Comparison

123RF vs Pexels

123RF lands on Depends, and Pexels lands on Worth it.

123RF

Depends

Confidence: Medium

Buy if you need volume royalty-free images cheaply and will use a unique password.

Worth it

Confidence: Medium

Use it if you need free, high-quality stock photos or videos . there is no purchase decision or paid tier at all.

123RF versus Pexels
Compare	123RF	Pexels
Verdict	Depends	Worth it
Best for	Bloggers and solo marketers on a budget	Bloggers and marketers needing free images
Who it's not for	Security-conscious enterprises vetting vendors	Anyone reselling stock images as-is
Privacy	Suffered a 2020 breach exposing 8.3M user records; no public security page found.^⁶	No public vulnerabilities found for itself; severe CVEs affect its third-party WordPress plugin, and no public security page was found.
Support quality	Review sentiment not extractable from snippets	App Store reviewer says company doesn't care
Public sentiment	Users rate it 4.4/5 on G2, but independent reviewers and Trustpilot threads raise service and trust concerns.^¹	Reviewers largely praise Pexels as a dependable, easy, high-quality free stock source, with occasional complaints about curation and support.
Biggest gotcha	2020 breach leaked 8.3M accounts . use a unique password, never reuse old credentials^⁶	WordPress plugin users must patch: SSRF CVE-2024-25915 (CVSS 8.8) and RCE CVE-2024-6132