Draftss vs. 99designs: A Comparative Analysis

Introduction

Graphic designing is gaining the much required and needs attention by the businesses across the world which has led many graphic designers to come up with innovative services to offer. These services are highly innovative and customized in order to fulfill the requirement of the industry today as well as to cater to the demands which the brands and the developing business world is facing. Two such service providers are Draftss & 99designs.

After analyzing a number of competitors in the previous editions of the competitor analysis, we again aim to analyze the two competitors which are performing well in the industry and would try to bring out the facts and figures of their performance. The two competitors are providing their services and clients seem to be satisfied with the services,. But what are the service provider competing upon the market today? And if you are a client looking forward to avail any such service, what is it that attracts you the most and which among the two would be suitable to your requirement?

Read the previous article review about Draftss & Penji here.

In this piece of guide, we look forward to exploring the dimensions of the services provided by Draftss as well as 99designs and thus, aim to conclude a better option for the type of requirements one may have. 

Draftss – Overview

Draftss is known for its unlimited graphic designing services as well as the flexibility it possesses in its highly affordable subscription packages. With a team of excellent designers and developers in the organisation ready to help businesses with the most relevant solutions, Draftss delivers! The service provider is a one stop shop for all the designing and development needs for startups, founders, freelancer, developers, and design & development agencies to get their tasks worked out with an expert and skilled team of professionals.

With all of the quality and speed, Draftss is highly an affordable option which makes it a win-win deal for everyone. The package at Draftss starts from just $89 per week.

99designs – Overview

99designs is a subsidiary of the company named Vistaprint which is based in the Netherlands and is one of the leaders in the market which offers graphic design services and web design services. The company is into various other domains of printing and publishing. The business has been equipped with a very skilled workforce and has some very attractive services to offer. With their presence in a number of locations, they have a large number of team members as well as they are also into more than one domain of business. The service provider offers two ways to get the designs done. One is to work directly like any other company while the other one is to host a contest and get the aspect designed with the help of the community of the service provider and give away the prizes as per the selection as the fee.

The service provider has a very different and unique kind of pricing set for the clients which looks a bit complicated and might become a reason to re-consider the choice. The pricing for each particular to be designed is different and comes with no universal package. The pricing is particular-dependent and not time-dependent. However, the fee is comparatively very high than any other service provider in the industry which makes it less of an option for the small businesses as well as entrepreneurs. s

The service provider offers its logo designing services starting from $299 which gives you somewhere around 30 concepts to choose from but it won’t cater to any other designing request.

Pricing – Draftss vs 99designs

Outsourcing is done to save costs and prevent the hustle to make up for the internal management. But when the costs are not being fulfilled by a service provider, it becomes very difficult for the client to go for the service and the complete concept of outsourcing becomes vague. Let us look upon the costs of Draftss and 99designs.

Draftss Subscription Cost

Draftss comes with a very affordable range of services making the pricing as its one of the many USPs. The plan starts at just $89 per week. The best thing to look out for here is the weekly plan offered by Draftss which seems to be very rare in the industry. For businesses which require the tasks to be worked upon for a shorter period of time, other service providers do not offer an option for the duration of less than month usually.

Draftss has monthly plans, quarterly plans, as well as especially designed annual subscription plans for its clients to offer. Thus, it becomes very easy for even the small businesses and startups to avail the quality services at Draftss while making it even easier for established corporations to gain value out of the packages.

99designs Subscription Cost

99designs has a very different and unique model of pricing in the graphic designing industry. It offers prices based on each particular to be designed and has no proposition to design any particular based on the time-bound method where a client may require multiple particulars to be designed. In the case of the multiple particulrs to be designed, 99designs might look very expensive and an option to not choose when the budget is an issue.

99designs also offers negotiation-based quotes on receiving a requirement for multiple designs however it does not have any fixed package to cater to the requirement. This makes the service provider a little less resourceful and thus lags behind in terms of pricing. The provider however has a design contest proposition when a client can host a contest for the design of the particular and the community of the service provider will submit the design concepts which the client can choose from. On choosing and selecting a final design, the fee as per the service provider can be paid to the community member as a reward.

Services Offered by Draftss & 99designs

With a number of varieties in services, subscription packages, and add-on support, both the service providers have got a lot to offer. While both Draftss and 99designs offer on-demand graphic design services, Draftss has the upper hand when it comes to getting more for your money.

Offering by Draftss

With Design + Code and Enterprises packages, you not only get the designs, but you also get the HTML/CSS/JS code necessary to turn your designs into a responsive website. Draftss also supports development inside WordPress using Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi Builder, Oxygen Builder, WP Bakery, and Visual Composer.

It also has got a very compact and smooth process of work which makes the tasks to get completed swiftly and effectively. With a complete team of designers and a dedicated project manager for each of the task allocated by the client, Draftss make the complete process a whole lot easier and hassle-free.  

Offerings by 99designs

The designs produced by 99designs are often appreciated and applauded for the attention and sharpness the designs carry. However, the limitation of particular-based pricing makes it very difficult for any client to chose 99designs over the service providers which are very flexible and agile in terms of their pricing and operational model.

Let’s have a sneak peek into the services offered by the two available in a wide range:

Draftss is a one-stop-shop for all the designing and development needs of the clients. With a vast range of services it has to offer, the highly skilled team of professionals can also work on any given task swiftly and effectively with quality and perfection.

Another thing to be noted is the wide range of technology and designing platforms supported by Draftss. It supports CorelDraw, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, Powerpoint, Keynote, WordPress & Page builders.

The services thus are highly responsive, quick, and efficiently backed up with a great team of designers and developers. Draftss equips all of its clients with a complete team of designers and a dedicated project manager. The client is also provided with a number of concepts and design options before going ahead with the designing process. This makes the complete designing process seamlessly smooth and efficient even further.

Portfolio – Draftss vs 99designs

A portfolio plays a major role in defining the quality and standard of designs that can be expected out of the service provider. The portfolio is also one of the first impressions that a client gets to have of the service provider and this makes up for most of the things in a perception that a client would have throughout the process of selection of the service provider.

Portfolio of Draftss

A highly versatile, diversified, and extensive range is what you get to see on the portfolio of Draftss. Draftss works on a number of services, and thus its portfolio comprises of everything a client might be looking forward to avail. Also, the previous projects worked out by Draftss have received some amazing reviews. Hence, after looking over the portfolio, the team seems to be highly reliable and attentive to details of the designs making the portfolio of the service provider strength in itself and enhancing the brand value of the service provider.

Portfolio of 99designs

99designs has worked on a number of projects and has also been working with many clients in the domains of the logo, web designing, merchandise, and other specific designs. This makes them fulfill the quantitative requirement of the portfolio. Talking about the qualitative aspect of the designs developed by 99designs, the 99studio is also one of the most advanced and modern designing space which looks forward to combining modern art with the relevant concept of the client. This studio comprises some of the very expert designers in the industry and is priced at an expensive fee of $5,999.

Quality

Quality at Draftss

Draftss has been in the industry since a long time now and has continuously been producing not just good designs but great designs. Because of the team of highly specialized designers and expert developers, it has been creating masterpieces for all of its clients regularly. Reviews and testimonials of the clients served by Draftss have also been highly positive and appreciable about the work.

With add-on facilities provided by Draftss to the clients, the complete process is a very qualitative structural flow of work which in turn makes the design and development requirements of the clients to be fulfilled easy and smooth. Customer support and client servicing becomes a delight for the clients at Draftss as well as the capability to integrate any and all technology platforms as well as collaboration tools into the process makes it a very accessible and reliable option for all the designing and developmental needs.

Keeping the quality intact and pricing affordable for all, Draftss hence is a very lucrative solution for all types of businesses and their requirements.

Quality at 99designs

99designs has a great pool of talented designers who are engaged from across the world working for a number of clients to design specific featured designs. The designers, as per the claim of the service provider, are skilled at more than 90 design concepts and aspects, making it a very flexible and agile model for the potential clients to work with. The quality of the designs however is very standardized and good, the attention is paid to the intricate corners of the designs which make them look very exhilarating and suits the need to the design.

The designers are coming from a very skilled and learned background which again makes the complete process of designing a very easy and smooth process and thus the services are qualitative enough too. The cos is very high and hence providing the services to the clients becomes even more easy for the service provider.

Design – Draftss vs 99designs

Both the service providers, however, claim to offer the best designing teams with the subscription of their respective packages, the services come with various advantages as well as disadvantages.

Design at Draftss

Draftss has a great team of professional designers who are expert at what they do. For every specific aspect of graphic design, Draftss thus has a designer who specializes in the domain. Sharp designs and attentive approach towards the designs are two of the major skills all of the designers at Draftss possess.

With every subscription of Draftss, it equips you with a complete team of designers with a dedicated project manager who works with a simple motto – producing not just good designs but great designs. The service provider only allocated specialised designers to the domain specific tasks so that only the best designer for the task works upon the particular type of design.

Design at 99designs

99designs certainly has a good team to flaunt before its clients and that is what it has done successfully over its web platforms. 99designs has got a good team to work with and hence great designs can definitely be expected put of the service provider. However, the limitations of its stringent model stay with the quality of the design making it difficult for the smaller and medium-sized business to avail the services of 99designs. the service provider also do not equip the clients with the project manager in the lower-rated packages, unlike Draftss which offers the manager in each of its packages. Thus, it makes the service provider a big no for the smaller clients with mulitplke requirements or budget constraints.

Development – Draftss vs 99designs

As important is great designing for a business, great development is equally important. A highly interactive and user friendly UI/UX would only work good only if it us developed well enough to deliver the customer experience as expected.

Developmemt at Draftss

Draftss, with its highly efficient and effective team of graphic designers, possesses a team of skilled and professional developers. By providing the required assistance to the businesses with the designing and UI/UX development, Draftss also helps the clients to build upon the designed interfaces. The team of developers and coders at Draftss work well with the factors of designing, speed, mobile responsiveness, & overall health of the digital platforms. Draftss also empowers its clients with the technologies and frameworks like HTML/CSS, WordPress, Page Builders, & Elementor, among many others. Thus, providing the solution for the development of the designs & web platforms, Draftss has a big edge here over other similar service providers in the industry.

Draftss hence comes out to be a very rare option to get the tasks of designing as well as development worked out on a single platform with highly affordable services.

No Development at 99designs

99designs won’t be able to cater the tasks related to web development and coding. 99designs is known for its graphic designing but lacks in the front of development of the web platforms. A client, in case of development of the web platform, will have to look for another option for development and hence 99designs might not be a great choice for the clients looking forward to avail the services of graphic designing as well as web development.

Process – Draftss vs 99designs

On-Boarding

Needless to say how busy stays the schedule of the businesses and the owners. It is thus always a good idea to offer them with easy and quick on-boarding process for any service being offered to them.

The on-boarding process at draftss is quick and simple.

• Visit the website and choose a plan.
• Fill out the form for on-boarding and done!

The team gets back to you and gets you going!

The on-boarding process at 99designs is also very quick and time efficient. Although the limitation of the plans stays, the client can submit a request through their website and can start working with their team or the freelancers. The client also has an option to start a contest.

Task Submission

Draftss is for all and hence it keeps its doors open for anything & everything. Draftss operates on a number of platforms and collaborates with the clients. Thus, it gives a lot pf option to clients to submit their tasks and use platforms like  E-mail, Trello, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, and just about every other project management tool that you have been using OR the submission form by Draftss to submit the design & development tasks. This makes it very handy to use and easy to reach out to.

On the other hand, 99designs operates only through its web platform to accept the task submissions and thus the process becomes a little less handy. However, the service provider does not have packages to offer multiple design requests which makes the direct acceptance of request also an easy way as the requests will have to be placed only once in the starting of the package.

Revisions

To serve the best to the clients, it is important for the service provider to iterate the output to suit the best of the requirements of the client. Draftss understands it and hence allows the clients to ask for as many revisions as required. Therefore, it’s not a problem if the first output does not fit the best! The clients at Draftss always have got a second chance.

99designs understands the same and hence offers multiple concepts to the clients. For each design requested at 99designs, a client may expect about 30 concepts or even 80 concepts, depending on the plan.

Finalizing

At Draftss, clients finalize the design only when it is exactly what is needed. Therefore, until and unless it is perfect, it is not finalized. The client is also offered a number of options of format to get the designs.

99designs also offers the same service. They do offer their clients to finalize the designs and download when satisfied.

Communication – Draftss vs 99designs

Communication plays a very vital role in the satisfaction of the requirement of the client and fulfilling the needs. Until and unless the concept and the requirement of the design are communicated in a very clear manner, the design developed might not come up as the appropriate or good enough one.

Communication at Draftss

Among many other things, Draftss has a really great communication process. The process is smooth, flexible, very handy, and hence very easy for the teams as well as clients to collaborate through. To provide ease and not confine the clients with limited options, Draftss also offers its clients to communicate with the design team over a single chain of E-mails, Slack, WhatsApp, & a number of other project management tools. This helps both the ends of the team as well as clients to be highly responsive, quick, & in sync with each other thus making the final output a qualitative and a better one. The smooth process also helps to quicken the process and deliver the project in less time and thus give out more value to the monthly plans with more designs being worked out.

Communication at 99designs

99designs is just a platform to connect to a great designer onboarded on the platform. 99designs thus won’t see to any of your concern which arises during the communication and the complete process will be between the designer and the client. Hence, the process will be based on the comfort and feasibility of the designer and the client on how they would like to go ahead with the process and this also gives the flexibility to choose a channel of communication. On the other hand, the contests held on 99designs have no communication process and only a brief can be shared based on which the complete community will submit the design concepts.

Turnaround Time Per Task

The faster you get the task done, the faster can you submit another one in the unlimited graphic designing services. This is an important aspect when you go ahead and choose Draftss as your service provider, which is quick and suereasy!

However, 99designs is not dependent on time and hence is independent of the concept of turnaround tine. This will also make the turnaround time variable and not so stringent as that of Draftss.

Turnaround at Draftss

Draftss provides a realistic turnaround time for the most common design tasks. From illustrations to logos, it gives you the information you need before you even pay for the service. The average time taken by Draftss for each of the individual services can be seen here. Although Draftss does not take more than approximately 2-3 days on average to finish most of the graphic design tasks, smaller tasks may be delivered even earlier. Simpler tasks take lesser time, complex tasks take more time.

Turnaround at 99designs

99designs do not have any upfront information about the turnaround time the designers or freelancers on the platform can provide. However, once the designer is chosen and started working with the turnaround time is mutual and can be variable according to the needs and designing of the client and the designer respectively.

Whitelabel – Draftss vs 99designs

Not just for clients but Draftss is open to businesses looking forward to extend the similar services in the market but may not possess the same standard of quality and resources. Draftss offers them its white labeling services and lets them become the partner and equips them with the Draftss team for providing the services to the partner’s clients with the mark of partner. Thus, the team of professionals and experts at Draftss acts as an extended team for the partner and works for the partner’s clients with the same level of dedication and quality assurance. This helps the partner firm to cater to the expectations and requirements of the client with the amazing services from Draftss and thus make a name and bring goodwill for itself.

Partner needs not to worry about the heavy budgets and managerial efforts to maintain a team of designers and developers.

Especially for a firm which is growing, it is always a great idea to outsource all the services which requires highly qualitative resources and are not available. It helps to avoid the resources of the firm to get diluted by spending huge on the designers who possess absolute brilliance to design and work out the tasks without compromising on the quality of services like Draftss. Thus, partner firms needs to make no upfront investment, needs to go through no hiring process, and requires no design team. The partner just needs to serve the clients with just a very quick & highly affordable subscription!

Whitelable Service at 99designs

99designs does not offer any white labeling service to any of the clients or applicants. However, the service provider comes with an affiliate program that is very organized and focused. The complete program is thus divided into three levels – associate affiliate, affiliate partner, and brand partner. Once the person has joined the service provider as an associate affiliate, the person can keep progressing on the levels of the program and at the same time keep his commission increasing.

What To Choose?

Unlimited graphic designing service packages are making a great resource for a number of businesses that require design tasks and development to be done in a frequent manner. Just that the value of the services depends upon the quality and type of services being offered to you by the service providers. Draftss in this case offers unlimited graphic designing services as well as other packaged designing services, 99designs is working on the model where it has pricing which is dependent on the particular being designed. Although, Draftss &99designs have been fairly competitive throughout the review, Draftss has highly established its dominance over some aspects of designing as well as a development upon 99designs.

Draftss provides integrations with leading project and task management services – Slack, Asana, Jira, Bitbucket, Github, Airtable, G Suite, and Dropbox. However, 99designs do not have any specification about the communication mentioned upon their web platform.

In addition, Draftss allocate a dedicated manager to all the clients who are opting for any or for all the packages of any price. 99designs only offers a manager for its platinum plan and has no other plan to offer a service where a dedicated manager is offered. The prices are too high for the majority of the business to avail the platinum plan of the service provider.

While Draftss offers great flexibility in its subscription packages in terms of duration, 99designs offers just the packages based on the specific requirement of the client. The affordability of the packages of Draftss acts as a big add-on for the service provider and is highly lucrative for the clients who wish to have a long-term association with a great designing team without much load on its pockets. For a shorter duration of association, Draftss offers weekly plans that work great for smaller projects.

Now that you are here, Draftss has got a present for you! Avail a discount of 25% OFF with Draftss & enjoy the amazing designing & development on any quarterly or monthly plans! Use the coupon code “BEST” to avail this offer on your first subscription.

To subscribe for plans & packages offered by Draftss, sign up here!