Pixline vs SmugMug
SmugMug is the storage and portfolio platform: unlimited, zero-compression images, print fulfilment through Bay Photo and WHCC, and a website you control down to the CSS. It is not a delivery tool for an event with forty families in it, and it does not pretend to be.
What SmugMug does well
- Unlimited, zero-compression storage — the best of these for archiving a lifetime of work.
- Lightroom and Capture One integration, and privacy settings granular enough to be useful.
- Print fulfilment through Bay Photo and WHCC, and a website you can customize down to the CSS.
- Long-established and stable; the platform is not going anywhere.
Where delivery breaks for an event with forty kids
SmugMug has no free plan and a trial that requires a card. Galleries are password protected and organized by you, by hand. There is no client mobile app, and the platform has no concept of a person in a photograph: a school photo day becomes either one gallery of 200 photos that everyone sees, or forty galleries you built yourself.
What Pixline does instead
| Problem | SmugMug | Pixline |
|---|---|---|
| Forty families, one gallery | You create and name each gallery manually; the platform does not know who is in a photo | Faces are detected and clustered, families are named once, each gets its own link |
| Getting files onto a phone | Gallery download; no client mobile app | A save-all page of direct image links, verified in a 390×844 phone viewport |
| Commission | 15% markup on print sales on the lower tiers; zero only on Pro | 0% on every plan |
| Knowing who opened it | Analytics per gallery | Views and downloads per family, plus a suppression list naming the families whose email bounced |
These are measured on the staging deployment: open the demo event and look at what each family sees.
Price
| Tier | SmugMug | Pixline |
|---|---|---|
| Free | None — 14-day trial, card required | One event, 100 photos, 30-day galleries, Pixline-branded |
| Paid | Roughly $11/mo Basic, $28/mo Power, $42/mo Portfolio, $53/mo Pro, all unlimited storage | $9.99/mo or $99/yr. 100 GB, unlimited events, unlimited families |
When SmugMug is the right choice
If you are archiving a lifetime of work and selling prints from a portfolio site, SmugMug is the better product and Pixline is not competing with it. Pixline is for the afternoon shoot where forty different families each need their own set of photos by Friday.