A company logo is one of the first things you create when you launch a new business. Let’s face it, having a logo somehow makes your project feel more real. Plus you won’t feel like an idiot if you don’t have a logo when someone asks you about it.
With modern logo makers, you can create an attractive image that doesn’t look like it was designed using a Photoshop alternative. The best online software will pair up a font with a suitable vector and put it all together in a suitable color scheme. You’ll even find animated logo creators that help you create video logos.
1. LogoPony
LogoPony was one of the first logo creators using machine learning to be released. It’s as good as, if not in some ways better than Looka (think Samsung compared to Apple).
To design a logo you just enter the name and the tagline of your company on the first page. On the next page you choose how playful or serious the logo will be, color scheme, a couple of suitable icons and you’re done. Press ‘Make Me a Logo’ and after a few seconds, the software will generate endless logo options for you.
Overall, LogoPony is the best logo maker for a one-off design. It’s cheaper than most of the competition. For $49, you get your logo in a range of formats and sizes, plus you get icons, favicons, and watermarks. This covers your branding needs for a web business.
2. Looka
Looka was the first logo maker powered by machine learning and the most established company in this market. Since launching in 2016, Looka has sold over 50,000 logos and generates over $600,000 in revenue each month. It’s a very big number!
With all this money Looka has developed a great product. It has the best user interface of all the logo makers. And they create some great logos (there are some advantages to having so much capital to reinvest in your product). Yet while I like Looka it is expensive…
Looka has three price plans. The first one is pointless (you get a low-resolution file of your design for $20). This means you need to pay at least $65 for your logo. For $65, you get high-resolution files of your logo with fewer extras than LogoPony. A custom design meanwhile costs $195.
3. Logozign
LogoZign is one of the newest logo makers to hit the market. It’s created by the people behind Gifzign, an online GIF maker. It’s unique selling point, which puts it at the top of the list of best logo creators, is the pricing. While every other logo creator charges users per design, LogoZign allows you to create unlimited designs for one price. It currently costs $75.
The reason Logozign can offer this pricing is down to intelligent partnerships with free vector libraries. It’s also an offline product (though you do need an internet connection for it to work). This reduces the cost on the company side, which is passed on to you as the user.
Ultimately I’d recommend Logozign if you need to create quick logos for clients. For example, it’s great for Fiverr sellers. However, if you just need a logo for your business then use either Looka or LogoPony (it’s cheaper and the auto-generated designs are often of higher quality).
4. BrandMark
BrandMark has tried to establish itself as a one-stop branding website. The main service it offers is the logo creator. However, you can use BrandMark to develop font pairings and color schemes for your marketing material.
Overall, BrandMark has a good logo maker, but I have a few problems with the app. When designing your logo, you don’t get to choose the icon. This speeds up the process of designing a logo on the front end. The trade-off is that you spend more time choosing your logo. But the main issue is that you can only see one logo at a time, a pretty silly oversight with the User Interface.
BrandMark has the same kind of tiered pricing scheme as Looka. It does offer a few extra features, though. This includes social media icons, logos suitable for iOS, and Android apps. That’s more than you get with LogoJoy but less than you get with LogoPony.
5. Designhill
Designhill is the only company on this list that’s not a pure software agency. They are more like a membership site where businesses can hire freelancers to create graphics for them. They are obviously very successful. Unfortunately, the logo tool needs to be improved.
Creating a logo with the Designhill logo maker follows the same formula as most of the other platforms listed. It feels like a premium product. You won’t have a problem until you have almost finished your design. My first issue is that you are forced to signup to the platform to see the logo. I’d say this is an inconvenience rather than a problem.
The real issue is that what you asked for isn’t what you get. For example, I wanted my logo to be blue. I got pink, red, black, and plenty of other colors, but not much blue. The logos’ quality also needs to be worked on if they want to compete with a logo maker like LogoPony. Still, they do offer a better pricing structure for their custom designs than Looka.
6. Creatopy
Creatopy is an all-in-one visual production platform, and while it boasts multiple capabilities, you can also use it as a logo maker.
The platform has an intuitive interface that allows you to create your logo in five simple steps. Once you decide on a business name, you can choose a template for your industry and bring your creative input by customizing it. When you’re happy with the result, you can share the logo with your team and exchange live feedback. You can then download your design in the formats that fit your needs best.
With Creatopy, you can save both time and money, as the platform makes available many customizable logo templates and design elements addressed to various industries and purposes.
Plus, with Creatopy, you get full ownership of your logos and visuals at a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional designer.
As there’s hardly anything more important than the result, Creatopy’s capabilities allow you to visualize the way your logo looks in various settings and color schemes, from print to digital, including on social media and display ads.
7. Desygner
Desygner is an easy-to-use graphic design tool. You get access to thousands of templates that can be customized and royalty-free fonts, to create your logo.
The process is simple. Just select the template, add your brand name, and then download it. If you want access to their custom fonts, upgrade to their paid plan.
You can design logos, social media banners, and invitations, among other marketing materials. The paid plan also allows you to create a brand kit with a new logo. You can store all your brand assets in a library. Their plans start from $4.95, are billed monthly, and include six users. Not sure if you want the paid plans? They also offer free trials.
8. Basic Premium Logo Creators
There are a lot of logo makers to choose from, but only a few of them use machine learning to create custom designs. Most of them are quite old and share the same user flow; you choose your logo from a library of pre-set templates and edit them from the drag and drop interface.
A few examples of logo creators that fit this template include Logo Maker and Logo Genie. They’re ok, but… You’ll end up with the same kind of logo as that used by a hundred other online businesses, just with a different name.
9. Free Logo Makers
In addition to the older premium logo makers, there are a lot of free logo creators online. The majority of these free logo makers are pretty bad. They use the same interface as the basic premium logo creators, just with fewer templates (if at all).
Most of the free logo creators were created to bring traffic to a website. The idea is that you either optin to an email list or purchase a premium service. Designmatic and ZenBusiness are two good examples of design agency websites with a free logo maker. Shopify, which is often on the list of top logo makers, created a simple drag and drop logo maker for the same reason.
A lot of people use the free logo makers to create their logo. Personally, I wouldn’t use them. If you want to create a logo for free screenshot a logo you like and recreate it in Photoshop or something similar. You’ll probably end up with a better looking logo than you’d get from one of these free logo makers, which brings me on to the next point…
10. Alternatives
If you don’t want to use a logo creator, there are plenty of drag and drop design platforms that make it easy for you to create attractive logos. Top of the list is software options like Canva and Youzign. These platforms don’t have the pre-built logo templates you’ll find with the premium logo creators, so you’ll need to create your logo from scratch.
Keep in mind hiring a designer meanwhile is pretty cheap. There are plenty of freelance sites where you can hire a good designer for a lot less than $100. For example, Freelancer and Elance are good, though you’ll need to spend a lot of time filtering results. 99Designs is slightly more expensive, but the quality of the designers you’ll find on the site is generally better.
Alternatively, you can always run a competition and get designers to submit work to you. You can get some excellent logo designs this way, though it is expensive. For example, you can run a logo design competition on DesignContest from $275 a competition.
For more useful tools for online business owners, check out our guide to the best invoicing software, and the best accountancy software. You might also want to check out our roundup of the best affiliate marketing tools.
Hope you like our content. If you feel you have a solution that should be on this list, shoot us an email. We want to make our articles as comprehensive as possible.
