Business Logo Designs: Canva vs Fiverr vs ManyPixels

Logo designs are often overlooked by small businesses. It can be easy to gloss over this detail when you start a new business.

From your end, you're busy planning site designs, product development, social media marketing campaigns and more. You're less aware of the way your business appears from your target customer's perspective.

Your logo (along with your entire branding style as a whole) is one of the first things potential customers will notice about your brand. Fortunately, there are many different ways to create logo designs.

We're going to compare three of these methods in this post: do-it-yourself (DIY), hiring a freelancer or using a design agency.

We'll be comparing a different tool or service for each: Canva for DIY projects, Fiverr for hiring freelancers and our preferred service ManyPixels for using an agency.

Let's dive a little deeper into the importance of logo design first.

Business Logo Designs and Why Yours is Important

Brand recognition is one of the most powerful achievements a business can earn. It helps to instill trust among potential customers along with a sense of familiarity that can lead to higher sales.

There are a lot of different ways to achieve brand recognition, but logo design definitely takes the cake. This is especially true if you use a multi-faceted marketing strategy.

You probably publish to a few different social media platforms and run ad campaigns on them as well. You may even use local ad campaigns, such as commercials on local channels and billboards.

Your primary goal is to increase sales, but marketing should go much deeper than that. Your logo design helps potential customers remember your brand as they see your posts and advertisements more and more. They'll start to recognize your brand over time, especially if you pair your logo with uniform brand designs.

A single effective ad increases sales for a short period of time. Brand recognition turns your business into a household name, at which point you'll see a continuous wave of sales come in with or without ad campaigns.

Business names are important as well for the exact same reasons. Some brands even use their business names as their logo designs (think Coca-Cola and FedEx). Others use both (think Nike and Tesla).

You can certainly create your own design yourself. However, choosing a logo design is not our focus in this article, so let's get on with it.

3 Ways to Create Business Logo Designs

Let's go over our top three methods for creating business logo designs: DIY, working with a freelancer or hiring an agency.

DIY is definitely the cheapest and simplest way to go. This may be the smarter choice for new bloggers and startups, at least when it comes to budget. Instead of paying hundreds to a freelancer or agency, you'll spend nothing or close to nothing creating your own business logo design in a tool like Canva.

The downside is the lack of quality, efficiency and effectiveness. Unless you have a background in logo design or corporate graphic design, you'll have a tough time creating a design that's memorable yet simple at the same time. You may also have trouble reproducing your logo for use on a variety of different mediums.

This is why hiring a freelancer or agency for your logo design may be more beneficial if your budget permits it. A freelancer is an excellent choice if all you need is a logo. You can hire them on a project-by-project basis and part ways when each is complete. This is much better for budget management, especially when you use cheaper freelancer platforms like Fiverr.

Even so, an agency may be the best option if you're after business logo designs as effective as the ones we mentioned earlier.

Hiring freelancers on platforms like Fiverr is cheap, but they may not have all of the skills necessary to produce logo designs that get results. It's not enough to be skilled in graphic design. Visual branding is important as well, and it's a skill that's much tougher to master when you haven't worked with many corporate brands.

When you hire an agency like ManyPixels, you know you're hiring designers that have experience working with larger businesses. It's much harder to find freelancers with the same level of experience and prices that fit your budget.

Let's introduce our platforms and services and their potential for creating business logo designs. We'll compare each from a broader graphic design perspective after that.

What is Canva? (DIY Option)

Canva is definitely the best option if you want to save money designing a logo yourself, especially if you don't know the first thing about creating designs from scratch.

Source: Canva

Canva is a freemium graphic design tool. It allows you to create graphics with a drag-and-drop editor, stock images, icons and illustrations, and web-friendly fonts.

It's an incredibly useful tool for bloggers and small businesses that don't have the budget or workload to justify hiring freelancers and agencies. You can have designs ready to go in minutes thanks to the tool's library of predesigned templates.

Premium users can create designs even quicker with brand kits, which saves your brand's color palette and logo for easy application later.

You can technically create any design from scratch with Canva. Inserting fonts and icons you want to use, dragging them wherever you want, and resizing them as needed is easy.

Even so, the developers of this tool want to make things as easy as possible for you, so they've created a quick-access logo maker option that preloads their library of logo templates as soon as you open the editor.

The template library has contemporary designs. The fonts, icons and illustrations are well designed as well. Still, it's easy to see the difference between the stock logos available in this library and the ones we know by heart from famous brands.

Plus, you can't trademark logos that use stock assets.

As we said, Canva is best suited for bloggers and small businesses in need of simple designs while they grow their businesses. It has a free forever plan. Canva Pro costs $12.99/month or $119.99/year for up to five users. You can try it free for 30 days. Custom enterprise pricing is available as well.

What is Fiverr? (Freelancer Option)

Fiverr is a platform that connects businesses to freelancers who offer digital services in over 300 categories. It's an affordable way to hire freelance talent. It's also more convenient than browsing through each freelancer's personal website.

Source: Fiverr

Fiverr got its name from the flat $5 fee it used to charge for all jobs the platform hosted. You can still find services, including logo designs, that only cost $5. However, if you enable the Pro option when you search for services, you can browse through a list of freelancers who have proven their talent.

Experienced freelancers know their worth, so the first thing you'll notice when you enable this filter is a huge spike in cost. Logo designs are priced at hundreds and even thousands of dollars each.

Either way, you'll be able to view thumbnails of actual designs each freelancer has produced while you search.

There are even several filter options designed to narrow your search:

• Subscription Service - Only show artists who offer subscription-based pricing for ongoing work.
• Budget - Set minimum and maximum prices.
• Logo Style - Filter by design style, including minimalist, freestyle, lettering, watercolor, vintage and more.
• File Format - Choose from a variety of different file types, including PNG.
• Service Includes - Filter results by specific services freelancers offer, including printable resolution files, source files, transparent logos, social media kits and more.
• Seller Level - Filter results to only include newer, cheaper freelancers or experienced yet more expensive ones. Options are top, level-two, level-one and new sellers.
• Delivery TIme - Choose from turnaround times of anytime, seven days, three days or 24 hours.
• Seller Speaks - The language(s) sellers are proficient in.
• Seller Availability - Filter results to only include sellers that are currently online.

These filter options, along with the sort feature, simplify the process of finding a freelancer who offers exactly what you're looking for in a logo.

Click on an offer to reveal the artist's full profile and offer for this service. This includes additional pricing packages they may offer, reviews from past customers, a complete explanation of what their service includes, their portfolio and more. You can even bookmark services and freelancers for easy access later.

Messages and payments are handled directly on the Fiverr platform. This protects both buyer and seller. Payments are made in advance unless a seller sets up milestone payments. This breaks payments down into multiple steps for each part of the design process, such as three milestone payments for three design concepts then one final payment for the completed design.

Each service is given a license. Make sure you negotiate a commercial license with your seller else you won't be able to trademark your logo.

Fiverr also offers a logo maker that generates logos for you based on a short questionnaire. Similar to Canva, they're well designed but not memorable. They cost either $30 for just a few images of the logo or $60 for ready-to-use images, resizable images, social media kits and more.

What is ManyPixels? (Agency Option)

ManyPixels gives you access to your very own graphic design team for an affordable monthly rate. While Canva and Fiverr are better options if you only need a logo and don't publish much at the moment, ManyPixels is the best option for ongoing projects.

They'll help you create a uniform design across every marketing channel you use: your blog, landing pages, social media profiles, advertisements and more.

We use ManyPixels for graphic design work across all of our sites. In fact, they create all of the featured images we use here on the blog.

As a design agency and subscription-based service, ManyPixels can help with a variety of different projects, including logos. They can work on brand guides, infographics, social media branding, display ads, graphics for presentations, landing pages and even your entire website.

The way it works is simple. You sign up for the service by telling ManyPixels about your brand and choosing a plan. You can then submit your first request complete with your brand assets and design inspiration.

ManyPixels will assign one of their designers to your request, and you'll have a design in one to two days. The service includes unlimited revisions and reworks regardless of which plan you choose, so you won't pay extra if you aren't satisfied with your design the first time around.

You retain all ownership rights once the design is complete, at which point all source files will be available for download.

Everything is handled through ManyPixels' platform. This includes a mobile app. You'll be able to submit requests, communicate with your designer and download complete projects, all from the same interface.

ManyPixels has a base plan (Essentials) that starts at $449/month, but it doesn't include logo designs. You'll need to subscribe to the Advanced plan or higher for $549/month. Discounts are available for quarterly and annual plans.

All plans come with a 14-day, money-back guarantee.

DIY vs Freelancer vs Design Agency

Let's recap the strengths and weaknesses of each option in terms of what they offer for logo designs and graphic design as a whole.

Specifically, we'll be looking at how each option does in terms of cross-platform marketing, efficiency, consistency, and quality and effectiveness.

Cross-platform marketing

Cross-platform marketing involves utilizing the same graphics and marketing messages across a variety of different platforms but optimizing them for each. These platforms may include your blog, YouTube channel, social media profiles, advertisements and more.

Creating designs for all of these platforms on your own would normally be quite difficult. Fortunately, Canva offers templates for a variety of different platforms, and at an incredibly affordable rate as well. You can prepare designs for multi-platform marketing campaigns in no time.

The downside to using a DIY approach for creating custom designs is how much you'll need to learn about what works and doesn't work for each platform.

Freelancers and designers from agencies like ManyPixels are more likely to have experience creating designs for a variety of different platforms and actually getting results.

Efficiency

All three of our methods for creating logo designs handle efficiency differently depending on how you choose to do them. Let's compare our chosen platforms instead.

Creating your own designs is really time consuming if you're not skilled in graphic design. That's what makes Canva so great. It allows anyone to feel as though they're skilled in this department. Even so, learning what designs work best and actually settling on a final design can be very time consuming, even with this tool at your disposal.

This is where freelancers and agencies come in handy. Platforms like Fiverr make it easier to find freelancers, but you still need to spend time sifting through gigs and seller profiles. Plus, freelancers work with a lot of clients, so they may not be able to complete your projects as efficiently as you'd like.

ManyPixels is the clear winner in this department. The agency assigns a designer to your project for you, so you don't need to waste time finding one to hire.

Plus, they have access to an entire team of designers, so they're able to divide their workload up evenly and provide quicker turnaround times.

Consistency

Consistency in graphic design refers to the uniform design your brand uses, a design that's memorable and recognizable across multiple platforms. Think of McDonald's golden arches combined with their famed red-and-yellow color scheme.

This is an area of graphic design the DIY and freelancer options have the upper hands in. No one knows your brand and the vision you have for it better than you. Similarly, freelancers have limited clientele, so it's much easier to form long-term relationships with them and have every design they create for you contribute to that overarching vision you have for your brand.

Agencies have larger customer bases, so while they may be able to deliver designs quickly, each design may be disconnected from one another.

Fortunately, we've been quite happy with ManyPixels and haven't noticed any such disconnect in the designs they've created for us.

Quality & Effectiveness

To reiterate once again, Canva is an amazing design tool perfectly suited for non-designers. Despite this, the quality of your designs are dependent on your own knowledge of graphic design.

Freelancers and agencies are professionals. They specialize in this field and are, therefore, much more proficient at delivering quality designs capable of helping you achieve your marketing goals.

Agencies are more adept in this area. They're more likely to have worked with corporate clients, which means they have experience in creating designs optimized for conversions, SEO and user experience. They're also able to fully test your designs given the balanced workload we mentioned earlier.

Final Thoughts

Creating logo designs is not easy, but you can get the job done with the right tools, whether you're going the DIY route, hiring a freelancer or working with an agency.

Consider your budget first and foremost. If you don't have a lot of funds, your best option is to use a DIY tool like Canva.

If you have a higher budget, choose between the freelancer and agency options instead.

If budget is your biggest concern, don't be put off by ManyPixels' subscription cost. The service has no contracts, so you can cancel whenever you no longer need their services. This will allow you to acquire a logo design and even a few additional requests without breaking the bank.

No matter which option you choose, make sure it matches the vision you have for your company's branding and the marketing goals you want to accomplish.