img.ly Alternative for a Hosted Embeddable Editor

If you're looking for an img.ly alternative, you want one thing: a real design editor inside your own product.

Their CreativeEditor SDK does that, and does it well — full-featured, runs in the browser or natively on mobile, and you control almost everything. No complaints there.

The bill comes due around the editor. img.ly's SDK is just the editor — the rest is yours to build and run:

• Host the rendering engine yourself
• Build the backend it needs — template storage, per-user data, uploads, auth
• Ship a heavy editor bundle to every user
• Get the commercial price on a sales call

I built Orshot Embed for teams who want the editor without running all of that. Same editor we use in Orshot, hosted by us, dropped into your app with an iframe or a React/Vue component. Your users, your branding, your domain — our storage, accounts, and rendering.

Try Orshot Embed free

What actually changes

Same job — your users editing designs in your app. The difference is who runs the editor:

Where img.ly is still the better pick

I'll be straight about it — stay on img.ly if you need:

• Offline editing — it runs client-side, no network required
• Native mobile — a real iOS / Android / Flutter editor
• Engine-level control — forking the renderer, custom UI internals

Orshot won't match it there. If that's your list, this is the wrong tool and I'd rather you know now.

What you get with Orshot Embed

If it's not your list, here's what's actually included:

• White-label it — custom embed title, icon, and accent color, with Orshot branding removed on higher tiers
• Webhooks and events — your backend gets pinged on template.create, template.update, and template.delete, and postMessage events fire on save and export so your UI can react
• The same render API underneath — PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, PDF, and MP4/WebM/GIF from one template, any size via Smart Resize
• A brand library and 1,000+ templates so nobody starts on a blank canvas
• Me on the other end of the chat, usually within the hour

Basic embed is on the paid plans; white-label, webhooks, per-user data, and custom buttons turn on as you move up the tiers.

Try the editor right here

This is the editor your users would get — embedded exactly like it'd sit in your app. Click around:

Like how that feels? Build your own → — free to start.

Dropping it into your app

Setup lives in your Orshot workspace:

• Switch the embed on and add your allowed domains
• Drop in your branding — title, icon, accent color
• Pass a userId for each person so their templates stay separate

Then mount it however suits your stack:

• Iframe — <iframe src="https://orshot.com/embeds/EMBED_ID">, with an optional userId and signed token
• React or Vue — drop in @orshot/embed-react or @orshot/embed-vue, mount it as a component, and listen for save and export events

Full steps are in the Embed docs and this walkthrough.

Need an image without anyone opening the editor? The same template is one POST away:

const response = await fetch("https://api.orshot.com/v1/studio/render", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: "Bearer YOUR_ORSHOT_API_KEY",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    templateId: "orshot_template_id",
    modifications: {
      title: "Hello World",
      image: "https://example.com/photo.jpg",
    },
    response: { type: "url", format: "png" },
  }),
});

Common questions

Bottom line

img.ly's SDK wins if you need a self-hosted, client-side editor you own down to the engine — offline, native, all of it. No argument from me.

If you just want your users editing on-brand templates inside your product, without building the platform behind it, that's the gap Orshot fills.

Comparing other embeddable editors? It's the same hosted-vs-SDK question with Polotno and Templated — I went deeper here. Try Embed free. Get stuck wiring it up? Hit the chat. I'll help you out.