Every tool in the Craft suite is benchmarked honestly, compared head to head against leading commercial services. We don't hide our weaknesses, because transparency builds more trust than any marketing claim ever could.
This piece is part of our benchmark series, alongside our summarization tool comparison and PDF compression benchmark. The shared philosophy: show wins and losses, no cherry-picking, and link straight to competitors so you can verify everything yourself.
How we tested
We ran each engine over the same test image set: aged portraits, landscapes, anime frames, and scanned documents. For every image we kept each tool's default settings to reflect what a typical user actually experiences, rather than tuning each one privately to flatter our numbers.
When a high-resolution original was available as ground truth, we measured two metrics. PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) measures pixel-level deviation from the original in decibels, where higher is closer. SSIM (Structural Similarity) measures how well structure and contrast are preserved, on a 0 to 1 scale. Neither tells the whole story, so we always review images by eye in parallel, because some models inflate PSNR by over-smoothing detail.
1. Upscale — Real-ESRGAN ncnn-vulkan
Our Upscale tool runs Real-ESRGAN on ncnn-vulkan with GPU acceleration. In ERPFit internal benchmarks, output lands around 25dB PSNR, good enough for real-world enlargement but still below the top proprietary models.
| Tool | Price | Max Scale | Quality | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERPFit Upscale | Free | 4x | Good (PSNR ~25dB, ERPFit internal benchmark) | Yes |
| Topaz Gigapixel | $199 | 6x | Best | Desktop |
| Let's Enhance | $9/mo | 16x | Very good | Cloud |
| Upscayl (open source) | Free | 4x | Near-commercial | Desktop |
The strengths are speed and privacy. Because it runs on a Vulkan GPU directly on our servers, images never leave the system, and every operation is callable via API for batch jobs. All of it is free, with no per-credit pricing.
The current limits are just as clear. Maximum quality trails Topaz Gigapixel because their proprietary models are more advanced. We only support 4x today, with no 8x or 16x, and there is no dedicated face-enhancement pass for portraits. These are real limitations, not euphemisms.
Best for: quick upscaling where privacy matters, anime content, and batch processing via API.
2. Colorize — DDColor + 9 presets
Colorize is built on DDColor, a colorization model published at ICCV 2023. Its biggest differentiator from every competitor is that it works in both directions: it colorizes black-and-white photos and also applies artistic decolorization with 9 dedicated presets.
| Tool | Price | Colorization Quality | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERPFit Colorize | Free | Good (DDColor, ICCV 2023) | Yes |
| Palette.fm | $6-72/mo | Best | Cloud |
| Kolorize | $0.30/credit | Very realistic | Cloud |
| MyHeritage InColor | Freemium | Good for portraits | Cloud |
On color naturalness, Palette.fm still edges ahead thanks to its proprietary model and enormous training data. We won't pretend otherwise. In exchange, none of the competitors here offer artistic decolorization, and all of them process your images on their servers rather than yours.
What's missing in the current version: there is no guided colorization (picking colors for specific regions) and no video support yet. Those are our two next development directions.
3. Restore — CodeFormer + GFPGAN
Restore lets you choose between two face-restoration models: CodeFormer (published at NeurIPS 2022) for quality, and GFPGAN for speed. There is also a non-AI mode (sharpen and denoise) for anyone who wants a natural result with fewer hallucinated details.
| Tool | Price | Quality | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERPFit Restore | Free | Good (CodeFormer, NeurIPS 2022) | Yes |
| Remini | $9.99/mo | Best on mobile | App |
| MyHeritage | $13/mo | Great for portraits | Cloud |
| VanceAI | $9.90/mo | Very good | Cloud |
Honestly, Remini still produces sharper, more flattering faces in many cases, thanks to a proprietary model heavily tuned for mobile portraits. We also lack two features common to commercial services: automatic scratch and crease removal, and "Deep Nostalgia" style animation. If you specifically need those, a paid tool will serve you better.
Summary: Craft vs Commercial
Our Craft suite does not win on raw maximum quality, and we say so plainly.
| Dimension | ERPFit Craft | Commercial Leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, all tools | $6-199/month |
| Privacy | Self-hosted, images never leave your server | Images processed on their servers |
| API | Yes, all tools | Some |
| Max quality | Good (SOTA open-source) | Better (proprietary models) |
| Features | Core function | More features |
We're not trying to beat Topaz or Remini on raw quality. Their proprietary models are currently better. Our value lies elsewhere: genuinely free, self-hosted so your images never leave your server, transparent about exactly which model we use, and built entirely on open-source engines you can inspect or improve.
If you want to understand how we built this whole stack, read about ERPFit's open-source toolset.