The Best 6 99designs Alternatives & Competitors
Promoting your business and getting people to notice it is important. But what’s even more important is engaging your customers. After all, meaningful interactions between brands and customers are key to brand loyalty. But how can you combine engagement and promotion? Through purposeful goal-oriented marketing designs. And what can you do when you do not have a design team to take care of your marketing designs? Work with design services like 99designs.
99designs is a fuss-free way to tackle all your custom graphics requirements. On the flip side, the pricing of the various services offered is not within everyone’s budget. And the plans can be a tad bit confusing to choose from. Whatever be your reason, if you need cheaper and more convenient alternatives to 99designs, we got you covered. In this blog, we have compiled a list of the best-rated 99designs alternatives for every business model and every budget requirement.
But first, why is 99designs one of the best options to outsource graphic design?
- The biggest advantage is the design contest feature. Upon submitting your brief you get a whole lot of designs to choose from. That gives you some fresh perspectives to explore.
- Considering how versatile the portfolio is you can get almost all your web designs, brand identity designs, and marketing graphics created in the same place.
- With a team of highly-qualified designers on board, you can be assured of design quality.
Why 99designs is not for everyone
- First off, the prices of the different services are slightly on the higher side. A logo design, for example, starts from $299 for the basic Bronze pack. If you need to work with top-level designers you will have to choose pricier packs like the Platinum pack which costs $1299.
- The number of designs you get for your brief depends on the plan you choose.
- You get dedicated account managers and priority support only for higher-level packs.
- Providing a creative brief for your designs can be tricky. Your inputs are in the form of choosing from the existing library of sample designs, and choosing from the available options of brand style, color palettes, and others.
- There is a 7-day window for contests. That’s the amount of time you have to wait in order to see all the designs for your brief. You can choose within 2 or 3 days but that means that you are missing out on the maximum number of designs available for your plan.
Reliable 99designs alternatives – design crowdsourcing
DesignCrowd is another popular design crowdsourcing platform known particularly for its budget-friendly plans. The starting price for logo design, for example, is $109 for 3 designs and up to 3 revisions.
Pros
- Some plans support unlimited revisions.
- In most cases, designs start showing up in your account within 24 hours after posting your contest.
- A money-back guarantee is available if you do not find designs that meet your requirements.
- Other than posting design contests you can also hire designers directly after browsing through their portfolios on the platform.
Cons
- Customer service is slightly sluggish sometimes
DesignHill is another cost-effective alternative to 99designs. The starting price for logo design, for example, is $249 for 20+ designs. It also supports one-on-one design projects by hiring designers from a wide pool of designers.
Pros
- The top-tier services offer more features than those offered by 99designs but at a lower price.
- Besides creating content for your business you can also use DesignHill to create Whitelabel designs.
- The Premium Plan includes contest highlights, and contest promotion. But on 99designs even if you choose the Platinum Plan you have to pay extra to highlight your contest and get more designs.
- Design Hill also offers a print-on-demand service. So, for merchandise marketing, you can have your designs and prints done in the same place.
Cons
- The Design Brief form on DesignHill does not gather as much information as that on 99designs.
- You need to pay extra to work with top designers
If you want to explore the maximum number of designs before finalizing one for your brand, DesignContest has plans that can deliver up to 210 designs. The basic plan starts at $295 which is almost similar to 99designs but you get up to 50 designs (up to 30 designs on 99designs).
Pros
- The Premium plan lets you work with top-rated designers and get up to 210 designs.
- Offers 100% money-back guarantee to get a refund if you do not find a design to suit your needs
- You can choose to sign an NDA and work continuously with a designer if you like the designer’s work.
Cons
- Extra price to highlight or promote your contests
The limitations of design crowdsourcing
When you are looking for 99designs alternatives, the above options are good to consider if you like the contest model. You should also not mind spending time creating contests and going through the process for every single design your business needs.
The limitations to choosing design crowdsourcing companies as 99designs alternatives are:
- You need to pay extra for faster turnaround times
- You only get a limited number of revisions in most plans
- With most crowdsourcing platforms, you need to pay extra to hide your projects. Otherwise, your design brief is out there and even your competitors might be able to see them.
- There are separate bills for every design. So, understanding the overall costs involved in creating your business’s graphic design can be difficult.
- There is practically no client-designer relationship. Some might find such collaborations slightly difficult to work with.
So, if you need a truly simpler approach that reduces the number of steps and the budget involved, unlimited graphic design (or subscription-based design) is worth a shot.
It’s offered in the form of design subscriptions where you pay a flat monthly fee to handle most of your brand’s design requirements. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? We’ll tell you about a few credible unlimited design services.
99designs alternatives – unlimited graphic design services
Long story short, at the price of designing a single logo, you can design logos, social media posts, banner ads and so much more by choosing an unlimited graphic design service. That’s why for small businesses looking for 99designs alternatives that can save their budget, design subscriptions are often recommended.
A few common benefits that all of the below-mentioned unlimited design services offer are:
- Unlimited revisions – so you can change anything you like about your design until you are fully satisfied with the results.
- No design contract – so, you can start and stop subscriptions as per your business requirements.
- A single monthly bill – instead of paying separately for logo design, social media designs, and email designs, you can pay a flat fee for an unlimited number of designs per month.
We’ll also give you a peek into what some of the top unlimited graphic design services have to offer.
Plans
- Graphics – $499/month for graphic designs and illustrations
- Graphics Pro – $995/month for all services of Graphics along with presentation design and dedicated designer.
- Graphics Premium – $1695/month for all services of Pro along with motion graphics
Design Pickle offers a wide range of designs. For the $499 you pay for the Silver plan on 99designs (for logo design), you get unlimited designs with the Graphics plan offered by Design Pickle. This includes all types of graphic designs (like logos, infographics, marketing designs, and more) and custom illustrations.
Design Pickle has a 1-2 day turnaround time for most graphics. This means that the total time taken to view your designs, provide feedback and go on with the next project will be much less than the time taken to design on 99Designs.
Pros
- You can also design motion graphics for your brand’s promotions by choosing the Graphics Premium Plan.
- Your designs are handled by Design Pickle’s team of designers which is much better than working with freelance designers without much experience.
- The intuitive project management platform of Design Pickle makes it easy to place requests and download your designs.
Cons
- To design presentations, you need to choose the Graphics Pro plan which is priced at $995/month.
Plans
- Graphics – $599/month for all types of print and digital marketing and branding designs as well as illustrations
- Video – $699/month for motion graphics and video editing services
- Graphics+Video – $995/month for both graphic design and video design
With all the benefits offered by Design Pickle but with slightly lower-priced and more flexible plans, Kimp is another popular choice when it comes to unlimited graphic design. Brand identity design, communication design, print advertising designs, digital designs – Kimp handles them all. In addition to these, Kimp also has flexible motion graphics plans.
Unlike Design Pickle, you do not have to choose a combination of graphic designs and motion graphics. The Kimp Video plan is useful if you are looking to outsource only motion graphics design and have other options to handle graphic designs.
Pros
- Kimp is one of the few unlimited design services that support multiple active requests at a time. This helps in maximizing your design output and can be particularly useful for businesses actively expanding their social media or digital presence.
- You get to work with a dedicated team of designers ( 3 designers and 1 Project Manager). Whereas for a similar price most other unlimited graphic design services only allocate one designated designer for your brand.
- The scope of services offered by Kimp is pretty wide. You get everything from traditional advertising designs to digital designs and so much more.
- Presentation designs, as well as custom illustrations, are part of the Graphics plan. But on 99designs you can only choose presentation template designs.
- Both Trello board communications and email communications are supported
Cons
- Kimp does not provide extensive web design services. It only covers landing page designs.
Plans
- Pro – $499/month for graphic designs and illustrations
- Team – $699/month services in Pro and web/app designs, presentation designs, and animated graphics
- Daytime – $999/month all services included in Team as well as USA daytime support and same-day turnaround.
Penji handles all types of designs including web and app designs. This can be a complete package for startups that do not want to spend all their time finding different teams for each job.
With a simple in-house platform to handle all your projects, Penji also allows you to manage multiple brands and invite multiple team members to your project.
Pros
- While most designs come with a 1-2 day turnaround time, the Daytime plan has the same-day delivery of designs. This helps you take care of last-minute design requirements without worry.
- You begin by working with a set of designers. But if you do not like their work, you can conveniently request for swapping your designers without any additional price.
Cons
- Does not cover video editing
- You can only communicate with your designers through your Penji dashboard
Which of These 99designs Alternatives Will You Choose?
As you can see, the decision regarding the right graphic design service boils down to understanding your requirements. If it is a one-off requirement like just the logo design, platforms like 99designs and the crowdsourcing options like the 99designs alternatives mentioned above might work. But if you wish to get the maximum bang for your buck, then slightly extending your budget and choosing an unlimited subscription will be a great idea. At a slightly higher price than some logo design plans, you will be able to create various kinds of marketing and branding designs for your brand. And all the unlimited services mentioned above come with a no-contract policy. So you can always try for a month and then cancel if you do not have multiple design requirements month after month.
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