Seeking the top logo design service? 99designs and DesignCrowd are both crowdsourcing creative platforms that facilitate collaboration between professional designers and clients. These platforms organise contests for designers, where they create digital assets, including logos, web designs, and graphics, for clients and win prize money. It is a win-win for both parties – for designers as well as for the clients. So where lies the difference?
On the face of it, both of them may appear similar. However, if you dig deeper, you will find several distinguishable factors.
99designs is the largest online graphic design service platform, connecting graphic designers with projects and contests to work on. It includes approximately 1.4 million registered professional designers in its community and has paid out $200 million to date to the designers. This featured, sizable platform offers a wide range of design products, including logos, web design, music album covers, 3D designs, and more.
In contrast to 99designs, DesignCrowd is a small online community with just 640000 designers and $47 million in revenue to date. Though both platform maintains a global presence, DesignCrowd can reach only a limited audience in comparison with 99designs. This difference in size reveals the formal difference between the two.
Is that all about the differences? Of course not. This was just a clear factor to distinguish the two, apparently. And a lot more to come in the way.
1. Design Contest pricing:
It's hard to compare the contest pricing between the two platforms. However, we have still managed to draw a comparison. Let us have a look.
Both design platforms allow you to choose packages at different price points and charge an additional amount for every extra feature. However, relative to 99designs, DesignCrowd packages are generally cheaper. Well, that doesn't mean
DesignCrowd is bad for designers. DesignCrowd works in principle – the more you pay, the more DesignCrowd offers you with the design submissions, regardless of the designers' efficiency. While in the case of 99designs, a more expensive package implies the participation of high-level designers in your contest. Consequently, you can expect a lot of high-level submissions accordingly.
2. Design Quality:
Paying extra on 99designs will offer you a better selection of designers. This obviously doesn't imply that designers at DesignCrowd are bad. Many are actually talented. But 99designs, compared to the latter, offers designers far better consistency.
For the startups, DesignCrowd arranges its designers according to their five-star ratings. Clients essentially provide the ratings, and therefore, if they fail to do so, the platform also fails to store their designs in its system. According to the statistics, among 600,000 designers, only about 42000 have their individual ratings.
In the case of 99designs, designers are ranked based on a personal assessment conducted by the staff. For this, the graphic designers are asked to submit a bio that includes their repeat clients, contest wins, response time, and their specialisation. These classifications categorise designers as Entry-level, Mid-level, or Top-level, enabling clients to find a suitable designer for their project.
3. Design Contest process:
In the battle between DesignCrowd and 99designs, the process of conducting contests is remarkably similar. Clients provide a design brief according to their preferences, and the designers must design their concepts accordingly. Finally, in the end, they will give feedback to their selected designers and both offer a guaranteed money-back. But where lies the difference?

In 99designs contests, the briefs are more in-depth, whereas DesignCrowd offers standard, one-page briefs. However, 99designs always strives to understand the clients' preferences and assist designers thoroughly. As a result, it encourages the designers to produce far better results.
Furthermore, both DesignCrowd and 99designs offer direct hiring on projects. However, DesignCrowd mainly focuses on design contests rather than directly working with designers.
Now, since you are well aware of all the differences, it will be far easier for you to find a helpful platform. If you are highly concerned about price and expenses, then it is better to prefer DesignCrowd. On the other hand, if you are
concerned only with graphic designs, their quality, and hiring hardcore designers, then you should skip to 99designs.
So what's your choice?
Whatever it may be, you will get a lot of
impressive ideas on logos as well as on graphics.