An appealing and functional portfolio presentation is key for every artist. Ideally, you want to showcase your artwork in a way that attracts collectors, and eventually start selling right from your portfolio as your audience grows. I tested two portfolio builders head-to-head: Pixpa vs. Readymag. There was a clear winner throughout my testing, making it easy to decide which portfolio builder artists should use!
Every artist needs an appealing online portfolio that helps you to showcase your art in the best way possible—and ideally also to sell your work.
Creating a portfolio site doesn’t have to be complicated. There are multiple portfolio builders on the market that make it really easy and fast to build an online presentation for your artwork—no techy skills required.
In this post, I'm taking a closer look at Pixpa and Readymag, helping you decide which platform is best for displaying your artistic portfolio—and potentially selling your pieces!
I’ll compare the features of both platforms, their ease of use, creative appeal, ecommerce readiness, and pricing.
By the end of this Pixpa vs. Readymag review, you’ll know exactly what you can expect from both platforms and can select the best fit for your artistic needs.
Let’s get into it!
Pixpa vs Readymag for Artists:
Quick Overview
Pixpa — 5/5 
Pixpa is a versative portfolio builder with 200+ templates specifically designed for creatives. It comes with built-in blogging and eCommerce support and also artist-focused features, such as client galleries and image watermarks. It’s easy to set up and customize, providing a sales-ready portfolio with minimal effort and at very affordable costs.
Readymag — 2.5/5
Readymag tailors to various professions, not only creatives, and offers unique portfolio layouts to experiment with. While it comes with a free plan, SEO tools and custom domains require a subscription. Overall, Readymag is pricier than Pixpa, but lacks important features such as native ecommerce support and client galleries.
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Ease of Use
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Templates
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Customization
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eCommerce
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Pricing
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Overall Rating
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Pixpa vs Readymag: Table of Contents
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Pixpa vs Readymag: Which is the Best Portfolio Builder for Artists?
A good portfolio builder for artists and other creatives should have several key features. First of all, you want it to display your works in an appealing way that clearly keeps the focus on your artwork.
There should be a range of templates to choose from that cator to your personal style, branding, and creative needs. They should feature image galleries and ideally also support video and audio integration.
Finally, the templates should be easy to customize and responsive, meaning they should look good on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
For artists wanting to sell, the builder should make it easy to set up a storefront, offer at least basic product and sales management, and integrate with payment gateways.
To get found by the right people, it’s important to have access to SEO tools and analytics to optimize your content for search engines and track its performance.
You also want a custom domain that can include your artist name, is easy to remember, and gives your portfolio a professional feel—polished to list on your business card or submit to galleries.
I’ve tested Pixpa and Readymag on exactly these features, and there was clearly one platform that performed better than the other across the board.
By the end of my in-depth comparison, you'll know exactly whether Pixpa or Readymag is the best choice for your portfolio!
Ease of Use
Pixpa
Readymag
PIXPA VS READYMAG
Which makes it easier for artists to create a portfolio?
• Pixpa User-Friendliness
Pixpa is a portfolio website builder with top-rated user reviews on Trustpilot and Capterra. It’s specifically tailored to creatives and one of the most popular options on the market.
Pixpa’s website is well organized and easy to navigate. You can immediately see what the builder is about and where to find everything.
To start a free trial, all you need to do is click on one of the buttons. ʕᴖᴥᴖʔ
After signing up for free, you’re taken to a quick onboarding form where you can enter your artist name and select what kind of creative work you do.
The name you enter here will automatically appear on your portfolio site, and selecting your creative area will take you directly to a selection of pre-designed templates that Pixpa suggests in the next step.
All in all, Pixpa’s onboarding process takes just two steps—entering your info and selecting a template. That’s about it! It couldn’t be more convenient and straightforward, even for a beginner who has never created a portfolio site before.
• Readymag User-Friendliness
Readymag‘s website felt pretty cluttered and difficult to navigate. The top of the page throws a lot at you at once: template previews, settings screenshots, text snippets, and even a giant orange “Publish” button was floating across the screen, which wasn’t even clickable.
There’s so much visual information on Readymag’s front page that it’s difficult to understand how everything fits together, and it doesn’t really give you a clear idea of what the platform actually offers.
Readymag’s onboarding process features a number of questions regarding what you do and what you want to create.
One question asks what you do. I’m an artist, photographer, and a business owner, for example, but you can only choose one option, which I didn’t find very useful. I’m sure plenty of creatives work across multiple areas, too.
Just like with Pixpa, Readymag’s next step takes you to its library where you can choose a template for the portfolio site you want to build.
- Bottom Line
Both Pixpa and Readymag are portfolio builders aimed at creatives, but Pixpa is way easier to onboard with than Readymag. It offers a clean, well-organized website and a fast, two-step onboarding process that’s straightforward, even for total beginners.
Readymag, by contrast, has a pretty cluttered front page that makes it hard to navigate, and its onboarding forces you into single-choice answers that don’t reflect how multidisciplinary many creatives actually are.
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Pixpa
Readymag
PIXPA VS READYMAG
Which platform has the better templates for your art portfolio?
• Pixpa Templates
Pixpa currently features 200+ templates—all designed with visual creatives in mind. You can select from a range of categories, including Photography, Art & Illustration, Graphic Design, and Business.
All templates are visually stunning, mostly with a minimalist design and enough white space to make your artwork stand out.
Some templates I specifically like for artists include:
By the way, all Pixpa templates are completely free with every plan, and you can change templates at any time. This means you can start creating a website during the free trial, and when you later find that you like a different template better, you can simply switch to that one.
Any text you entered and images you uploaded will be preserved and carried over to your new template. It’s really super convenient.
Another great thing about Pixpa templates is that they come ready-made with all the important pages right out of the box.
They come complete with Home, About, and Contact pages, a gallery, and a store, and some even include a premade blog or commissions page! Everything an artist needs.
• Readymag Templates
Readymag’s library includes templates for the different types of websites the platform caters to. Even though I ticked that I’m an “artist” in the previous questionnaire, I was still directed to the default library and not to a specific template section for artists.
The best templates for artistic needs are probably included in the Portfolio category.
One of the biggest differences compared with Pixpa is that most Readymag templates come at an additional cost. Prices range from $20 to $70 and are added on top of the subscription fee if you decide to continue using Readymag.
Most templates in the Portfolio category come with a black or bold-colored background, which I personally don’t find very appealing for a portfolio presentation.
In a addition to that, there were many one-pagers, which lack the full experience of presenting yourself as an artist and your work online.
One of the better options was Mills, in my opinion, which is just a one-pager with basic grid galleries and costs $25. However, it includes some nice visual effects and enough text and white space to showcase your work and write a couple of sentences about it.
- Bottom Line
Pixpa provides you with a complete portfolio site with less cost and effort. You can choose from 200+ templates that are free with every plan and include all the pages an artist needs out of the box.
Readymag doesn’t have dedicated templates for artists. Instead, it features many portfolio one-pagers that come at an additional cost and are not everyone’s taste due to their dark and bold-colored backgrounds.
Customization Options
Pixpa
Readymag
PIXPA VS READYMAG
Which platform can you better tailor to your needs?
• Pixpa Customization Options
Pixpa turned out to be really straightforward and easy to use right from the start. Once you’ve chosen a template and are on your dashboard, all you need to do is click “Edit Website,” and you can start customizing your site.
Whether you want to modify text, images, or other media, you simply click on the section and you can start editing the content.
The great thing is that many of Pixpa’s templates come with a huge hero image or image slider on the front page, which is ideal for presenting your best artwork.
To modify any text blocks, headings, buttons, and more, you simply type in the new text in the right-hand sidebar and click “Save” when you’re done.
The sidebar editor also allows you to change fonts, colors, line height, and spacings, and to insert links, and things like bulleted and numbered lists with just a click of the mouse.
Pixpa’s editor in the right-hand sidebar lets you easily modify any section and element on the page.
Perfect for artists and very unique to Pixpa is that you can create dedicated client galleries, where you can both showcase and sell your images.
You can allow clients to select their favorite images, write comments, and even download your work directly. For more privacy, you can choose to password-protect your galleries or require an email sign-in.
I think this is something really fantastic for artists!
But there’s much more when it comes to customization options. Pixpa lets you choose your own custom subdomain.
For example, you can enter your artist name, and then people will be able to find your work at ginangiela.pixpa.com. This URL is easy to remember, looks professional enough to put on business cards or in your artist bio, and doesn’t cost any extra money.
Another way to get a custom domain is to purchase one from Bluehost and connect it to Pixpa. Then your domain can be just your artist name, without Pixpa in it, for example, something like ginangiela.com.
Another thing I particularly like about Pixpa is that you can create a blog. Blogging is not only excellent for writing about your artwork; it’s also a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website.
How? You can create content around art-related topics that people are searching for online. When someone types in a query that you answer in your blog, they can find your page directly in the search engine results.
That’s called SEO (search engine optimization) and it helps your content pop up at the top of Google and attract an audience for your art.
I highly recommend starting an art blog because you can also monetize it, in addition to selling your work.
Pixpa has a blog pre-installed with most of its templates. Otherwise, you can add it with a click of a button. The blogging features are pretty extensive, considering that Pixpa is a portfolio builder in the first place.
You can group your blog posts into different categories, add tags, different authors, and include social sharing options for maximum exposure.
Pixpa has a blog pre-installed with most of its templates.
When it comes to search engine optimization, Pixpa comes with a very advanced SEO manager, which is still super easy to understand. It lets you optimize each page and shows you which aspects are already well optimized and which still need improvement.
• Readymag Customization Options
When it comes to customizing text, images, and other elements, Readymag basically works the same way as Pixpa. You can modify text on-screen, simply by clicking on the text block. Similarly, you can adjust alignment, fonts, and style, and reorder sections.
Readymag also provides a number of media widgets to add videos, audio, shapes, maps, slideshows, lotties, forms, buttons, and custom code.
This is definitely a plus for artists because you can show your best artworks in a slider on the front page or give insights into your process with timelapse videos.
Contrary to Pixpa, Readymag doesn’t offer any additional customization features. There’s no dedicated widget to add client galleries or start a blog. You also can’t get a custom subdomain for your Readymag portfolio.
If you don’t want to connect a custom domain, you’ll have to deal with lots of numbers in your URL that can’t be deleted. All you can do is add your artist name after them, for a bit of customization.
Nevertheless, Readymag provides a number of SEO settings for page title, meta description, and keywords. The catch is that you can only edit and use them when you subscribe to one of Readymag’s paid plans. Those plans also let you connect Google Analytics to track your site’s performance.
- Bottom Line
For artists who want galleries and blogging out of the box, Pixpa is definitely the better all-around portfolio builder.
Pixpa offers noticeably more customization depth than Readymag, including client galleries, a built-in blog, and a free custom subdomain are all things Readymag simply doesn’t have.
Ecommerce Features
Pixpa
Readymag
PIXPA VS READYMAG
Where to sell your artwork—on Pixpa or Readymag?
• Pixpa eCommerce Features
As I already mentioned above, Pixpa lets you create client galleries where your customers can directly purchase their favorite images. But that’s not all.
Pixpa also allows you to launch a full-fledged online store. The option of selling products is already active by default. If you also want to sell digital files, such as images and other digital downloads, you can activate that option on the dashboard with one click.
Every Pixpa template comes with a ready-made store out of the box. The storefront is already filled with a number of prints for sale that you just need to replace with your own products.
This is super convenient because it will only take you a couple of minutes to get your own art shop up and running.
Along with a pre-made online store, you’ll get a whole range of payment gateways and marketing integrations. You can basically accept payments worldwide, using payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, PayU, and so on.
When it comes to integrations, Pixpa also offers marketing popups and announcement bars to put your current offerings in the limelight.
• Readymag eCommerce Features
Readymag doesn’t come with native eCommerce functionality. To still sell from your portfolio, you can connect the platform to third-party providers, including Ecwid, Stripe, Shopify, and Gumroad.
This means that Readymag itself doesn’t let you manage inventory, orders, products, or any other sales features. You’re essentially combining Readymag’s portfolio with a separate commerce platform.
For artists who only want to sell a small number of products, this can work well. However, if you want to sell prints and originals on a more professional level, a dedicated ecommerce platform is the better choice.
- Bottom Line
Pixpa is the clear winner for artists who want to sell directly from their portfolio. It comes with a built-in store, digital downloads, client galleries, and a full range of payment gateways. Everything is ready to go with minimal setup.
Readymag has no native selling tools. Instead, you’d need to rely on a third-party platform like Shopify or Ecwid, which adds cost and complexity.
Pricing
Pixpa
Readymag
PIXPA VS READYMAG
How much is Pixpa?
• Pixpa Pricing
Pixpa offers four subscription plans, which are all extremely affordable. The plans differ mainly in the limits they place on pages, images, and products.
The Basic Plan at around $4 per month (billed biannually) is a good starting point: it lets you publish up to 10 pages and one blog, upload up to 200 images, and lets you sell up to three products.
The Creator Plan at around $6/mo removes these caps and gives you unlimited pages, blogs, image uploads, and sell up to 10 products.
The best option for selling your work is Pixpa’s Professional Plan at $9/mo, because it comes with advanced eCommerce and marketing features perfect for managing and promoting your products.
Is Readymag completely free?
• Readymag Pricing
Contrary to Pixpa, Readymag offers a free plan, where your portfolio site will have a pretty unobtrusive brand logo in the bottom-right corner. However, the free plan comes with limited features.
As I already mentioned above, you can’t use SEO customization features or a custom domain on the free plan.
The most affordable paid option is the Personal Plan at $14 per month (billed annually), which costs more than all of Pixpa’s biannual plans and doesn’t even provide half of the functionality you’d get with Pixpa.
There’s no native eCommerce capability, no client galleries, no blogging features, and overall way less versatility.
You’ll also need to keep in mind that Readymag has a cap on monthly views. If your site receives more than 10k monthly views, you’ll need to subscribe to the Freelancer Plan at $29/mo, which allows 25k monthly views.
- Bottom Line
Pixpa is the far better value. Its plans start at around $4/month and already include eCommerce, client galleries, and blogging. These are features that Readymag doesn’t offer at any price.
Readymag’s cheapest paid plan, at $14/month, costs roughly triple Pixpa’s starting price yet delivers less functionality, and even that comes with a monthly view cap that can force you into a pricier plan as your site grows.
Pixpa vs Readymag: Overall Rating
Across all the aspects I tested both Pixpa and Readymag, including ease of use, templates, customization options, eCommerce features, and pricing, Pixpa consistently came out ahead.
Overall, Pixpa offers a simpler onboarding flow, a much larger library of free templates built specifically for creatives, and better functionality, including client galleries, built-in blogging, and free custom subdomain.
Pixpa also comes with full eCommerce functionality. That means you can launch a full-fledged store with inventory management and payment gateways out of the box. Despite all of that, Pixpa is extremely affordable with pricing plans starting around $4/month.
While Readymag may be as easy to set up and use as Pixpa, it falls behind on templates (mostly paid, limited artist-specific options) and lacks native eCommerce support, while still being more expensive and less feature-rich.
Bottom line: You simply can’t go wrong with Pixpa, whether you want to set up a simple portfolio site or start selling your artwork. The platform offers everything artists need and provides excellent value for money!
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