I Tested Printful, Gelato, & Printify in 2024 - Do NOT Choose Wrong!!

if you are considering a print on demand store with Etsy or Shopify or anywhere else you've probably heard of three big suppliers and wondered what's actually better between gelato printify and printful and in this video I decided to set out and figure out that answer for you now this is not a sponsored video I received no compensation for this whatsoever and I'm going to purchase some samples in this video with my own money to evaluate the shipping time the quality the price and anything else I think you need to know especially fundamental difference between these three suppliers to help you decide which one's actually the best one for your business now with that said we have a lot to talk about in this video galato and printful and printify all work in very different ways and with that you have different selections of products you have different qualities of prints and you have different options available in all of them so I decided to analyze two popular products and order samples of those but we'll cover a lot of other ones as well I've used these in the past in different tutorials I've ordered tons of samples from all of these and uh so I have a pretty idea of which ones are going to be the best but the side by-side comparison I'm saving that cuz I think that is going to be very very interesting so I want to start off with the big picture how do each of these work well for print on demand as you might know you'll have an online store somebody can purchase a design from you like a like a t-shirt for example and then your supplier actually prints it on demand like they don't have inventory you don't have inventory nobody has inventory they just print it as the orders are made you have you know shipped out right away and that way you don't have the constru straints of a physical warehouse and printing press and everything for yourself instead you can work with the supplier but the way the suppliers work is also fundamentally different so printful makes everything in house when an order is placed they have their own printers and they sand it out whereas gelato and printify are sort of a middleman and they have a network of their own printers that then can set send it out and there's some advantages and disadvantages with that I'm going to talk about advantages of course you have more locations you have more countries so in some regions you could have faster shipping time in other locations maybe you have less fast shipping time the disadvantage would be having multiple different printers means that there's more variables that you have to choose from you can find a really good printer for really cheap but you could just as easily find a not so great quality printer uh and we'll talk about how you can actually select that later on in the video but that's like a fundamental difference there gelato and printify are sort of a middleman printify does their own printing inhow so then talking about the pricing I'll compare individual product pricing in a second but each of these three starts off with a free plan or at the very least a free trial and then you can upgrade to paid plans printify is the most simple so you have free one which you can have five stores per account just basic you set up your store you sell everything but if you upgrade to $29 per month you can save up to about 20% uh on on each product that's actually being sold so it could save you some money if you have a larger a volume of sales and you can have more stores per account you can have 10 stores per account with that and by the way $29 per month is the monthly price if you pay annually I think it's like $25 per month or something like that gelato then has a much more comprehensive pricing structure where you have the free plan forever it's always free which is great you have gelato plus which is $24 per month and this is going to give you that discount is kind of a common theme we're seeing here you're getting about 10% off for some products not all products but 10% off for some products but they also give you some other cool advantages here as well like premium mockups meaning if you make a t-shirt design they can mock it up on a model like a human wearing that and it looks very realistic that way you don't have to take the photos yourself like I've seen the premium mock-ups and I think they do a really good job you also have the ability to use stock images and graphics and icons on your designs if you're into that I usually just make my designs over on like canva or something like that anyway but if you like making it in house on their own software it's pretty easy to do Additionally you have branded labels and branded inserts when you upgrade to gelato plus so you can have a little card in there saying thank you for your business here's 10% off your next order and kind of you know get some more sales going like that and of course you have some expansion tools as well but moving up from there the next one's much more expensive gelato gold is $119 per month so that's obviously meant for larger businesses operating at scale and with that you're getting up to 15% off per product you're actually ordering 30% off branding prices and you can have Smart Pricing for shipping depending on where your end customer is actually located and then of course we have Platinum that's going to be like the custom one for for larger Enterprises that are really using this at a massive scale and like I said this is a comprehensive like there's a lot of different plans here they actually have a little tool like right above the pricing that you can click like how many sales do you have per month and you can say zero 5 10 whatever and they'll recommend what they would consider to be the best plan for you and then of course we have printful pricing so printful does things very differently so they have two options you can get that are like a Premium plan option and you can pay for them or you can earn your spot in them if you drive enough Revenue so what I mean by this is you can start off with just not paying anything that's totally fine you can make your store starting off like that then you can go to the growth plan which is $24. 99 per month or if you make $122,000 in Revenue over the past 12 months then you're you can get that for free you don't have to pay $25 per month which is kind of a cool incentive and kind of a nice savings if you're getting like $122,000 in sales per year I think that's pretty nice and with that you're getting 20% off DTG which is direct to garment printing uh 30% off other printing Styles free digitization for non embroidery there's a little catch right there um you have unlimited stores which is really awesome you didn't see that with printify for example and you have 7% off product branding discount as well so if you want to have The Branding in there um that's you know a little bit cheaper here and then the business plan if you have $60,000 worth of sales per year you can get in here you're getting slightly better disc discounts and now free digitization on embroidery as well uh which is nice I'll talk about that feature in a second because I think that feature is really nice their digitization is different than everyone else like there actually is a human reviewing that and I think it does reflect in the quality in the end all right so with that being said let's actually get into the product selection I mentioned this is not a sponsored video but at the end if you decide you like one of these uh we do have tutorials on all of them and I do have affiliate links with all of them as well so if you feel this information was helpful then when you go to make your store at absolutely no extra cost to you you could choose to go through our affiliate link and that will help to fund videos like this so to check out the product selection let's start off with printify and I'm going to go to sandr media. com printify so sandr media.

com printify will take you to this page you can say start for free you can create your account then um and once you have your account we can go over to catalog to check out all the different products they have and the pricing as you can see having so many different suppliers out there they have access to a lot of different products as well so not just like a lot of different t-shirts as you can see here a ton of different t-shirts but also like a ton of different categories of products in general like swimwear or skirts and dresses or Sports Wear baby baby clothing like you've got a lot of options here um coffee coffee category like literally just branding coffee which is pretty cool if you're trying to White Label that there are a ton of different products on here accessories home and living and so that's going to be one of the the biggest benefits of printify I recommend just like visiting all three of these in the end and just kind of browsing through depending on what your design is that you're trying to sell maybe one of these three maybe printify for example is just going to have an option that the others just don't have but you can see here this is absolutely going to be a huge Advantage so going one step further let's say the first product that we want to compare between all three of these is going to be a Gilden 5,000 t-shirt an incredibly common t-shirt that you see pretty much everywhere and I know all three definitely will have that if we go to t-shirts we can go down and right there the Gilden 5000 cotton tea and one thing you want to note here is that this is the price range you can see it starts at $98 but we can go down here and see well first of all $692 if you upgrade to print toy premium remember I said you can get about 20% discount that's a pretty nice discount there on a t-shirt you can see the shipping is $4. 29 they have 25 different colors available you can print on the front side and the back side others as we'll talk about in a second can print on other locations as well not just front and back so a little bit of a limitation there but we will be able to choose our supplier as well so if I click on Show additional providers right there it's almost a hidden button so they have their their default one that they like to recommend and you can see the provider info right here they'll tell you a little bit more about it but if I go to Show additional providers you can see the location of them so you want to make sure you're choosing one that is the right price the right quality the right reviews and most importantly in the right country so you you don't want to have to go through customs for every single shirt that you're selling unless you're okay with waiting like 30 days for a product to arrive so right here Monster Digital is the one that we see on the top there's a bulk discount available uh 9. 6 stars is really high it's in the United States uh and that's you can see what our pricing is right there so that's pretty nice 32 colors with this one as well but if you wanted to go down you could potentially sort these by um printify ranking which is what they're doing you can look at production time who's the fastest you could look at the lowest price here so the lowest price is actually giving you $9.

7 not really a huge difference in the price there um but regardless I'm going to go with the default one that printify is recommending on the very top okay so $98 remember that we're going to go to the next one all right so now going to the next supplier let's go to sandal media. com gelato and that will take you to this page we can say get offer by the way you don't have to go through our affiliate Links of course if you choose to uh you do have a we do have a special offer that you can get 50% off your first order with gelato um so just kind of if you're going to do it you might as well go through the link get get your first order at half price so you can get your samples and see what they actually look like so now we are going to click sign up all right so then once you get to the dashboard on gelato on the left side we can go to product catalog and you can see here we have slightly fewer options available compared to printify so not quite as overwhelming but within each one you can still see we have all the Staples we've got men's clothing women's clothing um within each one like t-shirts hoodies long sleeve shirts Sports Wear um as well as some other categories as well like mugs uh tote bags wall art if you're trying to sell maybe like your own art and you want to sell your you know uh maybe your drawings or your paintings or something or just your own graphic designs on posters or on metal framed posters you can do all of that we've got hats down here um I will be doing a hat in just a second as well as photo books mugs and different things like that so let's go back and compare the price again for the gildin 5000 so let's go to uh men's T-shirts if we go down we should see um Gilden 5000 Gilden 5000 where there it is Gilden 5000 right here and so we can see this is actually slightly cheaper so $8. 38 so $8.

38 with $466 of shipping compared to printify which was 908 and 429 shipping so it's 1304 total from gelato and if you look over here that is 133 uh 37 I believe I don't know if I yeah 1337 is the price here so a little bit more expensive a couple cents more expensive and now let's go to the third one being printful so again sandral media. com printful printful and that'll take you to printful dashboard here you can make an account I already signed in I already am signed in rather um so it'll probably bring you to like a signin page enter your email make your account and then from here once again on the left side we can go to product catalog now printful I would say has a pretty large variety of products they don't have quite as many as print ify but if you look at like men's clothing for example we have you know quite a big selection here of shorts and pants and like men's leggings like you can really do a huge variety of different products um as well as those other things like I said home and living accessories you can have coasters and tumblers magnets all types of different things um so like I said if you're trying to make something that is very unique like maybe a specific frame for some wall art or like a specific kind of mug check out all three they probably all have different products in that Realm but looking at the basics like t-shirts for example if I go back to Men's Clothing go to t-shirts let's check out the price on this from printful so Gilden 5000 right there like I said I usually like to compare that because it's just everywhere like everybody sells it here we have embroidery or direct to Garin printing um I'm going to stick with DTG so we have a consistent comparison we have uh whatever that is like 20 something colors $925 so a little bit more expensive here and the shipping uh we have to I think calculate the shipping no shipping starts at $4. 69 so this one is definitely going to be the most expensive out of the three but let's actually go and make some orders with all of these and see how they actually compare so since we're on printful let's just kind of continue with printful here and talk about the uh the design tools available okay so on printful I'm going to choose uh so I'm going to choose a black T-shirt we're going to select the size and we could uh start a new order or create a product template I'm just going to start a new order and I can do a basic order right here or test design uh so we're getting a sample 30% off right here I'm just going to go with that you can do that I think like maybe once per month or something maybe twice per month but I'm going to do it right now um with this account so let's go and start making the design I'm going to use the same exact design the same file again DTG black T-shirt still size large uh I'm going to upload and I'm going to upload a new file right here and this is going to be let's see if we can find that same file click and drag it once you have the file you can click apply and that'll just drop it right on your shirt you can reloc This and like I said these tools are going to going to be familiar on all of them they have a lot of similarities but what I like about printful is you can print on the front the back the outside label inside label left and right sleeve like you can really do any kind of printing you want on basically any product out there in addition on the left side you can see we've got like text and clip art uh quick designs some premium options down there as well um and you can just change like some faill colors there's a lot of cool things Fiverr kind of links up really well also if you wanted to hire someone to do the design but if we go back to layers uh everything looks good print quality 276 DPI is definitely more than enough and uh let's go and generate the file so you can see here it says $9.

25 yeah so we can continue the shipping with this one in just a second all right so on gelato we have a ton of different colors a bunch of different sizes um we can go down here and uh you can do embroidery or direct to garment I'm going to do DTG for all of these just so we have you know a consistent comparison I'm going to choose a size uh you can choose any color you want I'm going to go with um probably I mean Royal Blues I don't know I I think let's kind of be consistent here let's make it a black shirt for all of these um I'm going to say start designing them so on the left side if you click on product we can change to a black shirt you can change the color to whatever you want and going down the left side we can do all types of things if I click on files I can upload a new file so I can just click on choose file so choose file right here um and then I can upload a file that I created like I said over on canva or anywhere that you may a file maybe on Photoshop or something then once you upload the file you can just click on it or you can click and drag it it'll bring it over to the Garment uh just a draft I don't know just I wanted to choose a design that had a lot of color in it um and kind of was not especially easy to print so we can really see what the differences really are between them so going through you can see we're getting 50% off our first order first order is going to be $419 so kind of nice when you're just kind of trying out different samples different orders different products uh you can actually save a little bit of money in uh getting your product because I think no matter what even if you know your supplier I think it's helpful to uh just order it and see it for yourself to know what's actually like going to the customer how it looks when you're actually wearing it and so you can take your own photos and use it on your own social media as well now looking at printify I found the shirt that I wanted like I said I'm going to go to start designing um I don't need to take a tour it's going to try to make me take a tour anyway so this is a much more uh rudimentary designer I would say where like the the t-shirt is just a like an outline you can see kind of strange doesn't look realistic at all um but I'm going to choose the file that that we had before on the left side you can still see there's like AI image ad text my library Graphics templates and some shutter stock stuff so I'm going to so you can see front and backside I'm just going to put this on the front side um we can select a variant here so I don't need white and I do want black so I'm going to make this black T-shirt save product and that looks good so now I could continue to publish here say continue to or actually just create a sample order that's what I'm trying to do create a sample order and then we can just select our size and we can place this order as well so I checked out on all three of those products right now but I want to test out another product as well I want to try embroidering right so DTG is great and that's going to be a big part of what most people are selling with with um print on demand t-shirts and sweatshirts and stuff but let's say you wanted to do something else that was embroidered maybe a hat for example so I'm going to order three different hats hats are a little interesting because you don't have the same selection on all of them so on printify if I go over to hats we have kind of five options here one of them is a beanie one of them is a bucket hat and then really only three baseball caps two of them have leather patches on them as well so we kind of just have one option um if you're in the US market at least more options if you're looking at all markets but now over on printful I'm going to go to add another product I'm going to navigate to hats and you can see we have a lot of selections here actually for hats surprisingly um quite a few and I want the uh upup 6606 I believe so that's a hat I've actually ordered in the past I really do I I like that hat it's pretty reliable but we could also check out like some snapbacks um some clothes backs some camouflages like trucker hats foam trucker hats retro hats a lot of different options I'm going to go with this one right here you can see we have about a dozen different colors um and all of these like you know pretty nice you can you can drop in your embroidery right in the middle so I'm just going to use the Sandell logo I'm going to put this on um let's see maybe we want to do gray and black khaki we've got like a green and and khaki we've got white um I guess they call it moss and khaki right here and now over on gelato let's go to hats and we can go to hats in the US and you can see they have four categories of hats which is nice I'm going to go to tracker hats we have two different ones and there's the uh 6606 that's a hat I was looking for um which I think is basically exactly what we want right here so I'm going to select that one we have about a dozen different colors so very similar right here um maybe different colors but I think most of them do look the same to me we've got like khaki and khaki silver um so I'm going to go with this design right here moss and khaki that doesn't look like moss to me it looks more maroon but I'm going to drop I'm going to upload our file I'm going to choose it from my device I'm just going to choose like a monochromatic just a white santra logo I'm going to drop it in here and uh we want this to be an embroidery which it doesn't really give me options I'm fairly certain this is going to be an embroidery it should you can see thread colors on the top this is an embroidery right here we could resize it we could save this as a template as well and it kind of shows you right there there's a preview of what it's going to look like let's make that a little bit bigger kind of fitting in the Hat right here so you can see the tools seem very easy to use very intuitive much like a t-shirt design even though this is an embroidery so I kind of like how how that's set up um it shows you approximately what the threads are going to do I think that looks good that's clean that's exactly what I want you can see right here we do have 15 different thread colors we can choose from um as soon as you click off of it it's going to kind of show it uh as if it were a real thread it kind of renders it but I'm going to stick with white for this um I think this looks better on this hat anyway now back to printful I'm going to select uh Brown and khaki I wanted moss and khaki but I think Brown and khaki is probably the closest one I'm going to get so we can get a decent comparison here now I'm just going to click on upload design I'm going to upload a new file we're going to drop in the logo right here and the logo's there now you can zoom in on this you can see what it looks like this looks very very similar to the gelot version so I think these are probably going to be very very similar in the final product back to print ify here I'm just going to at this one the low profile baseball cap it's not the same one I was looking for so it's not going to be a perfect one toone comparison um but let's check this one out I'm going to upload a design we're going to upload that same logo here um it shows its production cost $14. 49 let's go to my library drop in the logo in the middle we can choose the variants let's change that I don't want a white hat we're going to go with um maybe like a navy blue hat so it kind of pops out a little bit better and again this is this is like a really really rudimentary design tool here so it doesn't even show a rendering of the Hat just shows like a doodle of the Hat basically so on printy that is a little disappointing that you don't have the best I mean you do get some mockups here you can go to mockup view and it shows you kind of what your Hat's going to look like but again I don't know if I really trust if I really trust this this much let's see what it looks like yeah so that's showing what it is it's bright and colorful we could also switch over to realistic make it look more realistic I don't know why it wouldn't be realistic by default yeah so I don't know let's go with that all right so I'm going to save the product um we're going to go with that and uh we'll place an order for this one as well so looking at the costs here on printify for that hat you're looking at $14. 49 also $749 in shipping sold $21.

98 uh for that one hat then on printful you can see it is $14.