- withoutBG Open Weights
- Open weights · commercially permissiveLicense: Apache-2.0
- remove.bg
- ProprietaryLicense: Paid cloud API
withoutBG Open-Weight Model vs remove.bg
Qualitative comparison, 10 photos. These photos have no ground-truth matte, so there are no scores: judge the outputs by eye. Use the view controls on each row to switch between transparency, chroma key, and alpha matte on all outputs.
Disclosure: withoutBG includes BiRefNet
withoutBG Open Weights and Pro Model API are routed pipelines. A classifier sends fine strands, soft detail and transparency to withoutBG's own matting model, and hard opaque objects, flat scenes and vehicles to BiRefNet (MIT license), which is part of the pipeline. On this page, 2 of 10 images went to BiRefNet.
Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash
Photo by Carlo Sierra on Unsplash
Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash
Photo by Lars Bo Nielsen on Unsplash
Photo by Mayer Tawfik on Unsplash
Photo by Niko Tsviliov on Unsplash
Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash
Photo by Vinicius Wiesehofer on Unsplash
Methodology
- Alpha mattes are grayscale masks encoding per-pixel foreground probability. They capture fine edge detail (hair, fur, semi-transparent regions) that binary masks discard.
- Qualitative comparison: these photos have no ground-truth matte, so the page shows outputs side by side without scores. Comparisons with ground truth show MGE and MAE per image.
Photo Credits
Source images are courtesy of the photographers below via Unsplash.
Why use it as a remove.bg alternative#
- Apache-2.0 open weights: free for commercial use, no per-image cost.
- Runs on your own machine (Python, Docker or Mac), so images never leave it.
- Works offline, with no account or API key.
- Need harder edges later? The Pro Model API uses the same Python package.