Pixpa Review 2024: The best website builder for portfolio?

Pixpa is one of the black horses available in the market if you are looking for a portfolio website builder. But can it compete with Wix, Squarespace and other big names in the website builder space? Find out in our detailed review of Pixpa.

Our verdict

Pixpa is packed with minimalist, beautiful templates dedicated to building portfolio websites for creatives and small businesses in creative niche.

They have dedicated features for photographers like client gallery and mobile gallery app which we loved trying out.   Their ecommerce features are handy for photographers and artists who are looking to sell digital and physical prints of their work without losing out any commission on sales.

Though you won't find their user interface and navigation appealing as Wix, their affordable pricing plans make up for these minor drawbacks.

Pros of Pixpa

• Beautiful templates designed for portfolios
• Next-gen images formats like WebP and AVIF to load images faster
• Client galleries makes sharing and proofing work easier to clients
• No commission taken on ecommerce sales 
• Options to watermark and password protect images
• Best customer support with less than 5 minutes response time
• Pricing is reasonable compared to similar website builders

Cons of Pixpa

• No free plan and basic plan has limited features
• Can add more third party printing companies other than WHCC
• Lack of AI integration
• Not much of video based tutorials available

What is Pixpa?

Pixpa is an all-in-one website builder dedicated for photographers and creatives to build their portfolio websites without having the need of any coding knowledge. Pixpa is also packed with ecommerce and unique features like client gallery and photo gallery app which makes it a popular choice among photographers. If you are working in a creative niche and want to showcase your work online, Pixpa has some standout image focused templates for you.

Who is Pixpa for? Who should avoid it

Pixpa is not a generic website builder like Wix or Squarespace where you could build websites for any kind of business. Everything about Pixpa is built with creatives in mind. There are features like client galleries only few website builders like Pixieset, CloudSpot etc are providing. Pixpa also have around 150+ templates and most of them seem to be made for showcasing portfolios. 

Pixpa for photographers: Based on the website examples of Pixpa users, most of them seem to be photographers who have built their photography portfolio with Pixpa. Features like client gallery, mobile gallery app and ecommerce feature to sell physical and digital products and prints makes it an ideal choice for photographers.

Pixpa for other creatives: Pixpa is not just for photographers. You can built your portfolio if you are working anything around images. Be it a designer or artist, you can easily showcase and sell your work online with Pixpa.

Pixpa for bloggers: Though I wouldn't suggest Pixpa for regular blogging, Pixpa has all the SEO features which you only get in paid versions of WordPress plugins. If your blog is about travel or photography,where your blog page is image heavy, Pixpa can be a good choice as they use next gen image formats to load images faster. 

Pixpa for resumes: If you are looking at a freelance work or getting hired, an online resume gives a striking first impression. By creating it with Pixpa, your resume can be easily edited, more space to grow and add your work, and you can grow your presence in google searches. Pixpa has templates designed to build resumes. 

Pixpa for students: Pixpa is one of the most affordable website builders in the market which makes it an ideal choice to build your portfolio with Pixpa. They also provide a 50% discount on their product if you chat with the customer support team. 

Pixpa for models, actors and performers: Pixpa have options for music embeds, event listings, payment collection and lookbooks that make it easier to reach a wider audience.

If you are not looking to build your portfolio or your website is not image heavy, you have options to look elsewhere. If you want to build an ecommerce website, large product catalogs and complex tax configurations can be handled better by Shopify. As for flexibility and drag and drop features, you could easily go for Wix.

Though Pixpa has all the SEO capabilities, Wix has direct ties with Google and offers lot of advanced marketing features compared to Pixpa

Experience with Pixpa’s user interface and navigation

Pixpa's user interface and navigation is just as good as any other website builder I could think of. Compared to the interface of Wix, you can feel the reload whenever you click on the menu. But I didn't feel it to be an issue since the page loads really fast on clicks.

On the website section, you can find the site menu where there will be a list of pages which you can design. You can also easily add new pages from here.

You can easily add anything to your design by clicking 'Add a section to your page' button. Though these section are not drag and drop, you do not really feel the need of having a drag and drop interface since everything can be easily added or moved with small navigation menu available when you click on a section.

Almost everything is highly customizable with Pixpa. You can update the padding to your choice, add separators and even change the length and width to your choice.

I would assume most the users including me would settle for the default option provided by Pixpa instead of playing with these minute customization because you can still design beautiful websites with their templates and preset options. But this is how Pixpa is, it can be whatever you want it to be.

Though it has a well structured framework to make design changes, this however is not for users with low attention span to go through their help articles

How good is client gallery feature in Pixpa?

Client gallery makes it easier for photographers to collaborate with their clients. It can be used to share, proof, sell and deliver images to clients.

Pixpa has one of the best client gallery features out there. You can create unlimited albums and there are multiple design layouts which are designed to work on mobile devices. You can also set your custom branding by adding logo and brand colors. There is an option to add PIN protection for more security to your galleries

Is Pixpa good for building an online store?

Pixpa seamlessly integrates ecommerce along with portfolios. Creatives can showcase their work and set up a store to buy their work for those who are impressed with the work showcased in their portfolio website. 

Their e-commerce includes customizable store design, the ability to create and manage products, rich product descriptions, and the option to sell digital products.  They also do not take any commission on sale.

What are the Integrations available in Pixpa?

Pixpa offers 100+ integrations including Google Analytics, WHCC for automated order fulfillments, PayPal for payment collection, appointment scheduling apps and more. 

What are the SEO and marketing features available in Pixpa?

You do not need to add any 3rd party plugins to rank your website in search engines. Pixpa offers a good checklist during onboarding, options to add external scripts, Automatic sitemap and robots.txt generation, clean HTML markup, and images optimized with next gen formats to speed up the website.

Here's the full list of what Pixpa offers in terms of SEO

• Mobile friendly websites
• Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make your site load faster
• Include a free SSL certificate for secure website
• Auto generated sitemap in the correct .xml format to index your website
• Auto generated specialized sitemap for all gallery images on your website
• Option to add unique metadata for each page
• Clean, static URLs that are easily indexed by search engines
• Correct canonical URLs using "rel=canonical" tag
• Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
• Ability to easily setup 301 redirects
• Set site languages to rank in regional search engines
• Next-generation image formats (AVIF & WebP) for higher load speeds and SEO performance
• Ability to add unique metadata to each product foe ecommerce store
• Tracking analyze website traffic with Google Analytics integration

Marketing features available in Pixpa:

Since Pixpa is all about creating portfolios, I didn't expect them to have an arsenal of marketing features similar to what we usually see in big website builders like Wix and Shopify. Here's the available marketing features in addition to the SEO features they have.

• Show important announcements, discounts and offers with marketing popups feature.
• Full-width announcement bar to highlight offers
• Mobile Action Bar which can include up to 4 call-to-action links
• WhatsApp widgets
• Email lists to collect orders, website submissions, forms etc

Customer Support and Resources

Pixpa has a chat based and email based customer support. Pixpa is also best known for their customer support, I would say Pixpa has the best best support team in website builder space in terms of Response time and guiding you throughout to fix your issue or getting something done on your website.

Here's a screenshot of my interaction with their support team. I got the reply in less than 3 minutes.

Though I have not seen any tutorial videos, you can find everything about Pixpa in their help section. Help section is mapped well with categories like how to guides, FAQs, Client galleries and more. If you are having a hard time finding something in help section, you can either use their search bar in help.pixpa.com or get guidance from their chat support.

Chat window showed Manoj + 7 others, which I am assuming there is a team of 8 in total for chat support team which is pretty good given their response time.

Pricing plans of Pixpa

Pixpa is not free to use platform. You can access Pixpa free for 15 days trial. You do not need credit card details to start the trial. If you want to purchase the Pixpa plan, you can find Pixpa's pricing to be cheaper than many of the website builders. Pixpa also runs discounts most of the time.

Their trial plan gives access to almost all the features Pixpa has to offer. If you want to extend the trial, you can get it done by Pixpa's customer support. Below are the current pricing of Pixpa

Monthly pricing plan of Pixpa

Yearly pricing plan of Pixpa

Two yearly pricing plan of Pixpa

Does Pixpa have a community?

Currently I do not see any community based domains or social media groups around Pixpa. But Pixpa have a good word of mouth in X (Twitter) and Instagram and a lot of mentions by Youtubers suggesting Pixpa as the go-to website builder for photographers.

User reviews of Pixpa

Pixpa is rated well by their users with an average rating or 4.7/5. Most of the reviewers are in creative niche who moved from big website builders like Wix, Squarespace, Format and Zyro which is quite impressive.

Here are some of the reviews written about Pixpa in these platforms

What are the best alternatives to Pixpa?

If your prefer to have invoices, quotes and contracts taken care of in a single platform, Pixieset offers a studio manager along with website builder and client gallery feature.

IMCreator and Fabrik also put a strong competition to Pixpa with their beautifully designed templates.

Frequently asked questions about Pixpa