Pixelizer vs one-shot converters
A class of web tools — Pixelit, Pixel Me, and similar one-shot converters — is built to flatten a photo and download. Pixelizer is built to keep working after that first pass.
One-shot pixel converters — the class that includes Pixelit, Pixel Me, and similar browser filters — do one job well: upload, pick a coarseness, download. They are fine for a thumbnail or a joke avatar. They are not a place to keep a piece.
Pixelizer is the other shape of tool. You still start from a photo, but you choose a real quantizer, a cell grid, and a color budget. Then you stay: palette recolor, paint, fill, undo, duplicate sketches, a local gallery. Cloud sync is Pixel Enthusiast, not the free tier.
What we will not claimWe will not paste competitor screenshots, invent their feature lists, or pretend Pixelizer wins every slider-vs-slider bake-off. Those products are not Pixelizer’s editor with the lights off. They are a different product category.
If you want a ten-second mosaic, use a one-shot converter. If you want Median Cut, K-Means, NeuQuant, or Octree, a 2–256 color cap, optional dither, and a project you can reopen, use a studio. That is the photo-to-pixel-art loop above — coffee pour, 40×40, 14 colors, quantized in Pixelizer.