Pantone to HEX: why every site gives a different code

Where a Pantone HEX value comes from

A Pantone color is an ink on paper. A HEX code is a color on a screen. Getting from one to the other means measuring the printed swatch, usually as CIELAB values, and converting that measurement into the sRGB space screens use. Each open list was made by its own author, in its own way.

We took four lists from npm:

• Pantoner (MIT), the list our own tools use
• Bit and Black color palette (MIT)
• color2library (MIT)
• pantone-colors (MIT), which takes its values from pantone-colours.com

As a reference we used the CIELAB values in X-Rite's PANTONE+ Solid Coated V3 color book, from the color-books package. The package itself is ISC-licensed, but the color values in it come from X-Rite, so we use them only to check other lists and never publish them. 1,313 coated codes appear in the book and in the first three lists; 891 of them are also in the pantone-colours.com list.

How far apart the lists are

We measured every pair of lists with CIEDE2000, usually written ΔE: the formula the CIE published in 2001 to describe how different two colors look. On the scale we use across this site, a ΔE below 1 is an excellent match, below 3 a good one, below 6 approximate, and 6 or more a visibly different color.

Pantoner, Bit and Black and color2library mostly agree. Between Pantoner and color2library the median difference is ΔE 0.7, and every code is within ΔE 3. Bit and Black sits a little further off, at a median of 1.5 from Pantoner, with 96% of codes within ΔE 3.

The pantone-colours.com list is further from all three. Its median distance from each of them is ΔE 3.4 to 3.8, an approximate match on our scale, and only 3 to 4% of its codes come within ΔE 1 of theirs. Six of its codes differ from Pantoner by more than ΔE 10, and those look like mixed-up codes: for 207 C it gives a beige, #BAAA9E, where the other three give a deep red around #A50034.

Against the book itself, for the codes a screen can show, Pantoner and color2library are a median ΔE 0.7 and 0.6 away, Bit and Black 1.4, and the pantone-colours.com list 3.7.

Now take the 891 codes that are in all four lists. All four values sit within ΔE 3 of each other for only 22% of them. For 15% of them, the furthest two are ΔE 6 or more apart, which is a visibly different color.

A few examples:

In four of the six rows, 300 C, 3005 C, 426 C and 207 C, nearly all of the gap comes from the pantone-colours.com value. For 300 C, the other three lists are within ΔE 1.2 of each other.

One ink in five has no exact HEX at all

Screens can't show every color an ink can. Of the 1,313 coated codes, 277, or 21%, fall outside the sRGB range that HEX codes describe. For those inks every HEX value is a compromise.

How big the compromise is depends on the ink. If you keep the lightness and hue and lower the saturation until the color fits, the median gap between ink and screen is ΔE 2.5, a good match on our scale but not an exact one. For 47 codes it is ΔE 6 or more. Process Blue C loses ΔE 8.1, and 300 C loses ΔE 6.6. Saturated greens, blue-greens and cyans are hit hardest. All 47 are greens, blue-greens, cyans or blues, and the two furthest outside sRGB are Green C and 327 C.

The lists don't disagree more about these inks. Pantoner, Bit and Black and color2library actually agree a little more closely on these inks than on the rest. Take the largest of the three pairwise gaps for each code: its median is ΔE 1.2 for these inks and 1.6 for the others.

Smaller differences come from the method

We read the book's CIELAB values as D50, the white that ICC color management uses for CIELAB. Screens use D65, and a correct conversion adapts from one white to the other. For 79% of codes, Bit and Black's values are closer to a conversion that treats the D50 numbers as D65 ones. We don't know how the list was made. The two ways of converting differ by a median of only ΔE 0.9, so this explains a small part of the gap at most.

We got this wrong ourselves

Until 23 September 2026, the Pantone table on this site was typed by hand. When we checked it against these lists, 77 of its 126 rows were more than ΔE 2 away. 2665 C was #BF3FBF, a magenta, instead of a purple near #7D55C7, and some of those wrong pages were already ranking in search.

We replaced it with an import of 1,341 coated codes, from Solid Coated and from the smaller Pastels & Neons and Metallics books. A code goes into our table only if it exists in an X-Rite book and Pantoner's value is confirmed within ΔE 3 by Bit and Black or by color2library. For 1,281 codes both confirm it, and for 60 only one does.

How to pick a value you can defend

1. Keep the Pantone code as the source of truth. For anything printed, give the printer the code and let them match the ink. A HEX value can't carry it to paper.
2. If the brand has guidelines with a HEX value, use that. It is the value the brand chose, and it may differ from every list on purpose.
3. If there are no guidelines, pick one list and use it everywhere: website, slides, social images. Pantoner and color2library are the closest to the book in our comparison, a median ΔE 0.7 and 0.6 (our tools use Pantoner). Write down which list you used. Two lists mixed in one brand kit is how a logo ends up in two blues.
4. Check whether your code is in the list of inks outside sRGB above. If it is, no screen will match the printed swatch, and a duller screen version is expected.
5. Compare against a printed swatch for anything that matters, in daylight or a viewing booth. A screen can only approximate the ink, and two screens will differ from each other.
6. Watch for outliers. If a converter gives #0072C6 for 300 C or a beige for 207 C, its values match the pantone-colours.com list.

Our Pantone to HEX tool shows the screen approximation for each code, and the Pantone color finder works the other way, from a screen color to the nearest codes.

How we got these numbers

The lists are Pantoner 1.1.2, bitandblack-colorpalette 0.1.2, color2library 1.0.8 and pantone-colors 1.0.3, all from npm. The reference is the PANTONE+ Solid Coated V3 book from the color-books package 0.1.2. All numbers are for coated (C) inks and were computed on 5 November 2026. The losses for inks outside sRGB were recomputed on 7 November 2026: our first run clipped each RGB channel instead of lowering chroma, which overstated the largest losses.

Color difference is CIEDE2000 as implemented in culori. The book's CIELAB values are D50; we converted them to sRGB with culori, which adapts D50 to D65 with the Bradford transform. "Outside sRGB" means the converted color needs a channel below 0 or above 255. The gap for those inks was found by lowering chroma at constant lightness and hue until the color fits; the list rounds it down to one decimal. Bit and Black is a median ΔE 1.4 from the correct conversion and 0.8 from the D65 reading.

The formulas behind every tool on this site are on How We Calculate.