Resources

7 tools we recommend when ours are not the right answer

Toolery covers a deliberately narrow set of jobs. We would rather build a handful of tools well, and write a guide explaining what the output actually means, than ship two hundred calculators nobody maintains. The consequence is that we regularly do not have what you came for.

So here is the list our team actually uses. Each entry says what the tool is good at, when to reach for it instead of anything here, and where it falls down — because "just use this other site" is not useful advice without the caveats. Nothing on this page is sponsored or affiliated; we get nothing if you click through.

Bigger toolboxes

When you need a utility we simply do not have, these three cover more ground than any single-purpose site.

IT Tools

it-tools.tech

An open-source collection of roughly eighty developer utilities in one interface — hash generators, UUID and ULID generators, crontab parsers, chmod calculators, token generators, colour pickers, and a long tail of converters. Everything runs client-side, and the whole thing ships as a Docker image, so a team that cannot send data to a public site can host it internally.

Reach for it when: A one-off utility that is too niche for us to build — a bcrypt hash, a MAC address lookup, an IBAN validator.
The tradeoff: Breadth without depth. It gives you the calculator and nothing else: no explanation of what the output means, no guidance on when the answer is misleading.

Open IT Tools

CyberChef

gchq.github.io

Built and open-sourced by GCHQ, CyberChef models transformations as a "recipe" — an ordered pipeline of operations you drag into place. Base64-decode, then gunzip, then parse as a JWT, then extract a regex group, all in one chain you can save and share as a URL. It handles encodings, compression, classical and modern crypto, character encodings, binary parsing, and data forensics.

Reach for it when: Anything that needs more than one transformation in sequence, or where you do not yet know what the data is and want to experiment.
The tradeoff: The interface is a wall. Hundreds of operations with no onboarding means the first ten minutes are spent hunting for the right one. For a single decode, our Base64 tool or JWT debugger is faster to reach.

Open CyberChef

Transform Tools

transform.tools

A focused grid of format-to-format converters, weighted toward things developers paste between languages: JSON to TypeScript interfaces, JSON to Go structs, JSON Schema to TypeScript, HTML to JSX, CSS to JS objects, SVG to React components.

Reach for it when: Turning a sample API response into typed code, or porting markup into a component.
The tradeoff: Generated types mirror the sample you pasted, not the real schema. Optional and nullable fields that happen to be present in your one example come out as required.

Open Transform Tools

Images and media

Our image tools cover the common cases. These two go further where it matters.

Squoosh

squoosh.app

A browser image compressor from the Chrome team, with a split-screen preview that shows the original and the re-encoded version side by side at the same zoom. It exposes the actual encoder settings — MozJPEG trellis quantisation, AVIF effort levels, WebP method — rather than a single quality slider.

Reach for it when: Squeezing the last few kilobytes out of a hero image, or comparing AVIF against WebP on one specific photo before committing a format decision site-wide.
The tradeoff: One image at a time, and the encoder options assume you already know what they do. For a quick batch resize, our own tools are less work.

Open Squoosh

Can I Use

caniuse.com

The browser support table everyone eventually needs. Per-feature adoption data across browser versions, weighted by real usage share, with notes on partial implementations and known bugs.

Reach for it when: Deciding whether you can ship AVIF, container queries, or the View Transitions API without a fallback.
The tradeoff: Global usage percentages are not your usage percentages. Check your own analytics before trusting a "97% supported" badge.

Open Can I Use

Reference and testing

Two single-purpose sites that do one thing better than any general toolbox.

regex101

regex101.com

A regex tester with a live explanation pane that breaks your pattern into labelled components, a step-by-step debugger, and separate flavours for PCRE, Python, JavaScript, Go, Java, and .NET. It also reports catastrophic backtracking before it reaches production.

Reach for it when: Writing or debugging any pattern longer than a few characters, and checking that a regex behaves the same in the language you are actually targeting.
The tradeoff: Patterns are saved to their servers when you generate a share link, so do not paste production data alongside the expression. Our regex guide covers the concepts it assumes you know.

Open regex101

crontab.guru

Paste a cron expression and it tells you in plain English when the job runs, plus the next several fire times. The fire-time list is the part that catches mistakes — a schedule that reads correctly often fires at times you did not intend.

Reach for it when: Every cron expression, before it goes into a crontab or a Kubernetes CronJob.
The tradeoff: It assumes standard Vix cron. Quartz (Java) adds a seconds field and Kubernetes CronJobs run in the cluster timezone, so the preview can be an hour off across a DST boundary. See our cron guide for those cases.

Open crontab.guru

A note on pasting data into any of these

Most of the sites above process data in your browser, the same way ours do — but "runs client-side" is a claim you cannot verify from the outside, and share links in particular usually mean the payload was sent somewhere. Treat production secrets, customer records, and live tokens as things you do not paste into a website you did not build, ours included. Our developer tools are open to inspection in your browser's network tab if you want to check.