PhotoShelter vs Pixieset: What Each One Actually Publishes

Pick PhotoShelter if the photos are the asset. It is the right shape for an archive that people search, request and license: a library with permissions, sitewide download rules and outbound transfer to other systems. PhotoShelter's supported file types article recommends JPG and TIFF and documents RAW, PSD, DNG, PDF, SVG, EPS, GIF, HEIF/HEIC, PNG and HDR with per-format caveats (help centre article updated 28 July 2026), which tells you what it is for.

Pick Pixieset if the store is the point. If a meaningful part of your revenue comes from clients ordering prints and products through the gallery, Pixieset is built for that, and its own commission article is the clearest published statement of how that side works.

Pick neither if what you actually need is delivery and proofing at a flat price. That is the third option this page covers at the end, and we say plainly where it does not fit.

This is not a two-vendor price table. It is PhotoShelter's own published table for the Photographers product, read from its pricing page on 23 September 2026. The page shows a monthly and annual toggle; the figures below are the annual-billing view exactly as the page states them. The page uses a bare dollar sign and never names a currency code, so no currency is asserted here.

Two rows are easy to misread. Storage is metered in bytes, never in photo count, so 4 GB on Basic is a small archive once TIFF or RAW files are in it. And "Users: 1" is a plan contents row, not a price per seat: PhotoShelter publishes no per-user price for this product at all.

PhotoShelter also runs a second, separate product, PhotoShelter for Brands, with plans named Starter, Standard, Pro, Premium and Enterprise, storage from 1 TB to custom, and library seats from 2 to custom. Every button on that page reads "Get Pricing". No dollar amount appears on it, so none is quoted here.

Pixieset's per-tier prices and per-tier storage figures are not published in any source we are willing to cite. The help centre articles that discuss plans name the tiers and then link out to the pricing page for the numbers, and that pricing page refuses automated requests. A figure copied from a review site is not the vendor speaking, and a price reconstructed from an entry figure is a guess wearing a number.

So we leave it out, and we tell you where to get it: open pixieset.com/pricing in your own browser, where it loads normally. Check it the same day you decide.

What Pixieset does publish, and what the rest of this page uses, is the plan taxonomy and the rules. The tiers it names are Client Gallery Free, Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate, alongside Suite Starter, Pro and Ultimate, and Studio 60, 80 and 120.

This is the one commercial axis where both publish enough to compare. Both charge a percentage of sales on top of whatever the payment processor takes, and both say so in their own words.

PhotoShelter states the tier split as Basic 10%, Standard 9%, Pro 8%, and adds that "This transaction fee applies to all orders, including self-fulfilled orders" and that it is assessed at the time of sale and added to next month's statement (article updated 4 June 2024). The live pricing page repeats the 8% to 10% range.

Pixieset states that "Commission fees are only charged on orders placed while you are subscribed to the Client Gallery - Free plan", at 15%, and that every paid Client Gallery, Suite and Studio plan is at zero (article updated 8 September 2026). That is a real structural difference: on PhotoShelter the percentage never reaches zero, and on Pixieset the paid subscription is what buys it away.

Each flow is shaped by what the product is protecting: PhotoShelter a library, Pixieset a delivery. On PhotoShelter, download permission is set on the gallery or collection. PhotoShelter states there are "three options for setting download permissions: (1) Create a password (2) Grant access to specific people (login required) (3) Grant access to anyone (anonymous downloads)", with expiration dates and download limits available, and visibility set to "Everyone", "Those with permission" or "No one but me" (articles updated 21 May 2025). The client receives the size you selected plus any smaller options, with "Original file" as the largest. A sitewide Trusted Client Download setting can give named people standing permission across the site (article updated 9 April 2024).

On Pixieset, the documented client flow is a download icon at the top right, then an email address and a download PIN where one applies, then confirming the sets and the size, then Start Download. Pixieset states the download starts processing immediately and the client "can leave their browser window open or leave and be notified by email once their photos are ready". A full collection arrives as a ZIP, and large collections may be split across several ZIP files (article updated 21 September 2026).

The PIN is not optional by default. Pixieset states that it "automatically sets a 4-digit download PIN for collections", applying to photos and videos, and that the photographer can switch it off in the collection download settings (articles updated 15 and 22 September 2026). A photographer who has never opened those settings is shipping a PIN step to every client.

Pixieset also documents real limits the photographer can apply: capping how many photos can be downloaded across all visitors or per individual contact, restricting downloads to specific contacts so the cap applies to each one separately, limiting how many times a PIN can be used for gallery downloads, and choosing which sets are downloadable at all (article updated 23 September 2026). Download sizes are documented as 640, 1024 and 2048 pixels on the web sizes, and a 3600 pixel maximum for high resolution, or original size on upgraded accounts (article updated 21 September 2026).

Pixieset states that collections "will stay online for as long as you have an active subscription, or until you delete them yourself; they do not expire (unless you use our Auto-Expiry feature)". On cancellation it states that "If you cancel your Subscription, your Collections will be kept for a period of time before being deleted", and gives no length for that period (article updated 16 September 2026). That unstated window is the part worth planning around before you cancel anything.

Pixieset's help centre does document one owner-side bulk download, and it is narrow: under Activities and Favorite Activity, a client's Favorites list can be downloaded from the three-dot menu with Download all, or sent as a download link by email, with filenames exportable to a Lightroom Copy List (article updated 16 September 2026). Searching the help centre for an account-level export of originals returns nothing, so the honest statement is that Pixieset does not document one, not that it forbids one.

PhotoShelter documents the opposite posture. It lists outbound export over "FTP, FTPS (FTP w/support for TLS/SSL), sFTP (secure FTP), scp (secure copy)", to several destinations at once, and states that originals can go as they are or be converted on the way out: "If you'd like to convert your originals to JPEGs or send smaller JPEGs out, select JPEG file from the drop-down menu" (article updated 10 November 2025). If you care about being able to leave, that difference is the one to weigh.

We are the third option, and we are a narrower one. clientgallery.io is one plan at $10 a month or $100 a year. There is no print store, no commission on anything, and no per-seat pricing, because there is no seat model at all: a two-person studio shares one account. We host JPEG proofs and we do not warehouse RAW files, which is what keeps the price flat.

The fair-use figures, stated plainly so you can check them against a cap you are paying for today: 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account, and 5 GB on a free account. Full-resolution delivery is a separate mechanism, not a storage promise. You upload a full-resolution ZIP for a gallery, it stays live for three days per handoff, you can re-upload it any time, and you can keep 100 GB of standing ZIPs on the account.

Galleries sit on your own subdomain with no platform branding on them. Picks and comments come back into Lightroom Classic through a two-way plugin. If you are moving off Pixieset, a whole-account import reads your Pixieset dashboard through its own read-only interface, brings galleries across at Pixieset's largest web size, and skips what it has already imported so it can run in stages. It is a migration, not a backup: your masters stay on your drives.

Where we do not fit: if you sell prints through the gallery, we have nothing for you, and Pixieset does. If your library needs metadata search, licensing workflow and FTP transfer out to other systems, we have nothing for you, and PhotoShelter does.

A studio whose revenue runs through a print lab and a gallery store should stay on Pixieset. The commission structure is the clearest thing it publishes, and paid plans take the percentage to zero. Check its current prices yourself in a browser before you commit, because this page cannot give them to you.

An archive and licensing operation should stay on PhotoShelter. It meters storage in bytes, lists RAW, PSD, DNG and TIFF among its supported file types, gives you permission levels down to named people, and lets you push the library back out over FTP. The 8% to 10% on every sale is the price of that, and it never goes to zero.

A portrait, wedding or commercial studio that mostly needs to send galleries, collect picks and hand over finished files is paying for a lot of machinery it never opens. That is the case for a flat-priced delivery and proofing tool, ours or someone else's. Compare on the figures, not the feature grid.

PhotoShelter, live pages fetched 23 September 2026:

• PhotoShelter for Photographers pricing: go.photoshelter.com/photographers/ (fetched 23 September 2026)
• PhotoShelter for Brands pricing: go.photoshelter.com/brands/pricing/ (fetched 23 September 2026)

PhotoShelter help centre, each cited with that article's own update date:

• Self-Fulfilled Prints and Products (transaction fee by tier): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203373140 (updated 4 June 2024)
• Gallery and Collection Access: Who Can Download Your Images: support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374400 (updated 21 May 2025)
• Managing Visibility and Download Permissions: support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374470 (updated 21 May 2025)
• Trusted Client Download: support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374530 (updated 9 April 2024)
• Exporting Images via Outbound FTP: support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203374490 (updated 10 November 2025)
• Viewing and Downloading Images for Clients (bulk zip): support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037537394 (updated 12 November 2019)
• Supported File Types: support.photoshelter.com/hc/en-us/articles/203373520 (updated 28 July 2026)

Pixieset help centre, each cited with that article's own update date:

• How does the 0% commission fee work: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072 (updated 8 September 2026)
• Your client's download experience: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003594212 (updated 21 September 2026)
• What is my client's Download PIN: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/43979216610445 (updated 15 September 2026)
• Collection download settings: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003795572 (updated 22 September 2026)
• Limiting free downloads and other restrictions: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003008091 (updated 23 September 2026)
• Downloads (download sizes): help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003810212 (updated 21 September 2026)
• Do my Collections expire: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975012 (updated 16 September 2026)
• How do I download my client's Favorites: help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003003931 (updated 16 September 2026)

Pixieset per-tier prices and per-tier storage figures are absent from this page on purpose. No first-party source we can cite publishes them. Check pixieset.com/pricing in your own browser on the day you decide.