QR code generator & reader — offline

There are two things wrong with the average free online QR generator, and neither is obvious from the landing page. The first is that your content is posted to their server to be rendered. The second is worse: many of them do not encode your URL at all. They encode their short link, which redirects to your destination — so every single scan is logged by a third party, and the code stops working entirely if that company shuts the link down, moves it behind a paid plan, or goes out of business. People discover this when the code is already printed on a thousand flyers.

This generator does neither. The QR matrix is computed in your browser by an open-source library and drawn to a canvas in the page, so nothing is transmitted anywhere — the site has no backend to receive it. The code encodes exactly the characters you typed and nothing else, which means it is a static QR code that never expires, has no analytics attached, keeps working if this site disappears, and belongs to you outright. Open DevTools → Network while typing, or disconnect from the internet: it keeps generating.

The clearest case for generating QR codes locally is guest Wi-Fi. Both iOS and Android join a network from a QR code that encodes the credentials in plain text, and the format is a single line:

WIFI:T:WPA;S:NetworkName;P:YourPassword;;

Paste that into the content box, substituting your SSID and password. Use T:WPA for WPA and WPA2 networks, or T:nopass for an open network with no password field. If your SSID or password contains ;, ,, :, or \, escape each one with a backslash.

Note what that format means: the password is readable by anyone who scans or decodes the image, so the printed card on the counter is the security boundary — treat it like the password itself, and use a guest network rather than your main one. What matters here is that the password is never typed into a remote server on the way to becoming an image. The same reasoning applies to any private URL, unlisted document link, or contact detail you would rather not hand to an ad-supported generator.

Pick a size from 192 to 512 pixels and the preview updates live. PNG is the right choice for anything on a screen — slides, email signatures, a web page. SVG is the one you want for print: it is vector, so a code exported at any size scales to a poster or a business card with perfectly sharp module edges and no resampling blur. Print shops generally prefer it for exactly this reason.

Both exports include the quiet zone — the white margin around the matrix — which scanners need in order to locate the code. Cropping it off to make a code look tighter in a layout is the single most common reason a printed QR code fails to scan. The other is contrast: keep the code dark on a light background rather than inverted, and avoid placing it over a busy photo.

The library applies error correction automatically, so a code tolerates a degree of damage, dirt, or a partially obscured corner and still resolves. Shorter content produces a code with fewer, larger modules, which scans more reliably from a distance — worth keeping URLs short when the code will be read across a room.

The same page decodes as well as generates. Choose an image — a screenshot, a photo of a printed code, a saved PNG — and it is decoded on your device by an open-source scanner; the image is never uploaded. This is the safe way to answer "where does this code actually go?" without pointing your phone at it and being taken there immediately, which matters given how routinely QR codes are used for phishing: a sticker slapped over the legitimate code on a parking meter or a restaurant table sends you to a convincing payment page.

Decoding first shows you the real destination as text, so you can read the domain before deciding. It is also how you check whether a code someone sent you is a direct link or a third-party tracking redirect — paste the result back into the generator above to produce a clean, static version that points straight at the destination.

Sharp, straight-on images decode most reliably; if a photo fails, try a closer or better-lit shot. Need to convert or resize the source image first? The image converter also runs entirely on your device.