PicMonkey Review, Pricing & Features

What is PicMonkey?

PicMonkey is a design software used by a wide range of businesses to create ready-made presentations, social media posts, and videos. Over 450,000 users have used PicMonkey for their design needs. Its standout points are its photo editing features and social media integrations.

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Table of Contents

PicMonkey Review Summary

PicMonkey was founded in 2012 by Brian Terry, Justin Huff, Jonathan Sposato, Charlie Whiton, and Lisa Conquergood. Since then, PicMonkey’s employees have served over 450,00 users from its Seattle headquarters.

PicMonkey’s features are tailored more for marketers and bloggers with basic design experience and no need for collaboration. Its strongest features are its user-friendly presentation, photo editing, and social media integrations.

PicMonkey’s pricing starts at $7.99 per month per user. Its pricing falls in the middle of its closest alternatives, Canva and Visme. PicMonkey does not offer a free plan.

Overall, PicMonkey is a decent design software built for marketers and bloggers in need of ready-made and highly shareable content. PicMonkey makes creating presentations, videos, and social media posts very simple to do. However, its lack of collaboration features for more affordable plans makes options like Canva and Visme more suitable for some small businesses.

  • If you are in need of beginner design software with robust collaboration features, try Canva or Visme.
  • If you are interested in more robust photo editing capabilities, try Adobe Photoshop.
  • If you are in need of prototyping and wireframing software, consider Sketch or Figma.

PicMonkey Pricing & Cost

PicMonkey pricing starts at $7.99 per month. It is one of the most affordable solutions on the market today. PicMonkey does not provide a free plan like Canva and Visme. PicMonkey does not offer collaboration features in its two more affordable plans.

Here are PicMonkey’s three main pricing options:

PlanPricing per MonthCloud Storage
Basic$7.991 GB
Pro$12.99Unlimited
Business$23.00Unlimited

PicMonkey Features

Let’s discuss the major features that PicMonkey offers and how they can help your design needs. Product screenshots are included to add context and demonstrate the user interface.

Designs

PicMonkey’s specialty designs are its presentations, social media posts, and videos. PicMonkey comes with a variety of templates for these types of designs. This variety of design types and templates means that your business can easily create quality content for marketing, presentation, or general graphic design purposes.

Design Types and Templates

PicMonkey, like Canva and Visme, is built primarily for ready-made content creation. Contrast this with prototyping software such as Figma, which is best suited for wireframes and live prototypes.

”PicMonkey

Here is a list of the types of designs you can create with templates in PicMonkey:

  • Social media ads, posts, and thumbnails
  • Flyers
  • Presentations
  • Resumes
  • Calendars
  • Infographics
  • Logos
  • Postcards

Once you’ve selected your design type and template size, you’re presented with a multitude of design templates to choose and build from. You can also start from a blank canvas. We recommend small businesses select from PicMonkey’s wide range of templates to streamline content creation.

Tool Kit

PicMonkey’s tool kit is built specifically for basic and quick content creation. PicMonkey’s tool kit is relatively extensive. However, you still lack the flexibility of advanced solutions such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. These tools are best suited for advanced graphic designers.

User Interface

PicMonkey’s user interface is simple and very limited in regards to customization. An example of an uncustomized user interface is seen below.

PicMonkey, unlike Canva, comes with a layers tab. This makes shifting elements front and back easier to accomplish.

”PicMonkey

You can add four additional tweaks to modify your interface to your liking. These include:

  • Bleed marks
  • Grid
  • Mini map
  • Show objects off canvas

Tool Types

PicMonkey offers a comprehensive number of tool types to choose from. Each tool is designed to make content creation easy to understand and effective to do.

PicMonkey offers the same tools for its variety of design types. Graphs and charts are not supported in PicMonkey like in Visme and Canva. You can access the following tools when editing content in PicMonkey:

  • Text
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Graphics
  • Draw
  • Textures
  • Effects
  • Edits
  • Touch Up
  • Frames
”PicMonkey

Graphics are one of the most commonly used tools to choose from. An example of selecting graphics is seen above.

PicMonkey’s graphics are extensive. However, there is no similar feature to Canva’s “magic recommendations”. These are graphics that are similar to the template style you’ve selected. This means that PicMonkey won’t curate similarly designed graphics depending on which template you’ve selected This could slow your workflow.

Photo Editing

Photo editing in PicMonkey is limited when compared to Adobe Photoshop. However, it is more comprehensive than Canva and Visme.

PicMonkey comes with a number of fairly advanced adjustments to your images. This includes:

  • Exposure
  • Colors
  • Sharpen
  • Clone
”PicMonkey

You can also add advanced color effects to individual image layers such as gradients. These effects are simultaneously high quality and accessible.

Although PicMonkey’s photo editing is not as robust as alternatives like Adobe Photoshop, we feel it does well in accommodating designers looking to make quick coloring edits.

Collaboration

PicMonkey’s collaboration is intuitive but only available with its most expensive plan. Plus, PicMonkey’s pricing increases with the amount of team members you add on. Because of these reasons we highly recommend Canva or Visme over PicMonkey if you are planning on collaborating with team members.

”PicMonkey

Projects can be edited by team members at any time. Collaboration in PicMonkey is very similar to document management software solutions such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Commenting in PicMonkey is also flexible. You can pin exact areas of a project you want to comment on. This provides more context for both you and your team members.

Cloud Storage

PicMonkey is fully cloud-based unlike Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This means that you do not need to save your own projects on your device. We recommend PicMonkey if you will be handling a high volume of projects and files. However, PicMonkey does not include version control.

”PicMonkey

All your projects are stored in folders you create. You can create seperate folders to store your files in the cloud, similar to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Exporting

PicMonkey comes with a number of additional exporting and sharing options that are very convenient for marketers and content creators.

You can export your file as the following in PicMonkey’s free plan:

  • PNG
  • JPG
  • PDF

Although PicMonkey does not offer a content planner like Canva, it offers a comprehensive amount of social media platforms to directly post to.

Here are the social media platforms you can directly post to with PicMonkey:

  • Instagram Business
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Etsy
  • YouTube

PicMonkey Integrations

PicMonkey integrates primarily with document management software. Here are some popular integrations PicMonkey supports:

PicMonkey Customer Service

PicMonkey’s customer support team is helpful but only available through email. You must submit a ticket online to get in contact.

PicMonkey’s main resource is its blog. This blog primarily contains tutorials about PicMonkey as well as graphic design basics for your business.

Customer Support ChannelsEmail
Other Support ResourcesBlog
Application Status PageNo

PicMonkey Alternatives & Competitors

PicMonkey has a number of competitors. Its most comparable alternatives are Visme and Canva.

Here’s a full list of PicMonkey competitors:

Is PicMonkey Right For You?

Overall, PicMonkey is a decent design software built for marketers and bloggers in need of ready-made and highly shareable content. PicMonkey makes creating presentations, videos, and social media posts very simple to do. However, its lack of collaboration features for more affordable plans makes options like Canva and Visme more suitable for some small businesses.

  • If you are in need of beginner design software with robust collaboration features, try Canva or Visme.
  • If you are interested in more robust photo editing capabilities, try Adobe Photoshop.
  • If you are in need of prototyping and wireframing software, consider Sketch or Figma.

If you're interested, you can try PicMonkey today.

Yousef Fatehpour

Yousef Fatehpour is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit. He graduated from University of California, San Diego, where he studied Human Centered Design and Communications. His work at UCSD's Design Lab emphasized UX research and product management.

Yousef's primary areas of interest are software design, user journeys, and how user experience is handled across software markets. Yousef also has experience in product design and multimedia content production. You can connect with Yousef on LinkedIn.

Yousef is an expert in several software categories including:

  • SMS marketing software
  • Document management software
  • Human resource software
  • Applicant tracking software
  • Design software