BrandCrowd Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

BrandCrowd is a tool for creating logos and other creative business assets, letting organizations put their branding on everything from business cards and social media posts to flyers and menus. It’s a helpful tool for people who don’t want to shell out the big bucks for someone else to design a custom asset, but does it actually produce quality products? Let’s dive into the details and find out. 

BrandCrowd: The Good and the Bad 

Even though BrandCrowd markets itself as a free logo generator, it stands apart from the crowd. The logo quality is high, there are unexpected benefits to buying a BrandCrowd logo (hint: you can order branded gear!), and it’s easy to use. But it’s not quite as free as you’d think and the pricing structure is difficult to pin down. In this section, we’ll explore the company’s strengths and weaknesses in detail.

What BrandCrowd Is Good At

BrandCrowd surprised us with how easy it is to use and with the quality of its products—especially the logos. We also love that it comes with features for testing your designs. Let’s take a deeper look at BrandCrowd’s strengths. 

Easy to use: When you’re a new or young company, a lot rests on getting your logo and branding just right. That’s why we liked how easy it is to get something made on BrandCrowd. When you click on the logo creation tool, for example, you’ll see a place to enter your business name and another to enter keywords. It’s fun to see what BrandCrowd comes up with as you change the keyword combo. 

In one of our searches, we only used one keyword: “winery.” We got a lot of standard wine-influenced logo choices at first, but when we added “grapes” and “vines” to the keyword section, our choices got more detailed in terms of both the design elements and the overall look and feel.

Editing the logos is easy, too. Take one of the options BrandCrowd has generated, then you can edit the layout, add text, alter the colors, and even animate the logo. Creating flyers, postcards, letterheads, and social media posts is similarly intuitive and easy on BrandCrowd, as well. 

On top of that, there’s a great knowledge base of articles on the BrandCrowd website. Covering a wide range from an essential guide on how to create a striking logo to lists that feature dozens of examples for your inspiration, this resource makes getting the most out of BrandCrowd’s design tools even easier.

Asset variety: BrandCrowd offers a whole lot more than just logos. Need a template for a branded TikTok video or a Twitch banner? How about an Instagram Reel or a Zoom background? BrandCrowd has you covered. Considering that it’s been around since 2011, we’re impressed at how well BrandCrowd has kept up with consumer demand. 

And, you’re not even limited to digital versions of these assets. BrandCrowd will put your designs on all sorts of products, from menus and business cards to branded t-shirts,mouse pads, stickers, and more. When you finish creating a design, you’re able to order physical and printed products right from within the checkout process. 

The prices are a little high but shipping is free. Plus, you don’t have to undergo the hassle of taking your files to third-party printing companies. 

Polling feature: Getting feedback on your logo mockups can help you choose a design that will really stand out. That’s why we love BrandCrowd’s polling feature. Whether this involves your team of co-founders or a wider array of stakeholders or even customers, you can use this feature to land one a selection that resonates with and appeals to everyone. 

Create a logo or other asset, then run a poll that asks respondents to rate and review it. Whether you’re using completely different options or split-testing minor tweaks to a single design, you can get real feedback from real people about which variation is the best. Share the poll easily with the whole world on social media or to your peer ground via a persistent hyperlink to the poll. 

Honestly, we had a little too much fun testing the polling feature from both the logo-making and poll-responding sides. While it’s not possible to reach a targeted audience via BrandCrowd itself, the easy embedding of the poll and shareable link lets you use the channels you prefer to get this feedback.

Design quality: Some logo generators out there pull generic icons from a library and slap something basic together. For example, one free logo generator we tested in the same way as BrandCrowd produced a purple logo with the words Greenfield Grapevines under a basketball court for no apparent reason. 

Both the design templates that real BrandCrowd users and partners have created and the design creation wizard at the heart of BrandCrowd’s platform perform much better and more intelligently. 

Since BrandCrowd uses designs made by real people, you’ll see the designer’s username underneath any option. Then, starting from a higher-quality starting point, you can go onto tweak colors, lettering, and other elements to make something one-of-a-kind that also fits your company’s identity like a glove.

With any search, you’ll see pages and pages of choices. While logos and social media posts seem to offer a higher degree of quality than some of the other asset options, you’ll have hundreds of options to choose from (which, of course, can be edited to your heart’s content). And, once you buy a logo, you own it, giving you the freedom to use it to brand all the business collateral you want for as long as you’d like. 

Customer experience: When you purchase a logo from BrandCrowd, you won’t be able to download it right away. And that’s a good thing. For each logo purchased, the BrandCrowd team will make sure your logo looks perfect on PNG, PDF, EPS, JPG, and SVG files. You’ll then receive these files in an email. 

If you want the team to tweak a color or font after the fact, they’ll do it for you free of charge. More extensive edits require a monthly subscription to allow you to work directly with one of BrandCrowd’s in-house designers. We like that this level of service meets the middle ground between a professional design firm and a standard DIY logo generator. 

What BrandCrowd Is Lacking 

Even the best products and services come with weaknesses, and BrandCrowd is no different. From a slippery pricing structure to minimal customer support options, here’s where we found the company lacking. 

Unclear pricing structure: The main thing that bothered us about BrandCrowd is that you can’t find the pricing page until you’ve gone through the whole process of selecting a logo, making any edits, and clicking the Download button. Almost every other service online has a separate, easily accessible, and highly visible pricing page so you can assess the cost before taking any initial steps.

Having to go partway through the buyer’s journey first is frustrating. It also makes it difficult to find pricing information about other assets beyond logos, some of which have unique pricing and associated costs. You can cancel the subscription after you receive your files, but you’ll lose the capability for unlimited edits and downloads that come with that membership. 

You can get a free logo without any of this hassle, but those designs are, naturally, quite limited. The real draw for BrandCrowd is the designer-produced logos that you can make your own, you must sign up for a BrandCrowd subscription to download and use these. 

Customer support: The only way to reach a customer support agent for BrandCrowd is through email, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. To their credit, the customer support team does respond quickly, based on our tests and what we found in user reviews. But we would have loved to see a live chat feature at least so you can get questions about managing subscriptions, purchasing licenses, and working with a BrandCrowd designer answered in real time as opposed to waiting on email replies.

Expensive upsells: This wouldn’t be much of an issue if BrandCrowd didn’t market itself as a “free” logo maker first and foremost. Technically, the actual making of the logo is free, yes. You don’t have to pay to find and edit neat designs. But of course, you’ll have to pay to use the logo, unless you choose one of the more generic free-to-use designs. 

And, you have to be careful once you get to the checkout process. You’ll be encouraged to purchase BrandCrowd’s website builder, work with a designer (for an extra $199 a month), and purchase branded merchandise. This last option is actually pretty neat, but the prices are not cheap. All these potential expenses could drive the price of your logo way up, especially if you’re not careful and don’t want any of these services in the first place.

BrandCrowd Pricing & Options 

BrandCrowd offers custom logos and assets at a price your organization—whether large or small—can feel comfortable with. You can also use the site’s builders for business cards, social media posts, letterheads, and more. Either way you go, you’ll end up having to pay for a BrandCrowd subscription for usage rights and the ability to download designs in high-resolution files, unless you opt for one of the free (albeit more generic) design options.

BrandCrowd Paid Plans

BrandCrowd lets you whip up logos and a wide range of other branded assets. You can also get printed merchandise or collateral featuring those designs, tap into BrandCrowd’s network of designers for more hands-on asset creation, and use their free associated services like their business name generator.

But how much does this cost? After finalizing the design of your logo, you’ll be greeted with a page that gives you two options: the Premium Logo Pack plan, which costs you $60 for one year, or the same package with BrandCrowd’s basic site builder included, which runs $84 annually. You can opt for month-to-month billing for either option instead, but it will raise the monthly rate by several dollars.

When you purchase the Premium Pack, you automatically receive a standard license. With this license, you get non-exclusive rights to use the design for whatever you want. If you want to buy exclusive rights to the logo design or buy it out completely, you’ll have to pay a higher fee. 

Both plans also give you access to other assets and collateral you can design on BrandCrowd. However, the website builder doesn’t seem to be worth the extra cost unless you want to use it for quickly spinning up a very basic landing page. We wouldn’t recommend it for building your business’s home on the web.

You can also choose to work one-on-one with a designer in BrandCrowd’s network of freelance partners for $199 a month. 

Or, get your design printed on merchandise, apparel, or large-format displays like fliers and banners. Print services from BrandCrowd differ a good deal in price depending on what you’re getting printed, but shipping tends to be free on anything you order.

While the plans can be inconvenient if you’re looking for a solution to create just one asset like a logo or business card, they deliver real value when you start with a logo and apply to other assets that most businesses need for their online properties. Keeping it all on one platform also helps maintain consistency in style and feel across assets. 

Summary

BrandCrowd is a boon for businesses that don’t want to pay a designer to whip up essential brand materials like logos, business cards, and letterheads, as well as material and assets for social media channels and online advertising. It’s an incredibly easy-to-use service and comes with an astounding number of templates to get started from. If you’re just starting out with your business or are an existing SMB looking to rebrand affordably, BrandCrowd is a good option for you.