You fell for a color. Maybe it was on a friend's dining room wall, a photo you saved, or a chip you grabbed at the store. Then reality hits: it's a Benjamin Moore color, and your painter carries Sherwin-Williams. Or it's a Behr color and you'd rather use something else.
The good news is that paint brands aren't as different as their marketing suggests. Most popular colors have a very close cousin — sometimes an almost identical twin — in every other brand. The trick is knowing how to find it, and knowing when "close" is close enough.
Colors don't belong to brands — hex codes do
Every paint color, no matter who sells it, can be described as a hex code: a six-character value like #E8E4D8 that pins down an exact color. That's the universal language underneath all the poetic names.
Once you have that hex value, you can ask a simple question: which color in each brand sits closest to it? That's exactly what our Match by Hex tool does. You give it a hex code, and it returns the nearest match across Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, Behr and Valspar — side by side. If you land on a color's detail page, you'll also see its "same color in other brands" equivalents right there, so you can cross-shop without guessing.
No fan decks spread across the kitchen table. No holding two chips up to a window and squinting.
How to get the hex code in the first place
A few ways, depending on what you're starting with:
- You already know the color name. Search it in our color tools and open its detail page — the hex is listed, along with matches in the other brands.
- You have a photo. Pull the dominant wall color using a color picker (many phones and browsers have one built in), copy the hex, and drop it into Match by Hex.
- You have a physical chip. Find that exact color in our library by name, then read its hex.
From there, the matching is the easy part.
Why "nearest match" isn't always a perfect match
Here's the honest part. Two colors can share a nearly identical hex and still read a little differently on the wall. That's because paint isn't just color — it's pigment, base, and sheen, and each of those bends light in its own way.
A warm off-white in a flat finish reads softer and chalkier than the same off-white in a satin. A gray with a green undertone can tip blue under LED bulbs and go almost taupe in afternoon sun. Two brands hitting the same hex may use different pigment loads to get there, which changes how the color behaves as the light shifts.
So treat a cross-brand match as an excellent starting point, not a final verdict — especially for whites, grays and greiges, where undertones do the heavy lifting.
Test it in the room, in the actual light
Colorado light is bright and direct, and Douglas County homes get a lot of it. A color that looks perfect in a south-facing great room can feel cold and flat in a north-facing bedroom on the same day.
Before you commit to a matched color, look at it where it's going to live:
- Paint a decent-sized sample — bigger than a chip — on a couple of walls, not just one.
- Check it in morning, midday and evening light.
- Hold it near your flooring, cabinets and trim, since those undertones push and pull the wall color.
Our Explore Colors gallery is built to show color in real rooms and light rather than as isolated swatches, which makes it easier to picture how a match will actually feel. When you're weighing a few finalists together, the Palette Builder lets you set them next to each other and against trim and accent choices so nothing clashes once it's on the wall.
Where cross-brand matching matters most
A few real scenarios where this comes up:
- You loved a color at a past house and want to recreate it in a brand your painter prefers.
- You're matching an existing room — say your living room is already painted, and you want the hallway to flow without an exact reorder.
- You're coordinating a whole-home palette and want walls, doors and feature walls to share undertones even if they land in different sheens.
That last one is where a color moat pays off. A calm greige on the walls, a deeper version of the same undertone on a feature wall, a crisp coordinating trim on the doors — all easier to lock in when you can see true matches across brands instead of gambling.
Bring your match to the walk-through
Once you've found a color you love and matched it to the brand you want, the next step is seeing it in your own space with someone who paints these rooms every week. During a free estimate walk-through, we can talk through undertones, sheen and how the light in your home is likely to treat the color you've chosen — whether it's for interior walls, cabinets, doors or a feature wall.
Start with Match by Hex to find your color across all four brands, then get your free estimate when you're ready to see it come together.
