An honest (non-sponsered) review of Pixiset as an all-in-one platform for professional photographers
If you're not a photographer and you're in the market for wedding photos then this one's probably not for you - unless you're feeling particularly bored, in which case, welcome. Most of my stuff is obviously wedding related (I'm a wedding photographer based in Suffolk for a bit of context if you're just landed here from Google btw 🙋🏻♂️), but I've had this conversation come up enough times amongst other photographers now that I've ended up feeling like a proper review might be helpful and I don't have anywhere better to publish it so here we are.
If you're not familiar with Pixiset then it's probably worth a quick google (or here's a link to their website if you're feeling lazy). The basic premise is that they started out making sexy looking client galleries (which is what it's known best for) and then got a bit carried away with themselves and ended up offering websites, online print stores, a booking system, invoicing and a CRM. So, unlike some of its main competition such as Pictime or SmugMug, you can actually run pretty much your entire company from one platform. Here's the catch; you can do much better feature-wise from a selecting a pick & mix variety of different providers. Pic-Time is arguably the best gallery delivery service out there, HoneyBook is one of the best CRMs available for photographers (which includes billing), and if you don't want to pay for a custom website and you're planning on doing it all yourself then Squarespace is basically all you need for a pretty decent website. If you get all these platforms separately, you can have an incredible array of features at your fingertips and get stuff done that it's simply not possible to do on Pixiset. However, if like me you're a scatterbrain floozy, you might really benefit from having everything all in one place and you might be surprised to learn that it actually has (for most people) everything you need. I've been using Pixiset for literally everything pretty much since they started offering pretty much everything, and our businesses have grown along side each other so I feel fairly well placed to review it and talk through why you should seriously consider trading off functionality for convenience. Let's get into it;
The pros:
It all works together
Need to add a picture onto your home page? You can add it directly from your client's galleries. Writing a blog post? Dip straight into that client's gallery and dump their photos straight onto the page. This even extends to customising your invoices and booking pages. Can't do that on Squarespace can you? You'd need to go and find the photos you want from Lightroom, export them in web size, then upload and place them on the website.
You can also add enquiry forms to your website which are plumbed straight into your CRM so that new enquiries get added as new leads in your contacts manager, with all the information they put in their form already added to their contact card. All this joined up thinking means that you can get a lead from your website that turns into a client and you can have all their information, their bookings, their invoices, their payments, their contracts, their forms, their galleries and any extra notes you wanted to write about them all in one place on one page. YOU. CANNOT. GET. THAT. ANYWHERE. ELSE.
IT'S SEXY AF
I previously worked in marketing, so good design is desperately important to me and Pixiset delivers on that. Just quickly go and take a look at SmugMug (it's ok, I'll wait). It's not ugly (well the logo is, but I mean overall) however it's not as beautiful - in my opinion - as Pixiset. It's the same with HoneyBook; yea, it does what it needs to do, but it's looks like Microsoft Word while it does it. Pixiset is more "Mac". It's sexy ,and I am absolutely here for it. I realise that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and my taste might not be the same as yours but I think if you take a minute to really look at the differences you'll see that Pixiset is built with design right at the forefront of what they do and it's really consistent, very clean, and modern looking. A lot of the other options are "nice" looking, but often a little shabby round the edges, sometimes a quite dated and ultimately led more by just delivering a good product rather than looking great. Design is more of an afterthought.
I suspect that as a photographer you like looking at nice things, so when you have to use a platform on a regular basis, you want it to look scrummy don't you? That's why most of us convince ourselves we NEED Macs when really a top spec Lenovo would probably deliver what we needed.
Bonus point; because it's one platform, the user experience design ties in to all the 'bits'. Your gallery, your invoices, your booking links and your website, all with one similar look and feel. Much more professional than a random array of styles, no? We work so hard on making our photos look consistent, why not do the same for our client's online interactions with our brand?
Easy peasy websites
I'm not going to go into a feature specific comparisons with Squarespace in this review, and as I've alluded to already it's not a true like-for-like scenario anyway... but it's pretty bloody close. And if you're a professional photographer, I assure you, it's close enough to give it serious thought. There's a huge range of really beautiful templates to choose from and they're specifically designed with photographers in mind. None of this "one size fits all" thing or "oh this will work for photographers". With one click you can have an entire photography website built, and all you have to do is swap out the details & pictures for yours. Obviously you should definitely work really hard on getting your website perfect, it's your shop window and all, but my point is that getting started is REALLY easy. You can switch between templates if you change your mind later, and each template has an array of layout options and customisations which keeps your site feeling 'yours'.
And, if you know what you're doing and you really go digging in the menus you can actually customise just about anything. It's also got all the standard SEO stuff you need and as you can see from what you're reading this off right now, a pretty nifty blogging feature.
From an SEO perspective, I know it's hard to quantify, and that results are mostly down to what you do rather than what 'they' do, but I was able to get to the top of the first page on Google for a number of my chosen keywords, and the one's I'm not there yet for, I've noticed myself slowly creeping my way up over the last few years. At the time of writing, I'm the first organic search result for "Suffolk event photographer" and honestly didn't try very hard to make that happen at all. If you're not getting good SEO results, Pixiset itself isn't your problem.
Constantly evolving list of features
They've got a lot of really snazzy features squirrelled away which they just don't advertise. I suppose if you listed everything then you'd be there for a while but there's some really great stuff like email scheduling which I stumbled on by accident. They're also very grateful for feature requests and actually seem to listen to them. I obviously can't account for how many other photographers asked for the same thing as me, but the number of times I've asked for a particular feature and then a few months later it's miraculously appeared is more than any other service I've ever used. Every month or so there's something new and whilst there's gripes and limitations, they're really investing in making it more and more flexible and that's enough to keep me going because I know that if I have to use a workaround then at some point I probably won't have to anymore because they'll have sorted it. If only Adobe did the same. 🙄
Incredibly powerful (sort-of) built in booking system
So this one is a bit of a mixed bag which I'll talk more about in the cons section of the review, but for the moment, I'll casually gloss over the problems and focus on the good stuff. The headline news is that included with your CRM comes a booking system which allows you create session types (ie: mini, family, couples, headshots etc), set up the package and automate the whole booking process in one place. Here's my family session booking page as an example. Clients get here from clicking a "book now" or "check availability" button on my website and from there as you can see, they can view my availability (which is linked directly to my Google calendar, which in turn gets feeds from my personal iCloud calendar in Apple and my Reclaim AI schedule, so if Reclaim thinks I'm too busy to be taking on more work right now thank-you-very-much then it'll prevent Pixiset from letting people book until my diary's a little clearer), clients can then choose a time and date convenient to them, fill out a short info questionnaire form thingy (where they also choose a location in my case), read and sign the contract, pay their fee and get a conformation email. On top of that, they can even reschedule or cancel from the confirmation email without you ever having lifted a finger or spoken to the client. For the price you pay, this is pretty stunning. There's more features on top of this, and it's very customisable in terms of options. It's saved me SO much time using it for virtual meetings where in addition to clients being able to book themselves in for meetings (saving the otherwise obligatory week-long game of email ping-pong where you change possible dates), it also creates a scheduled Google Meet session and emails you and them the link AND adds it to your diary. Sensational. This in particular has saved me SO many hours and stopped me forgetting meetings on a number of occasions.
The cons
The CRM is still a little under-developed
Studio manager is actually still a pretty new service. Pixiset only introduced it a few years ago and I was one of the first customers to start using it. What we have now compared to what we had to begin with is honestly mind-blowing, but that does mean it's still in its infancy and it's not quite a fully developed CRM just yet. I will caveat this with a reference to the last 'Pro' from above though, because at the rate they're adding new stuff in, give it another year or two and I wouldn't be surprised if it more closely resembled something like HoneyBook. In the meantime though, there's a few key limitations, here's a few of the biggest for me.; Your client fields are limited and you can't link contacts. You also can't categorise contacts beyond "lead", "client" or "other". This means you can't view all of your wedding clients at the click of a button for example, and if you want a separate contact card for each partner in a couple then there's no way to link them. You'll need to look for each contact separately. Until not that long ago there wasn't even a search feature (not kidding. they were just listed in the order they got added, and it was up to you to look through the list manually. 😳). We're now at the point where it's got everything you need from a CRM, but there's LONG way to go still between it's main competitors in the CRM department. It's functional and it does the job, but it's no Swiss army knife.
There's no project management
I still have a spreadsheet which tracks all my bookings, where I'm at with them, how much they were for and what needs doing and when. Without this, I couldn't operate and it'd be a horrible, horrible mess. There's CRMs out there that I could be using which incorporate this feature and make my life a little easier.
Email scheduling is quite limited
This is something else which was a very recent addition to the platform - like, a matter of months ago - so I'm expecting it to develop more as per everything else. At the time of writing, you can schedule questionnaires, invoices and client gallery emails, but that's about it, and the templating is a little restrictive. This means that some emails I still have to schedule in my Mail app. This isn't really a deal breaker because it's a nice to have not a need to have, but I'm sure you agree, any degree of automation is a bonus and if I can schedule all my booking confirmations, follow-ups and info emails in one go rather than remembering to do it for every client, or make it so that anyone who's booked a certain package gets a certain email after a specified amount of time, I could use my brain for other important things. Like lusting over new camera gear on MPB or doing actual work.
The booking system is very limited
If you offer sessions, this is a fantastic straight-out-of-the box solution, but veer off that track and you might hit a few roadblocks. Flexibility isn’t its strong suit. I'm primarily a wedding photographer and I use it to book all my weddings, sessions, commercial work, and even meetings with clients and second shooters. But this is from hacking the system (in the life-hack sense, not actual hacking) and using multiple workarounds. It's not designed to do this. The reason I bother to do rather than staying in my lane is to make sure everything's in one place and my bookings are in one diary. Back when I used to put them in manually, I once accidentally deleted a wedding from my diary, (dw, I realised before the big day but it could have been a bit spicy). That can't happen with this setup. Again, as with all the other new features (and again we've actually only had this one for a matter of months) it's a work in progress and the longer I use it the fewer workarounds and hacks I have to use because they keep adding in my feature requests or generally improving the system. I'm hopeful that in another year or so it's going to be a really powerful platform. As it stands though, unless you're a session photographer, it's probably going to be a bit of a bitch or at worst, totally useless. Actually the meetings thing is pretty epic. You should definitely use that.
Mobile admin is a bit pants
Whilst the client side’s a smooth ride and your website and gallery is beautifully mobile-optimised, tinkering with admin features from your phone is like a puzzle – doable but fiddly. Although (and do you see a theme here) until not that long ago you simply couldn't use the admin side from your mobile. It wasn't just fiddly, it was a categorical, unilateral nope. We're mostly there now, but you still can't do a few specific things (I forget what exactly) and some of the things you can do aren't particularly happy about being done. Life's not too bad on an iPad, but for the most part I don't really bother trying on my phone unless I really have to.
The Bottom Line:
Pixiset isn't the perfect elixir. This is absolutely without any question whatsoever, not the best platform out there in any one particular area. I need to make this abundantly clear; there's platforms out there in every single service it provides which do it much better. But this is where synergy comes in. (If you're not familiar with synergy it's where the overall result of multiple 'things' working together add up to more than the sum of all its constituent parts. The business equivalent of 2 + 2 + 2 = 10.)
You don't choose Pixiset because you want the best booking system, you choose it because it all just gels together and makes your life simpler. I struggle to cope with information spread all over the place and it would piss me off no end to have separate logins and systems to get my head round for website, gallery, billing, contact management, contracts and bookings. Particularly with regard to keeping billing, bookings and CRM separate, you're literally begging for mistakes to happen, not to mention duplication of efforts. It would also be more expensive (and rightly so since you're paying for better systems). But if you add up all those separate providers' plans, Pixiset outstrips the lot if you go for its all apps package. For only an extra £13 a month more than the middle tier Pic-Time package(at the time of writing that is - I don't plan on updating this every time the prices change), you can get literally everything Pixiset has to offer; gallery, website, bookings, the lot. Squarespace alone would cost you more than that (it starts from £17 for businesses incase you were wondering). Factor in the bonus of having it all in one place and actually being able to serve the vast majority of photographers' needs and honestly why wouldn't you want that? Isn't it worth sacrificing a few extra features for convenience, brand unity and more money in your pocket?
This isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of deal, and some people will clearly have to go with someone else because it simply doesn't do what they NEED it to do for their business, but from one photographer to another, Pixiset is a really rapidly developing, immensely powerful, all-in-one solution which not only saves you money but can really improve how you do business. They do a free trial package too btw with no time limit so you can have a play for as long as you like before upgrading. Give it some thought.