Printful vs Printify

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Welcome to our Printful vs Printify comparison! In this post I'm going to spell out the key reasons for using one of these print on demand tools over the other. My aim is to do this in a friendly, jargon-free way —?and help you make a quick?but informed decision on which one to go for.

Let's start with the reasons to use Printful.

Reasons to use Printful over Printify

1. Its product designer is more powerful than Printify’s

When it comes to creating product designs, Printful takes the win.

For a start, its product designer — or 'Design Maker' —?lets you use considerably more fonts and upload bigger artwork files.

But it also gives you access to design features that are not available in Printify, like text transformation and clip art tools.

You can learn more (or try out) Printful's Design Maker here.

2. It works with more ecommerce platforms, including Amazon

Of the two platforms, Printful provides the bigger range of integrations with ecommerce platforms — 23 in total, compared to Printify’s 10.

Significantly, you can connect Printful to Amazon easily, which is not the case with Printify.

3. It gives you more options for creating product mockups

Product mockups are an essential part of running a print on demand business — they let you show items off in a variety of settings and can be vital to generating demand for your goods.

Printful’s mockup generator is more powerful than Printify’s, giving you access to 2,550+ scenes, including nature backgrounds, flat-lay table tops, home and office scenes. Abstract backgrounds, shapes and patterns can also be used in Printful.

Printify’s mockup-creation functionality is much more restrictive — you can’t create mockups for its full product range and there isn’t a built-in background library to make use of

4. It lets you deliver international orders more cheaply

If you’re a POD merchant who sells goods to customers in multiple countries around the world, you’ll find that international shipping fees are typically lower with Printful.

This is because with Printful, you’re dealing with a single supplier with printing facilities located all around the world. When an order is placed on your store, Printfulify automatically directs it to the facility that is nearest your customer.

By contrast, Printify prints your products via a network of third-party print companies, not all of which are competitive on price or located particularly near your customers.

5. It gives you more extensive branding options

When it comes to adding your brand to your POD products, Printful gives you more ways to do this.

First, it lets you add branded inside labels to all your clothing products, while Printify only facilitates this if certain print suppliers are being used. Printful also lets you add outside labels to clothing items, which is not possible to do at all with Printify.

And second, Printful gives you more options when it comes to your product packaging. It's possible to send Printful your own branded packaging which the company uses to ship your products (a fee will apply if you do this, however).

But with Printify, the various print providers involved use ‘white-label’ packaging only — it’s not possible to add your brand to these in any way.

And finally, Printful gives you more options when it comes to branded inserts. It's possible to add flyers, coupons, business cards, branded stickers, postcards and thank-you cards to your packages — and across the full Printful product range, too.

With Printify, you’re limited to adding a printed card to your packages, and this option is only available from a selection of Printify’s print partners.

6. You can use it as the fulfillment service for all your products

Unlike Printify, Printful isn’t just a print-on-demand supplier — you can actually use it as the fulfillment service for all your products.

Thanks to its warehousing offering, Printful can take care of the storage, packing and shipment of your full product range — not just print-on-demand items.

7. The situation regarding ethics is clearer with Printful

When you get Printful to print something for you, you can have relative confidence that it will be done so ethically.

This is because the company has a?publicly available code of conduct?covering human rights, workers’ rights, anti-corruption policies and environmental standards; and it has a statement on its website regarding its compliance with the UK’s Modern Slavery Act.

Because Printify works with a multitude of different suppliers however, it's less clear what the implication of using the company as a supplier is — to be 100% sure that an ethical approach is being followed, you will need to perform due diligence on the third-party supplier that ends up printing your item.

8. It makes product setup quicker

Because Printful handles all aspects of the print-on-demand process for you —?rather than asking you pick your own printer — setting up products is quicker. With Printify, you will often find yourself having to review a lot of information about different print suppliers before deciding upon one (so as to make sure you're not losing out on price or print quality).

You can learn more about Printful and get a free account for the platform here.

OK, so those are the key reasons to use Printful over Printify. But where does Printify win?

Reasons to use Printify over Printful

1. It gives you access to a much larger range of products

Printify’s product catalog lets you choose from 900+ products.

This is over twice as many as Printful offers, and opens up a lot more selling opportunities.

You can view the Printify catalog here.

2. It gives you a basic ecommerce store for free

Using Printful to sell online requires you to connect the platform to an online store builder, and doing so means ongoing monthly fees.

By contrast, Printify lets you create a basic ecommerce website for free, via its ‘Pop-Up Store’ feature. Now to be fair, this is a pretty basic tool and isn’t going to rival a dedicated ecommerce platform like Shopify any time soon, but it does mean that you can start a POD business using Printify entirely for free.

You can learn more about the Pop-Up store feature here.

3. It gives you more control over print suppliers

If you’re a Printful customer, you have no choice regarding how or where your items are made — you have to use their in-house facilities to produce your merchandise.

But with Printify, you can choose your print supplier based on location, price, production time, shipping cost and user reviews (see screenshot below for an example of the kind of information about suppliers and products you can access).

This approach to POD gives you much more say on quality control and the order fulfillment process.

4. It handles your customer queries on your behalf

With Printful, if your customers have any queries, you will always be their first point of contact.

But Printify can handle queries from your customers on your behalf through its ‘Printify Connect’ service —?something that can be a big time saver for merchants who have high volumes of sales.

(You should note however that this service is available to Printify’s Premium plan holders only, not those using its free plan.)

5. Printify has a native integration for Walmart

Selling on Walmart can get your POD products in front of a very large audience. And Printify offers a native integration with the retail giant’s store, while Printful doesn’t.

Printful vs Printify: the verdict

To sum things up:

• The main reason I'd use Printful boils down to simplicity —?when using it, you're only ever dealing with one print supplier (Printful). This makes the whole process of setting up a POD business quicker, as you don't have to vet a bunch of third-party print suppliers from a quality or ethical point of view.
• The main reason I'd use Printify is to access its significantly wider product range and to get more control over print suppliers and product costs. The option to have Printify handle customer queries is also a key plus point.

If you'd like to try either product out, you can follow the below links, which both let you set up a free account or try one of their premium plans out (the latter give you access to discounts on product pricing).

• Try Printful free here
• Try Printify free here

If you'd like to find out more about both products, we have a deeper dive of both available on the main Style Factory site, in the form of our full Printful vs Printify comparison.

You may also be interested in downloading our free ecommerce kit, which contains a lot of helpful resources for starting an online store or POD business, along with extended app trials. You can access this here.

Alternatives to Printful and Printify

There are quite a lot of alternatives to Printful and Printify available, with key ones including SPOD, Spring, Redbubble and Gooten. You can learn more about some of these and how they compare to Printful and Printify by checking out some of our other POD resources:

• Printful vs SPOD
• Printful vs Spring (formerly TeeSpring)
• Printify vs Shopify

Video comparison of Printful vs Printify

We also have a video comparison of Printful vs Printify available too, which you can watch on YouTube or below.

This article was written by Chris Singleton based on research by Matt Walsh.