QR & Barcode
Free QR & Barcode
Turn a link, a phone number or a wifi password into a code people can scan.
The bridge from paper to screen
A QR code is the cheapest bridge there is between the physical world and a web page: a square of ink that turns a poster, a menu, a package or a business card into a tappable link. What was once a novelty is now infrastructure — restaurant menus, event tickets, payment flows and shipping labels all run on the same standard, readable by every phone camera made in the past decade.
The tools in this category make those codes — properly, without the traps the QR industry has grown around them.
The trap this category exists to avoid
Search for a QR generator and most results are subscription services in disguise. They encode not your link but a redirect through their own domain; the code works during the trial, then the "upgrade to keep your codes active" email arrives — often after the codes are already printed on a thousand flyers. The QR standard itself has no such mechanism. A code that encodes your actual link cannot be held hostage, because there is nothing between the scanner and the destination.
Codes made here are always direct. The trade-off is honest too: a direct code cannot be edited after printing — the link in the ink is the link — so choose destination URLs you control and expect to keep.
What makes a code scan well
Four things, all boring and all decisive. Physical size: a tenth of the scanning distance, so 2 cm for a hand-held scan and 20 cm for a poster read from two metres. Contrast: dark on light, ideally the classic near-black on white; inverted and decorated codes fail on older readers. The quiet zone: the white margin is part of the code, and designs that crop it break scanning more often than any other mistake. Density: the less you encode, the chunkier the squares and the more forgiving the scan — short links beat long URLs, always.
The generator here bakes these defaults in: proper quiet zone in both downloads, high contrast ink from this site's own palette, and a size picker matched to real uses rather than arbitrary pixels.
Damage tolerance, chosen honestly
QR error correction lets a damaged code scan anyway — up to a quarter of the pattern can be missing at the highest setting. The cost is density: more correction means smaller squares at the same size. The generator offers the three levels that cover real cases and tells you the survival percentage of each, because "High sounds better" leads to dense codes that scan worse in practice. Screens take Low; print takes Medium; weathered outdoor signage earns High.
Your codes are your business
Everything in this category runs on your device. Links are encoded locally, downloads are produced locally, and nothing you turn into a code is seen, logged or kept by us — which for payment links, wifi passwords and unpublished URLs is not a detail. It is also why the generator keeps working with no connection: on the train to the print shop, the tool still makes codes.
Questions people ask
Are QR codes made here free to use commercially?
Completely. The QR code standard is open and royalty-free, the code you generate is yours, and nothing here is watermarked, limited or licensed. Print it on packaging, menus, posters — no attribution, no fees, no account.
Why do some QR codes stop working after a while?
Because they were made by services that route your link through their own short URL, which keeps working only while you keep paying or the service keeps existing. Codes made here encode your content directly — there is no middleman able to switch them off.
Can a QR code be scanned from a screen?
Yes — screens scan well as long as the code is displayed large enough and the screen is reasonably clean. Codes on TV or projected slides need to be generous in size; a quarter of the slide is not too much for a room-depth scan.
What can a QR code contain besides a link?
Any text: wifi credentials in the standard WIFI: format, phone numbers as tel:+358..., prefilled SMS, email addresses, plain messages, calendar entries. Scanning apps recognise the common formats and offer the right action automatically.
Is there a limit to how much fits?
Around 2,300 characters at the default tolerance — but density is the enemy of scanning, so codes should carry as little as possible. Encode a short link to the content rather than the content itself whenever it is long.
Are barcodes coming too?
That is the plan for this category: EAN-13 and Code 128 generation, plus a camera-based reader for codes that will not scan from damaged packaging. QR came first because it is what people ask for most.