Real vector paths, and the accuracy comes back as a number
Search this term and most of what you find does not vectorise anything. It takes your PNG, encodes it as base64, wraps it in an image tag inside an SVG shell and hands it back. The extension changed; the pixels did not. Zoom in and it blurs exactly like the PNG it still is, and opening it in Illustrator gives you nothing to edit. The check takes ten seconds: open the file in a text editor. If you see a wall of base64, you were handed a rename.
What this one actually produces
Shapes. The tracer finds the edges in your image and writes them as real SVG path elements grouped by colour, so you can scale the result forever and edit every curve in Illustrator, Figma or Inkscape. On a two-colour logo at 267 by 87 pixels, the output came back with 8 path elements, no base64 anywhere in the file, and the two source colours preserved as their exact hex values. The SVG was also sized 267 by 87, so it drops into a page as a direct replacement for the PNG it came from.
The accuracy is measured, not asserted
Every result carries a fidelity score, and it is not an estimate. Your finished SVG is rendered back to pixels and compared against your original image pixel by pixel, and the percentage that comes out is what you see. The two-colour logo scored 99.5. On the acceptance corpus every flat file scores 99 or above, and three of them trace at exactly 100.0. A real production logo, a white and red wordmark on transparency, traces at 99.7 into a 9.5 KB file of 3 colour layers and 19 paths.
Why traced logos usually look wrong, and what is done about it
Anti-aliasing is the reason most tracers produce a halo of speckles around every letter. The soft shades along an edge are not colours in the design, they are blur, and a tracer that treats them as colours will faithfully trace the blur. Colours here are detected at your image's native resolution, so those shades are recognised as edge blur and folded away rather than turned into shapes. The other classic defect is hairline gaps between adjacent colours, visible as thin light lines running through the artwork. Colour layers are built overlapping, so those gaps cannot form.
Transparency, and the outline that usually ruins it
Pixels below half opacity are treated as background and excluded from every traced shape, so the SVG stays transparent wherever your PNG was. The harder problem is the fringe: a one pixel ring of background colour that most tracers leave around a transparent logo, invisible on white and obvious the moment the logo sits on a dark page. It is removed here with trapping, a technique borrowed from print. Each colour layer is grown by a single pixel, but only along the strip that borders transparency, so the fringe is covered without moving any edge inside the artwork.
Small and slightly blurry is the normal case
Most people asking for a vector version do not have a clean master file. They have a small PNG someone exported years ago. That input is what the engine is tuned for: a small anti-aliased image is upscaled before tracing, which gives the tracer sub-pixel information about where the edges really run, so the curves follow the shapes the designer drew instead of the staircase of the small file. The 267 pixel logo was traced at 1024 wide, and the result says so. The honest limit is that tracing can only recover what the pixels still witness. A 30 pixel favicon holds very little truth about its own curves, and nothing can invent detail that was never saved.
Photographs work, and the tool tells you they should not
A photograph has no shapes to rediscover. It is continuous tone, so tracing produces a posterised approximation: interesting as an art style, wrong as a copy. The measurement makes this impossible to hide. A continuous-tone test image came back at 95.4 percent against 99.5 for the flat logo, and where the logo needed 2 colour layers and 8 paths, the photograph needed 16 layers and 9,899 paths. The result also carries a note saying the image is continuous tone and that the PNG remains the faithful format. If you want the posterised look deliberately, set the colour count yourself and take it.
Colours, or pure black and white
By default the palette is detected from your design automatically, so a two-colour logo traces as two clean layers rather than two layers plus a ring of anti-aliasing shades pretending to be colours, and richer artwork keeps up to 16. You can set the count yourself anywhere from 2 to 32: fewer for a cleaner, more stylised result, more for closer colour matching. For scanned signatures, stamps and line art there is a separate black and white mode that picks its threshold automatically from the image's own histogram, or takes a value from you between 1 and 254, and returns a single crisp black drawing on transparency.
What happens to your files
Several images trace with the same settings and come back as one ZIP under their original filenames. Files travel over an encrypted connection and are deleted from the server an hour after the result is ready.
What you get
- Real SVG path elements grouped by colour, editable in any vector program
- A measured fidelity percentage on every file, not a claim of high quality
- Anti-aliasing folded away instead of traced into a halo of speckles
- Transparency preserved, with the one pixel background fringe removed by trapping
- Automatic palette detection, a colour count you can set, and a black and white mode for line art
- No account, no watermark, and files deleted from the server an hour later
What's next?
Need to go the other way and turn a vector back into pixels for an upload form or an email? SVG to PNG renders it at any size you like. Before you ship the traced file, Compress SVG strips the editor junk out of it, and Compress PNG handles the original raster if you are keeping that too.