What is Gelato?
Print-on-demand platform with global production in 32 countries
If you need visual content on a regular basis but don't have the time or budget to involve a dedicated designer for every asset, Gelato fills that gap. It puts design capabilities in the hands of people who aren't necessarily trained in Figma or Photoshop.
How We Evaluated Gelato
We scored Gelato on five things: design tool quality, template variety, collaboration features, export formats, and asset management. Same rubric we use for every design tool in the directory, so the scores are comparable.
That meant using the product, testing the features that matter most for design work, reading the docs, and checking whether pricing is upfront or hidden behind a sales call. We also compared it against Beautiful.ai and Shutterstock to see where it stands.
Key Features
What Gelato actually gives you:
- E-Commerce Tools: Purpose-built features for online selling and store management
- Design Tools: Professional design tools for visual content creation
- Template Library: Pre-built templates to speed up design work
- Asset Management: Organize and manage brand assets in one place
Pricing
Gelato doesn't list pricing publicly on their website, so you'll need to reach out to their sales team for a quote. That's fairly common for tools aimed at larger teams, but it does make it harder to evaluate quickly.
To give you a rough sense of the market, comparable design tools like Beautiful.ai and Shutterstock charge in the range of custom pricing to custom pricing/mo, which should help you calibrate expectations.
Pros and Cons
What we like
- This is a tool built specifically for design, which means the features are tailored to real use cases in this space rather than being generic functionality that sort of applies
- The interface is accessible enough that people without formal design training can produce decent output, which removes the bottleneck of waiting on a designer for every small asset
- It focuses on doing one thing well rather than trying to be a Swiss Army knife, which usually means the core features get more development attention and polish than they would in an all-in-one platform
What could be better
- Pricing isn't listed publicly, so you'll have to sit through a sales call just to find out if it's in your budget. That alone is a friction point for smaller teams
- The most powerful features tend to be locked behind the more expensive plans, which means the free or basic tiers can feel limited once you've outgrown the basics
- Larger organizations with complex requirements may find that some of the advanced features they expect from enterprise software are missing or underdeveloped
Gelato Alternatives
If Gelato isn't the right fit, here are the closest competitors worth looking at:
- Beautiful.ai: AI presentation maker that auto-designs slides as you add content. Smart templates, brand governa... (starts at $12/mo)
- Shutterstock: Stock photo, video, and music marketplace with 500M+ images, AI-powered generation tools, and fle... (starts at $29/mo)
- Webydo: Professional website design platform for designers with code-free creation and client management ... (starts at $90/mo)
- SitesGPT: Create a professional, responsive website in seconds with AI-powered SitesGPT—no coding needed (has a free tier)
We track hundreds of design tools in our tools directory. Worth browsing if none of these match what you need.
Who It's For (and Who It's Not)
Good fit: Gelato makes the most sense for anyone who creates visual content on a regular basis (designers, marketers, content teams) and needs professional-level output without the overhead of learning full-blown design software from scratch. If that sounds like your situation, it's worth at least testing it out.
Skip it if: you create one social media graphic a month and don't need advanced features. A free tool like Canva will handle that without any cost. In that case, you might want to look at Beautiful.ai as a lighter-weight option.
Bottom Line
We gave Gelato 3.8/5. Does its core job well. Worth the investment if design is central to your daily work. If you only need it occasionally, look at a simpler option.
In short: Gelato is a strong choice for anyone who creates visual content on a regular basis (designers. you create one social media graphic a month and don't need advanced features.
Try Gelato