Unsplash

All three offer royalty-free stock photography. Unsplash's differentiator is curation — its photos consistently look more design-aware and less stock-photo-cliché, which is why Figma, Canva, WordPress (Gutenberg) and Notion all integrate Unsplash search directly into their editors. Pexels and Pixabay have larger absolute libraries (Pixabay also includes vectors and videos), but Unsplash's average quality bar is higher. For design work pick Unsplash; for broader stock variety (illustrations, videos, vectors) pick Pexels or Pixabay.

Yes — under the Unsplash License (since 2017) you can use Unsplash photos for free for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with no attribution required. The exceptions: you cannot redistribute Unsplash photos on a competing stock photo site, and you cannot use the photos to identify identifiable people in ways that would be defamatory or imply endorsement. The license is one of the most permissive in the stock-photo industry. The previous CC0 license was replaced by the Unsplash License in 2017 with minor changes.

Getty Images and Shutterstock are paid stock libraries ($35-$50 per image for single licenses, or subscriptions $29-$199/month). They have larger libraries, model releases on most people-images (critical for advertising use), and editorial / news photography. Unsplash is free but has limited model-release coverage and no editorial / news content. Use Unsplash for design, blog and content marketing; use Getty / Shutterstock when you need legally-cleared model releases for advertising or news photos.

Browsing and search require a network connection — photo metadata and thumbnails are fetched on demand. Once you have downloaded a photo it lives in your device's gallery and works offline. The PWA install is primarily a home-screen launcher convenience rather than an offline-first experience. For offline photo libraries, the alternative is downloading collections in bulk via the Unsplash API (rate-limited).

Unsplash photos appear in approximately 20% of design-tool exports per the Unsplash team's public claims — they are embedded as the default image library in Figma, Canva, Notion, Squarespace, WordPress (Gutenberg block), and dozens of other design tools. Independent bloggers, agencies, marketing teams and product designers use Unsplash daily. After the Getty Images acquisition in 2021 the platform has kept the free-license model intact while adding optional 'Unsplash+' paid premium photos for users who want more polished commercial content.