PhotoFig vs remove.bg

remove.bg taught a lot of sellers what a clean cutout looks like. You dropped in a photo, the background disappeared, and you got on with your day. For years it was the answer to “how do I get this product on white”.

It is also part of why PhotoFig exists. I started building it for a small online shop that photographs clothing on a mannequin, where both the mannequin and the background have to go. remove.bg cost up to $2 a photo for that, and the masks still needed fixing by hand.

Now remove.bg is closing. On December 1, 2026 at 9:00 CET, the standalone website goes offline. If it is part of how you prepare product photos, you have about two months to decide what replaces it.

PhotoFig is a browser-based product photo editor for e-commerce catalogs. It removes backgrounds, adds AI scenes and product shadows without repainting the product, and runs a whole folder or WooCommerce store through the same template in one batch.

Quick answer: If you remove a background now and then and already design in Canva, follow remove.bg to Canva. It uses the same technology. If you prepare product photos every week, work in batches, or need finished marketplace images rather than bare cutouts, PhotoFig does the whole job in one place, and the Free plan covers 30 new photos a month.

What is changing at remove.bg?

remove.bg has been part of Canva since 2021, and Canva is folding it into its own products. According to remove.bg’s FAQ:

• The website closes on December 1, 2026 at 9:00 CET. After that, the site and accounts are no longer accessible.
• Background removal moves to Canva, which uses the same technology. Canva is also the suggested replacement for bulk removal and for the desktop app.
• The self-service API stops accepting requests on December 1. API access moves to Leonardo.Ai, also owned by Canva. Enterprise API contracts continue as normal.
• The Photoshop plugin and other integrations are discontinued on the same date.

If you pay for remove.bg today, the details matter:

• Subscriptions keep working until December 1 and then end on their own.
• Annual plans get a pro-rata refund for the unused time, with no action needed.
• A monthly renewal on or after November 1 is free.
• Unused pay-as-you-go credits expire on December 1.
• Invoices and the credit usage report can only be downloaded until then, so export them now.

What is remove.bg best at?

It is worth being clear about what remove.bg does well, because it does it very well.

• One job, done fast. Upload a photo and the background is gone in seconds, for people, products, animals, and cars.
• Large output. Up to 50 megapixels as JPG or WebP, and up to 10 megapixels as a transparent PNG.
• Quick fixes. When the automatic result misses something, the Erase and Restore tools and the Magic Brush let you correct it without masking pixel by pixel.
• It was everywhere. Web, desktop apps, Android, a Photoshop plugin, Zapier and Make, and one of the simplest APIs around.

If all you ever needed was a transparent PNG, remove.bg was hard to beat. Canva is now the official way to keep that workflow.

How do the cutouts compare?

Both tools remove backgrounds automatically, and both let you correct the result with a brush. On a plain product on a plain background, you will struggle to tell them apart.

The difference shows on the photos that are hard to cut out: mesh, lace, glass, thin chains, or a product on a mannequin that has to disappear with the background. That is exactly the case PhotoFig started from. When the automatic mask is wrong, you refine it with AI-guided selection and a manual brush instead of re-uploading and hoping for a better result. Every run gives you the mask, the cutout, and a thumbnail.

My advice: while remove.bg is still online, run ten of your hardest product photos through both and compare the edges at full size. That comparison will not be possible after December 1, and it tells you more than any article can.

What do you get after the cutout?

This is where the two tools differ most. remove.bg mostly stops at the cutout. You can put a color or a photo behind it, and the API can add a shadow, but scenes, sizes, and publishing happen in other tools.

For a product catalog, the cutout is usually the first step. PhotoFig keeps going:

• AI backgrounds. Describe a scene or pick one, and PhotoFig places your product in it. The photographed product is never repainted.
• Product Shadow. Contact shadows that match the scene, so the product sits on the surface instead of floating.
• Batch templates. One template removes the background, sets the new one, positions the product, adds the shadow, and exports several sizes of every product in the same run. The run keeps going on our servers after you close the tab.
• Products that look the same size. PhotoFig can adjust a batch so a slim bottle and a wide jar read as consistent on the page, instead of each one simply filling the frame. I wrote about why that matters in how to make product photos consistent across a catalog.
• WooCommerce, on every plan. Connect your store, pick products by name, SKU, or category, and publish the edited photos back after you review each one. Your previous photos can be restored. Plans include 5 (Free) to 15,000 (Studio) store photo publishes a month, counted the same whether you publish from a batch run, Catalog Resize, or the editor.

If you are not sure which sizes you need, the product photo sizes cheat sheet lists them for each marketplace.

How much do remove.bg and PhotoFig cost?

remove.bg charges per image. One credit buys one full-resolution image, and the price of a credit depends on how many you buy. These are the prices on its pricing page on October 3, 2026:

Yearly billing takes 10% off, and the largest subscriptions bring a credit down to about $0.07. None of these can be bought after December 1.

PhotoFig does not charge per cutout. The Free plan includes 30 new photos a month, with background removal for each, and every paid plan includes unlimited background removal. Removal never uses AI credits, so those stay for AI backgrounds and Product Shadow.

Paying yearly costs $90, $270, and $708 a year.

To put that in numbers: 200 cutouts a month cost $39 on a remove.bg subscription. On PhotoFig, Starter includes unlimited background removal and 1,000 batch exports for $9.95, so the same 200 photos can run as one batch and download together. The Free plan covers 30 new photos a month, enough to try it on a real set of products.

Can PhotoFig replace the remove.bg API?

It depends on how you used it, and I would rather you know before you migrate.

The remove.bg API is synchronous and built for volume: you send an image and get the cutout back in the same response, at up to 500 images a minute. The self-service API stops on December 1, and the official path is Leonardo.Ai.

The PhotoFig API is built for catalog pipelines:

• Included in Pro and Studio. There is no separate per-image price. The mask tool returns a transparent PNG cutout and uses background removals, which are unlimited on paid plans. Credits are only charged for jobs that complete.
• Asynchronous. You submit a photo and get a job ID. A signed webhook tells your server when the job is done, or you can check its status.
• More than cutouts. The same API adds AI backgrounds and shadows, and resizes photos to exact output sizes.
• Rate limits. 60 requests an hour on Pro and 500 on Studio. Status checks count too, so use webhooks. Pro runs 3 jobs at a time and Studio 5.

Here is the same cutout in both:

# remove.bg
curl https://api.remove.bg/v1.0/removebg \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_REMOVE_BG_KEY" \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "size=auto" \
  -o product.png

# PhotoFig: returns a job; the cutout arrives by webhook or statusUrl
curl https://api.photofig.com/v1/tools/mask/edit \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -F "[email protected]"

If you send hundreds of product photos an hour, PhotoFig fits. If you send thousands of images an hour and need the cutout in the same response, Leonardo.Ai is the better fit. The API documentation and the OpenAPI file have everything else.

Side by side

Which one should you choose?

If you only remove a background now and then, and you already design in Canva, follow remove.bg there. It is the same technology in a tool you already use.

If you used the remove.bg API for high-volume, real-time cutouts, look at Leonardo.Ai first. That is the official migration path, and PhotoFig’s API is not built for that kind of throughput.

If your work starts with a folder or a store full of products, and the cutout is only the first step before backgrounds, shadows, sizes, and publishing, PhotoFig is built for that job. Run your hardest photos through it while remove.bg is still online, compare the results side by side, and decide before December 1.

Sources

• remove.bg, remove.bg is moving to Canva, checked October 3, 2026.
• remove.bg, Pricing, credit packs and subscriptions in USD, checked October 3, 2026.
• remove.bg, API documentation, rate limits, output formats, credits per image, and the move to Leonardo.Ai, checked October 3, 2026.
• remove.bg Help, How to use the Magic Brush, checked October 3, 2026.
• remove.bg, Integrations, tools and apps, checked October 3, 2026.