app
The festival of small front-end tools
omatsuri.app — https://omatsuri.app
Omatsuri — the Japanese word for festival — is a Progressive Web App with a collection of twelve open-source front-end tools, each solving a discrete problem. Symbol generators, triangle generators, page dividers, gradient generators, CSS cursors, keyboard event codes, color shades, fake data generators, and others.
What makes Omatsuri worth mentioning is its character. It's privacy-respecting by design — no analytics, no ads, no data collection of any kind. It installs as a PWA and works offline. The tools are well-implemented and the interface has a clean, confident design that feels intentional rather than assembled.
The fake data generator is particularly useful during development — realistic-looking placeholder names, emails, companies, addresses, phone numbers — because it's faster than reaching for Faker.js when you need a handful of values to populate a UI component and see how it handles real content. The keyboard event code viewer is similarly useful when you're writing event listeners and can't remember whether it's 'Space' or 'Spacebar' or 32 (it's 'Space', and Omatsuri's visualizer shows you this instantly when you press the key).
15. coolbackgrounds.io & css.glass
Two different takes on making backgrounds interesting
coolbackgrounds.io — https://coolbackgrounds.io
css.glass — https://ui.glass/generator
These are different tools solving different visual problems, but they belong in the same breath because they address the same underlying issue: most web projects end up with flat, uninspired backgrounds because generating interesting ones is either time-consuming or requires skills the developer doesn't have.
Cool Backgrounds generates downloadable PNG images across several distinct styles — particle networks, triangular meshes, gradient waves — in a way that's genuinely configurable. You pick a style, adjust colors and parameters, and export at the resolution you need. The outputs are high-quality enough to use as hero section backgrounds or page gradients without modification.
CSS.glass is narrower: it generates the CSS for glassmorphism effects. You adjust background blur, opacity, saturation, and border radius, and you get the exact CSS properties to create a frosted-glass card or panel. This is the kind of UI trend where hand-writing the CSS is technically straightforward but getting the values right requires iteration that the generator shortcuts.
Both tools are free and require no account. Both produce clean output that you can drop directly into a project.
Part Four — Performance, Quality, and Ship Readiness
16. gtmetrix.com
Performance testing that shows you the whole picture
gtmetrix.com — https://gtmetrix.com
PageSpeed Insights is Google's tool and therefore the one most developers default to. It's useful, especially for understanding how Google sees your Core Web Vitals and SEO signals. But its methodology — simulated throttling via a system called Lantern — can produce results that diverge significantly from real-world loading behavior. It's also opaque about test location and doesn't expose the waterfall in a navigable way.
GTmetrix runs performance tests using a real Chrome browser with actual network throttling. It gives you access to a detailed waterfall chart — a visualization of every request the page makes, in the order it makes them, with timing for each. This is the diagnostic view that tells you why a page is slow, not just a score. A 400ms time-to-first-byte means the server is slow. JavaScript that blocks rendering for two seconds appears in the waterfall as a red column during that window. Third-party scripts that load late and shift layout are visible in sequence.
The free tier allows multiple tests from different geographic locations, which matters when your users are distributed and latency is a variable. GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights are genuinely complementary — one tells you what Google's algorithm sees, the other tells you what your users experience. If you're doing serious performance work, run both.
17. responsively.app
Responsive testing without the tab proliferation
responsively.app — https://responsively.app
The manual workflow for testing responsive designs is genuinely bad. You open DevTools, toggle the device emulator, resize to 375px, check the layout, toggle to 768px, check the layout, switch back, and repeat for every device you're targeting. It's slow, it misses interactions between viewport sizes, and it gives you no peripheral view of how the same component looks across sizes simultaneously.
Responsively is a dedicated browser for responsive development. It shows your site across multiple device sizes simultaneously, in a single window, all synced. When you scroll on one, they all scroll. When you click a link, they all navigate. When you resize, you see the breakpoints fire across all viewports at once.
The perceptual benefit of seeing multiple viewports simultaneously is not trivial. It reveals problems that sequential inspection misses — a heading that wraps gracefully at 320px but awkwardly at 540px, a button that's fine at mobile and desktop but breaks at the "awkward middle" tablet size. The side-by-side view creates a kind of peripheral attention that sequential inspection doesn't.
It's a free, open-source application that installs as a desktop app. It reflects a browser built specifically for one workflow, rather than a general browser with DevTools bolted on.
Part Five — Specific, Surprising, Worth Knowing
18. carbon.now.sh
Code screenshots that don't look terrible
carbon.now.sh — https://carbon.now.sh
At some point you need to share a code snippet — in a talk, in documentation, on Twitter or LinkedIn, in a design review, in a proposal. If you screenshot your editor, the result is visually unremarkable and often illegible at the sizes social platforms display images. If you paste code into a slide deck, it looks like what it is: code pasted into a slide deck.
Carbon generates beautiful, styled images of source code. You paste your snippet, choose from a variety of editor themes and window chrome styles, pick your font (including ligature-supporting options like Fira Code), adjust padding, and export as PNG or SVG.
The results look like something a careful designer made rather than a screenshot. The typography is sharp, the window styling adds context, and the color schemes are well-crafted rather than just the defaults of whatever IDE you happen to use.
This is a small thing in terms of workflow impact. But it's one of those small things that consistently makes a noticeable difference in how your work is received, because visual presentation affects perceived credibility in ways that aren't always rational but are always real.
19. cssgradient.io
Gradient generation with enough control to actually be useful
cssgradient.io — https://cssgradient.io
CSS gradients are one of those things that are easy to write for simple cases and genuinely annoying to get right for complex ones. The syntax for multi-stop gradients with specific angles and precise color positions is not difficult to understand, but constructing it manually is tedious and the mental model between angle degrees and visual output is not always intuitive.
CSS Gradient provides a visual editor for the full range of CSS gradient types: linear, radial, and conic. You add stops, drag them, adjust colors, change opacity, and see the result update immediately. The generated CSS is clean and standard, with no prefixes unless needed.
What separates this from the dozen other gradient generators is the range of control and the quality of the output. You can generate gradients complex enough to serve as actual design elements — not just background washes, but multi-stop compositions with specific aesthetic intent. It also includes a gallery of pre-built gradients if the blank-canvas problem applies here as it does to color palettes generally.
The tool is free and requires no account. It does exactly what it says, correctly, and without friction.
20. explainshell.com
Because terminal commands shouldn't be archaeology
explainshell.com — https://explainshell.com
This one sits slightly outside the visual design space, but it belongs on any list of tools for working developers because it solves a problem that is both common and genuinely irritating: reading a command line instruction you've found somewhere and having no reliable way to understand what every flag and component does without reading three separate man pages.
Explainshell parses any shell command and visually annotates each segment with the relevant man page content. You paste tar -xzf archive.tar.gz -C /destination/path, and you get each flag labeled with exactly what it does, drawn from the actual documentation. The visualization is clear, the text is from authoritative sources, and the result takes ten seconds instead of ten minutes.
Developers copy and paste shell commands from documentation, tutorials, Stack Overflow, and pull requests constantly. Most of the time they understand the general purpose but not the specific flags. Explainshell is the fastest way to close that gap and avoid running something you don't fully understand on your system.
A Note on What's Not Here
This survey deliberately skips the category of well-known platforms — Figma, Vercel, Postman, GitHub, VS Code — not because they aren't essential, but because they don't need introduction. The premise of this piece is tools that solve problems before you search for them, which requires tools you might not have found yet.
It also skips tools that have become their own ecosystems: Storybook, Chromatic, Linear, Notion. These are legitimate and worth knowing, but they're extensive enough to require their own evaluation rather than a paragraph.
What the twenty sites above have in common is specificity. Each does something small, does it well, and gets out of your way. They don't have onboarding flows. They don't ask for your email. They don't try to expand into adjacent problems they're not suited to solve.
The web is a strange place to build things, and it tends to reward the developers and designers who understand it deeply rather than those who simply use the most powerful tools available. Part of understanding it is knowing your own workflow well enough to recognize where the friction lives — and having the resourcefulness to find the tools that remove it.
These twenty sites remove a lot of friction. Some of them will become part of your daily workflow within a week of finding them. Others you'll use once a month and be grateful for each time. A few you'll mention to someone else, who'll ask how you've known about them for so long without sharing.
That's usually how these things go.
Last researched and verified: February 2026. Tool availability and feature sets are subject to change.
Quick Reference Index
| Website | Primary Use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| caniuse.com | Browser compatibility checking | Free |
| squoosh.app | Image compression | Free |
| bundlephobia.com | npm bundle size analysis | Free |
| regex101.com | Regex writing & debugging | Free (Pro tier available) |
| transform.tools | Code/data format conversion | Free |
| coolors.co | Color palette generation | Free (Pro tier available) |
| fontjoy.com | Font pairing | Free |
| haikei.app | SVG background generation | Free |
| animista.net | CSS animation generation | Free |
| svgomg | SVG optimization | Free |
| roadmap.sh | Learning path reference | Free |
| devhints.io | Developer cheat sheets | Free |
| tiny-helpers.dev | Tool discovery directory | Free |
| omatsuri.app | Frontend utility toolkit | Free |
| coolbackgrounds.io | Background image generation | Free |
| ui.glass/generator | Glassmorphism CSS | Free |
| gtmetrix.com | Performance testing | Free (Pro tier available) |
| responsively.app | Responsive layout testing | Free |
| carbon.now.sh | Code screenshot creation | Free |
| cssgradient.io | CSS gradient generation | Free |
| explainshell.com | Shell command explanation | Free |
21 entries in the table? Yes — some problems don't divide neatly into round numbers, and the glassmorphism tool earned its own row.
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