Creating professional designs and showcasing products can cost a lot of money if you want them to be done well. And it becomes even harder to do in the first place if you’re a dropshipper and don’t have products on hand to photograph at all. An unlimited subscription to Placeit lets you create and use professional-grade designs, logos, and mockups for a wallet-friendly price.
In this in-depth review, we’ll explore what Placeit does well, where it has room for improvement, the various purchasing options, and whether or not it’s the right choice for you.
What Placeit Is (and What It Isn’t)
Placeit is cloud-based digital design software with nearly 100,000 templates for logos, mockups, and digital assets. Their library of templates is the largest out there and you can customize any of them with Placeit’s easy-to-use tools so they fit your brand like a glove.
Whether you need an eye-catching logo, social media assets, or product mockups for phone cases, mugs, or a new t-shirt business, Placeit’s library has something for everyone.
With that said, they’re not a print-on-demand operation, manufacturer, or dropshipping company. You can use it to create designs to sell and mockups to showcase your designs in real-life scenarios, but they won’t actually create any physical materials or products and ship them for you.
Placeit by Envato: The Good and the Bad
Design tools come in all shapes and sizes—some prioritize power, flexibility, and customization while others focus on empowering non-designers to create professional designs with easy-to-use features and templates. Placeit is definitely the latter.
It’s incredibly easy to use, requires no previous experience, and has a massive built-in library of examples you can start from. However, you don’t get all of that without a few trade-offs.
To kick off our review, let’s start with what Placeit does well.
What Placeit Is Good At
85,000+ assets: Placeit offers an unparalleled collection of design resources tailored for businesses and entrepreneurs. Their massive library contains over 30,000 mockups, 40,000 design templates, 5,000 video assets, and 5,000 premade logos.
Whether you’re looking to promote your clothing brand with product photos, design cover art for your podcast, or revamp your corporate website with fresh assets, Placeit has a wide array of quality options to fit your distinctive vision. Their easily searchable library lets you filter by category, style, image type and more to quickly unearth the perfect resource for your brand. New items are added every day, too, including holiday and seasonal templates to keep your business fresh all year.
With such an extensive collection, you’re bound to find some solid solutions for your next campaign or launch. Placeit’s responsive designs and vibrant aesthetic ensure your visuals will captivate customers on any device.
Customizable mockups: With over 30,000 mockups to choose from, Placeit offers a cost-effective solution for businesses to quickly visualize how their brands and products might look in real-life situations. Display your logo, website, app, or other designs on t-shirts, mugs, iPhones, printed materials, accessories, and more. Some mockups do look a lot like stock photos, but you’ll uncover many high-quality lifestyle and product shots in Placeit’s library that can effectively showcase your brand.
Use the free online editor to upload your designs and see how they appear on different situations, then choose the most appealing option for your goals. Within a few clicks, you’ll have a mockup that’s ready to use on your website or social media channels.
Intuitive logo maker: Need a professional logo but don’t have the budget for a designer? Placeit’s logo creator is the solution. With a huge library of templates spanning dozens of categories, you’ll find the perfect starting point for the new face of your brand in minutes.
Placeit’s drag-and-drop editor makes customizing any template easy. Swap out graphics, change colors and fonts, resize elements, or reposition things around. You have the freedom to tweak the template to match the vision in your head, but you don’t need any design experience to make it a reality. You can also use any of Placeit’s thousands of pre-made elements in your design so you don’t have to settle for something generic.
Best of all, you can download your logo at 4,000 x 4,000 pixels, so it will look crisp wherever you use it. And if you want to see how it might appear in the real world, Placeit offers mockup previews within the logo editor so you can see your design on business cards, product packaging, and more.
Drag-and-drop design builder: If you’re looking for an easy way to create stunning designs for social media posts, marketing materials, or your blog, Placeit’s digital design creator has you covered. Just like with their other design tools, they offer a huge library of templates, spanning Instagram posts, social media stories, flyers, business cards, YouTube channel art, and beyond.
Placeit’s animated options, like Instagram stories and video covers, open in their video editor. Although you can’t drag elements around and drop them anywhere, you can swap out fonts, colors, and images, plus adjust playback speed or add additional slides to craft longer animations.
For static designs, Placeit gives you more customization capabilities. You’re able to resize, reposition, add, delete, and edit elements to your heart’s content. Change the background, swap graphics out, pick different fonts—you have total control.
Simple video creator: Speaking of Placeit’s video editor, you can also use it to craft professional video intros, outros, animated logos, and more to illustrate your brand story. Start with one of over 1,000 templates, then adjust fonts, colors, images and text as needed. Some templates come with the perfect soundtrack but, if not, you can select a track from Placeit’s wide range of audio options.
The slideshow feature allows you to quickly build a video by adding new slides from their template library, though you’re unable to trim or cut the video further. While Placeit may lack advanced video editing capabilities, it provides an easy way for people to produce short, eye-catching videos that will engage their audience and bring their digital content to life.
Free image and video cropping: Upload a photo or video and resize it to precise dimensions for social posts, banners, Pinterest pins, and more. Whether you designed the asset yourself or want to reframe something from your library, the cropping tools make it easy to adapt your content to any size or shape you need. It’s also a great way to compress and optimize images. All with no account required.
For videos, the cropper is an easy way to highlight the best parts without having to reshoot the entire clip. Simply upload your video, drag the crop box to your desired selection, and download the new version.
Free video to GIF converter: With Placeit’s free converter, turn any video into an eye-catching GIF in seconds. Just upload your video, crop to the area you want to feature, update the frame rate, and then download your new, more portable GIF file. It’s completely free to use with no limits. You don’t even need an account.
Unlimited downloads: For one monthly price, you get unlimited access to logos, mockups, and design templates that you can customize and download as often as you like. No more rationing your downloads or paying extra fees if you go over a limit.
Keeping your visuals updated is key to standing out, so it’s good to avoid compounding costs that result from paying for each download individually. Placeit eliminates that hassle. Save your designs to edit later, download multiple copies to A/B test different versions, bookmark items for quick access, and organize all your downloads within Placeit to keep everything in one spot.
Straightforward licensing: Sometimes, the hardest aspect of securing quality digital assets is getting the permission to reuse them. Placeit makes licensing logos, mockups, and more easy for businesses with a clear and concise licensing agreement that gives you freedom and flexibility.
No matter if you choose monthly or annual billing, you’ll receive unlimited commercial use of any design you create. You won’t have to track sales numbers or purchase additional licenses to remain compliant. You’re free to edit, alter, and modify designs and then publish them anywhere online. You can even create physical products with your designs and sell them without issue. In short, you can do whatever you’d expect with designs you own.
While you can apply for trademarks on any unique designs you create with Placeit’s templates, you can’t redistribute the templates themselves or create your own version of Placeit. You also can’t imply false partnerships with third-party brands in your mockups or designs. However, you do retain the right to use anything you create even after canceling your membership or subscription.
Affordable: Placeit is a low-cost option just about any way you slice it. Even if you opt for a monthly subscription or purchase assets individually, Placeit is more cost-effective than buying similar items from other marketplaces or hiring a designer to create them for you.
Rather than shelling out $20 to $50 for a single logo template elsewhere, get unlimited access to Placeit’s entire library of over 85,000 customizable templates for a fraction of that per month. It’s also comparable to solutions like Canva. While Placeit’s monthly plan is a few dollars more than Canva’s, Placeit’s annual subscription is $30 cheaper per year.
What Placeit Is Lacking
While this software comes with a lot of intuitive tools and templates for an unbeatable price, affordability and ease of use often come at the expense of flexibility and customization. Placeit is no exception.
Fully unique mockups: Placeit has a large number of mockups to choose from—so many, in fact, that you’ll have to do some serious digging to uncover the gems among the many generic and unrelatable options. All this really means is that you’ll need to be discerning and selective in your searches on Placeit.
The good news is that Placeit makes it easy to favorite the mockups that resonate with you, so you can come back to them later. With some time and patience combing through the library, you’ll be able to curate a collection of mockups you’ll want to use. However, if you’re looking for something specific, Placeit’s overabundance of generic mockups can feel frustrating. You may be better off purchasing one that fits your exact vision elsewhere.
Advanced design tools: If ease of use and simplicity are your top priorities in a design tool, Placeit fits the bill. However, if you’re looking for advanced options for customizing your designs, it’ll leave you feeling constricted. Their tools lack some advanced features you may be used to, like the layers, blending modes, and transparency settings you’d find in Photoshop or Illustrator.
You’re essentially limited to adding, resizing, and arranging elements and tweaking colors and fonts. Even those capabilities can vary across Placeit’s suite of tools—you’ll have more freedom designing a social media graphic than you will editing a logo or animated video. For some, Placeit’s simplicity is a selling point rather than a limitation. But if you need something fully custom, Placeit’s tools will feel restrictive.
A modernized interface: Placeit’s design tools get the job done, but they lack some of the space-saving features found in more robust tools. As you build out designs with multiple elements, Placeit’s interface starts to feel cluttered. You’ll have to hide some elements to access others and each addition piles up on the left side of the screen. This requires constant scrolling to make changes, edit text, or swap images.
Placeit isn’t optimized for complex visual projects where you’re manipulating many components at once. The simplistic interface is fine for beginners but can hinder advanced designers who are used to more power and freedom.
Speed: Everything about Placeit’s interface feels sluggish, from uploading images to previewing changes. If you’re used to nimble design tools, Placeit’s lag can be frustrating. Any adjustments you make, from changing a color or resizing an element to swapping graphics, require you to wait between three and 30 seconds to see the results. For animated designs or video mockups, the delays are even longer—you have to watch the entire video preview, then wait for the download option to appear. If you realize you want to tweak something while you’re previewing it, you start the cycle all over again.
For small, simple designs, the speed issues may only amount to minor annoyances. But if you’re manipulating multiple components, uploading a lot of photos, or trying to quickly experiment with different options, the constantly long load times significantly slow down your workflow. Placeit forces you to be patient, making it difficult to experiment freely or achieve a quick and efficient end result.
Support for common file types: Placeit’s export options are severely limited. The only file formats available for download are PNG images and MP4 videos (plus GIFs when using the video-to-GIF converter)—no JPGs, PNGs, PDFs or other types. This restricts how you can use your designs after creating and downloading them.
Logos can only be exported as static PNG files, with no option to download the SVG source. So, you can’t scale the logo freely without loss of quality, though at least Placeit gives you a large 4,000 x 4,000 px version of the PNG image.
Perhaps most limiting is Placeit’s inability to export to design software like Photoshop. If you wanted to create a quick mockup in Placeit then refine it further in a more advanced editor or send your ideas to a designer who’ll refine them for you, you’re out of luck.
File sizes: On a similar note, Placeit limits your options to a single size when you download a design. The dimensions depend on what type of item it is, but there’s no option to choose smaller or larger sizes. For logos, the size is 4,000 x 4,000 pixels, which is ample for most uses. Mockups, however, top out between 1,900 to 2,100 pixels, making them too small for hero images, banners or posters. Some mockups don’t even meet Etsy’s recommendation for optimal image size.
Furthermore, you have no control over assets’ resolution. All images from Placeit are rendered at 72 dpi. That can work for a lot of online usage, such as imagery for your website, but that will present issues when enlarging an asset or trying to print it for a poster or banner.
Placeit Products and Pricing
Even if you have just a few dollars to spare from your budget, you can use Placeit to get what you need. There’s a free plan, an unlimited paid subscription, and the option of purchasing items individually.
Free Plan
Placeit offers an unbeatable free plan that gives you access to over 1,000 ready-made logos, mockups, graphics, and more at zero cost.
With it, you also get a dashboard to help you stay organized—you can save items as favorites, make copies, and create folders to keep everything tidy. In one section, you’ll also see the last five items you edited, the last five you downloaded, and the last 16 designs you opened.
Edit and download any item from their collection of free templates, with commercial use licensing included. While the options may be somewhat limited compared to Placeit’s paid plan, you can find logos to brand your business, mockups to showcase products, t-shirt templates for your merch line, and social graphics for promoting on Instagram.
For ecommerce stores or dropshippers, the free shirt and hoodie mockups mean you can model new product images in minutes without hiring a photographer. Bloggers and businesses with social media accounts can use the over 1,500 free design templates to create posts without paying a cent.
Even with a $0 price tag, you’ll have thousands of design assets at your fingertips to give your brand a professional sheen.
Unlimited Subscription
Placeit’s unlimited subscription runs $14.95 per month or $89.69 billed annually (only $7.47/month!) and gives you unrestricted access to their library of templates and unlimited downloads of the designs you create.
For less than you’d spend in a month on a weekly cup of coffee, you get a capable design tool that lets you create an endless supply of customized logos, mockups, social media visuals, videos, and more. Tap into their library of over 85,000 assets with no restrictions on where you can take them. You can also switch to an annual plan, downgrade to the free plan or monthly billing, or cancel at any time from right within your dashboard.
This membership gives ecommerce shops, bloggers, and small businesses an economical way to build a polished brand image and even showcase their products in real-life situations. Placeit’s unlimited subscription gives you everything you need in one place.
A la Carte Purchases
If you only need one or two assets, you don’t have to sign up for Placeit’s unlimited subscription to get what you need. You can still edit and customize designs using the same user-friendly tools.
Whenever you’re happy with a design, purchase it by itself for a one-time fee. That includes logos, mockups, animations, and digital designs.
In terms of price, Placeit is cheaper than most other creative asset marketplaces—each item costs less than $10, with some being as low as $2.95.
- Logos – $9.95 each
- Mockups – $7.95 per image
- Static digital designs – $2.95 each
- Animations and videos – $9.95 each
While a monthly unlimited subscription is more affordable if you require more than $15 worth of assets, purchasing items individually from Placeit’s catalog gives you flexibility and freedom to purchase what you need without being committed to another monthly subscription.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Placeit delivers on its promise of empowering non-designers and businesses on a tight budget with the ability to make high-quality design assets and mockups.
Is it the best, most advanced and customizable design tool out there? No, but it is one of the easiest to use. And it offers a ton of value, between its intuitive editing tools and its tens of thousands of professional templates, at a price point you won’t find elsewhere.
