Placeit Logo Maker Review 2024 – You Really Could do Better

This Product Is Fine, Until It Isn’t

Want to know why Placeit’s score is kind of low? Want to know why I’m mad, and disappointed? I’ll give you every detail, but first… some context.

I tested Placeit Logo Maker as part of my quest to find the best new logo for Website Planet. You can read all about my experiences in my detailed comparison of all the major logo design services. But first, let’s take a closer look at Placeit.

Placeit Logo Maker is one of a massive suite of tools designed to help you make logos (obviously), mockups, videos, and business cards, among other things. It’s run by the Envato network, the same people behind ThemeForest1, the Tuts+ sites, and more. That last fact makes my review of this logo maker all the more disappointing.

The interface is only available in English, and not terribly good English at that. Normally, this is forgivable, as not everyone is a native English speaker. In this case, however, the lack of proofreading is an indicator of the lack of quality control in this product. The actual logo maker seems to support every major language, including Chinese and Russian, though not every font has support for non-Latin characters.

Pricing options include single logo downloads, and a membership plan that makes buying logos cheaper, if you buy a lot of them.

Normally, this would be the point where I’d say, “Read the review, and decide if this product is right for you.” Well, it’s not right for anybody, yet. I don’t recommend paying any money to this service until some very important things are fixed. If they do get fixed, I might revisit this review, and edit it a little. In the meantime, I’d recommend using a professional tool like Wix Logo Maker – or to make your life easier, just hiring a logo designer on Fiverr.

There Aren’t a Lot of Features, and None of Them Matter

But talking about those features is my job, so I will.

The “generator” part of this logo maker is template-based and keyword-based, with no artificial intelligence (AI). You type in your text, pick your logo’s “industry,” select your colors, and go. You’ll get all kinds of options to choose from.

There are no color palettes, as such. There are some default color options, but you can set every color individually, and precisely.

You can replace the icon you’ve chosen at any time, in both the simple and fancy templates, though the fancy templates have a more limited selection of icons to choose from.

You can have logos with more than one line of text, but if you need, for example, three lines of text, you need to choose a template that already has three or more lines/text boxes. You can hide text you don’t need, but you can’t add more text areas than the chosen template allows.

When you download your logo, it comes in two formats: a large PNG file, and a PDF for printing and working with vector illustration programs. It uhh… just might not be the logo you designed, which is sort of a deal breaker, practically speaking. But I’ll get to that later.

There Are Absolutely Gorgeous Templates

These templates really are some of the best I’ve seen in a logo maker. There are templates for every big industry, and a lot of the small ones, too. Placeit went to the trouble of hiring some very good designers to supplement the usual “icon on left” or “icon on top” sort of logo designs.

The downside to the fancy templates is this: lots of people will be using them. Plenty of logos will look exactly the same, except for the text and colors. And like I said, the particularly fancy designs have a more limited selection of icons to work with.

The Logo Editor Is Simple, yet Flexible

You can edit just about every aspect of your logo quickly and easily. You’re unlikely to get lost in the user interface, because it’s simple. You can drag and drop pretty much anything around, as you see fit. The only real downside is that you’re going to have to eyeball everything, because there’s no grid to work with. You can snap elements to the middle of your canvas (vertically and horizontally), but otherwise, you have to be careful when dragging and dropping things around.

You Can Share Logo Previews for Feedback

If you’re working with others, or just want to get some feedback from social media, this is a useful feature. You can generate a URL for sharing, or share the design directly via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. There’s not much more to it than that, though.

You Can Preview Logos in a Variety of Mockups

Once you have a logo design you like, you can preview it on T-shirts, business cards, various kinds of simulated screens, and more. Presumably, you could then also download/buy these mockups, because mockup tools are a part of Placeit as well.

My Experience with Placeit

This is where I can get into detail about the problems. Actually making the logo I wanted to download was simple enough. Want to see that process? Check out the video. Watch it to the end to see me get mad. (Video coming soon!)

For the quick explanation, though, you can take a look at this image:

The logo on the left is the one I designed. The logo on the right is what I was able to download. The following image shows the button I pressed to get this result:

The logo that was delivered is actually the template I started with, which means this is a back-end bug. Somewhere between the purchasing process and the downloading process, all of my customizations to the design were lost. The design I made, incidentally, is still in my “drafts” folder.

Money was exchanged, and the product was not delivered. It’s as simple as that, and it drives me up the wall. It’s not like asking for a Coke, and getting a Pepsi. It’s like asking for a beer, then someone dumps a bunch of yeast and hops on your table, because they accidentally put the beer into a time machine first.

Still, as is tradition, I will show you the “final logo.”

Look, I can forgive typos and other small bugs, because no one is perfect, development is hard, and not everybody speaks English natively. But a service that literally does not deliver what you asked for — no… what you personally designed — cannot be called a “service.”

Fortunately, after some time and repeated attempts to contact their support team, I was given a refund via store credit, and I was able to use that to download the actual finished logo.

No matter how good the rest of the features are — and they’re just okay — that bug has knocked the score way down. It has to.

It’s Pretty Easy to Make a Logo You Can’t Actually Buy

Okay, for one moment, I’m going to put aside the rather obvious and almost deal-breaking flaws mentioned earlier, just so I can finish this review. Also, it’ll save me from re-writing most of this thing when Placeit eventually (and hopefully) does fix its logo maker.

The overall experience is simple enough, and there are few steps between getting to the site, and designing a logo. I can’t fault the interface in too many ways, as it feels intuitive, and is easy to learn. That panel on the right of the logo editor lets you switch out icon designs quickly, which is always a plus.

Could be better, could be worse. Other useful, quality-of-life features include:

You Can Save Your Projects as Drafts

This is the single most important ease-of-use feature, and so I mention it every time. Users need to be able to experiment with different ideas without losing the old designs they make, and they need to be able to get up and away from the site to think before they make any purchases.

There Is a Helpful Template Browser

With no AI to do things for you, you’ll be spending a lot of your time browsing through the templates to pick the one you want to customize. Fortunately, the template browser is fairly well-organized, and you can (as previously mentioned) see the templates with custom text and colors before you start editing.

I do wish there was a more detailed system of categorization for the templates, though.

You Can Make All Your Graphics in One Place

This isn’t a “logo maker” thing so much as it’s a “Placeit” thing. All of their graphics and video tools seem to be linked, so you could, potentially, use the service as a way to serve all of your graphic and video needs, so long as you only need simple graphics and videos.

It Took a While to Get Support, but the Team Was Helpful

The support section is a single page with a quick FAQ (which is helpful enough) and some mislabeled contact information (see the screenshot above), which was also helpful… eventually. I tried to use the phone line, but it asked me to leave a message, and the chat wasn’t available either, despite me being well within their schedule, which is Monday to Friday, 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM CT.

Well, maybe they were still on vacation or something, because I was able to reach them the next day, and they were able to solve my problems. Here are all of the support channels I tried.

Email

Before I ran into the major issues mentioned above, I asked if there was any way to see my invoices online, in the app itself. It turns out there is. The response took a bit more than a day, but was helpful enough.

I responded with an email about the problems I was having with the logo:

They didn’t get back to me via this email conversation, so I tried calling customer support… for the second time.

Phone

As mentioned, phone support was unavailable the first day I tired, and a very pleasant-sounding but not very bright machine asked me to leave a message. Same for Envato phone support, by the way. When I called again the next day, the operator was helpful, and did figure out the problem quickly. I was offered credit so I could download the actual logo I designed, which I did.

This was the email they sent in response to my call:

Chat

Again, the live chat was not available the first day I tried, but I was able to eventually use it. I asked if I could upload my own images in the logo maker. Turns out you can… but only for the gaming logos.

The pricing plans are simple enough: you can pay for a single download, or pay a subscription to make all downloads 50%. That’s right, the subscription only provides a discount.

Overall, the pricing is… well, I think it’s fair, when you compare it to how much it can cost to get a professional logo designed for you. Unless you hire a designer on Fiverr1, of course.

That said, it’s more expensive than a lot of other DIY logo-design apps out there. And the subscription is only worth it if you’re going to make a lot of logos with this platform, which I wouldn’t actually recommend. They do specify that you can access your downloads after you cancel your subscription. Well, I should hope so, because of that thing where the subscription only gives you a discount on other purchases.

We accept payments through PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express. Please note that a free version of the logo for download is not available. If you intend to make any modifications, kindly ensure that these adjustments are completed prior to purchasing the logo. It’s important to make all necessary revisions before the purchase, as post-purchase revisions will require an additional payment.

The refund policy is basically: “You only get a refund if we really screw up, or if we alter the terms of your subscription in a way that negatively affects you, in accordance with consumer protection laws.” If you just don’t like the logo you made, no refunds. I got lucky, really.

Usage Rights

Interestingly enough, you get all rights to the logo, including the right to sell your designs. Well, they’re only partially “your” designs, especially when it comes to the fancy logos. And a lot of other people might be making and/or selling logos that look very similar.

Basically, that clause is probably included so you can, perhaps, sell your website, along with its branding, in the future. It’s not so much for starting your own design business.