picdrop vs Pixieset: Which One Fits Your Delivery Workflow

Pick picdrop if your clients are businesses. Commercial and editorial delivery has a different shape from consumer delivery: several people review one shoot, they mark selects and leave notes, nobody is buying a canvas at the end, and the invoice is a purchase order rather than a card payment inside the gallery.

Pick Pixieset if your clients are consumers and part of your revenue is print sales. Pixieset bundles galleries with a store, a website builder and a studio management layer, and it charges no commission at all on any paid plan, which matters a great deal once the store is carrying real volume.

Neither answer is a compromise. The mistake is picking the consumer suite for agency work and then fighting its assumptions, or picking the commercial tool for a wedding business and discovering there is nothing to sell prints with.

picdrop is a German company and bills in euros. For a European studio that is a practical advantage rather than a footnote: the contract, the invoice and the data handling are all inside the same jurisdiction as the client.

The plan ladder is Free, Pro, Advanced, Business and Enterprise, five tiers read off picdrop's own pricing page today. Capacity is metered by storage rather than by gallery count, and picdrop sells add on storage from account settings when a plan runs short, priced by tier.

The limit worth understanding before you commit is what happens if you end up back on the free plan, whether by letting a trial lapse, cancelling, or downgrading. picdrop states that everything is preserved, and then states the consequence plainly. In picdrop's words, if your uploaded files exceed the storage limit or the number of galleries included in the free plan, the files and galleries above those limits can no longer be downloaded or accessed by third parties such as your clients. The free plan ceiling is three galleries and 1 GB.

Read that precisely, because it is narrower than the version that circulates. Nothing is deleted. Your own access is not described as cut. What stops is client access and downloading, and only for the galleries and files above the free plan ceiling. A downgrade does not bite immediately either: picdrop states you keep the plan you have already paid for until the end of the current billing period, and the new plan starts after that.

The practical read is that picdrop is excellent while you are paying for the tier your archive needs, and that your back catalogue is the thing that grows. Commercial delivery tends to accumulate: every campaign you shot last year is still sitting in the account, and the meter does not care that nobody has opened it since.

Pixieset is three products under one roof. Client Gallery is the delivery side, with tiers named Free, Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate. Suite adds the website builder, with Starter, Pro and Ultimate. Studio is the business layer, sold as Studio 60, Studio 80 and Studio 120. A studio that runs bookings, contracts and invoices inside Pixieset is using a genuinely integrated system, and that is hard to replace with a delivery tool.

The commission rule is the most consequential documented fact about Pixieset, and it is good news on paid plans. Pixieset states that every paid Client Gallery, Suite and Studio plan carries 0% commission, and that the Free plan carries 15%. It also states what the 15% is calculated on: the order subtotal, before any discounts, coupon codes, taxes or shipping fees are applied. And it states that the commission sits on top of whatever your payment processor charges, not instead of it.

That combination is why selling prints on a free Pixieset account is a bad idea and selling prints on a paid one is a reasonable one. The 15% applies to the biggest version of the number, before every deduction, and the processor takes its cut separately. Upgrading is not an upsell trick here, it is the correct move.

On longevity, Pixieset states that collections stay online for as long as you have an active subscription, or until you delete them yourself, and that they do not expire unless you use the Auto Expiry feature. It also states that if you cancel, collections are kept for a period of time before being deleted, without saying how long. That unstated window is a real planning gap if you are thinking about leaving one day. Where Auto Expiry is used deliberately, Pixieset states the collection is set to Hidden status at 11:59pm your local time on the date you set, and clients can no longer view their images.

On annual billing, Pixieset states that yearly plans offer up to a 20% discount compared to the monthly rate, and that Client Gallery plans start as low as $8 a month billed annually, or $10 a month billed monthly. That entry sentence is the only Pixieset price on this page, for the reason in the next section.

Every cell below is either a documented policy from the vendor or a product fact about clientgallery.io. Where a figure could not be verified from the vendor's own published material, the cell says so instead of guessing.

This site's rule is that a competitor number comes from the competitor's own published page, read on the day of publication, with the URL and date listed. Neither vendor cleared that bar on price today, for two different reasons.

Pixieset's marketing pages, including the pricing page, refuse automated access. The help centre does publish the entry sentence quoted above, and that is the single Pixieset price on this page. It publishes no per tier price table and no storage figure at all, so none appears here. Inferring the Basic or Pro price from the entry sentence would be a guess dressed up as a fact, and a comparison page that guesses is worth nothing to you.

picdrop's pricing page does load, but its price row could not be read reliably. Three separate extraction passes disagreed with each other, and each one attached a euro amount to the Free card, which is self evidently wrong. The monthly and annual toggle appears to shift values between columns. Plan names and the free plan limits came through the FAQ consistently, so those are published; the prices are not.

If price is your deciding factor, open both pricing pages in a normal browser and read them yourself. That takes two minutes and gives you today's numbers, which is better than anything a comparison page can promise.

There is a middle case. You shoot both commercial and consumer work. You need real proofing, where the client marks selects and comments on individual frames. You edit in Lightroom Classic and you do not want to export, upload, read a list of filenames off a web page and hand match them back into your catalog. You are not selling prints through a platform store, and you want the bill to stop moving as the archive grows.

That is the case clientgallery.io was built for. One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, with unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use. The fair use ceilings are published rather than hidden: 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, with 5 GB on a free account. Uploaded photos are browser compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, sized for fast viewing and hosted for as long as the account exists.

Full resolution delivery is deliberately separate. You upload a full resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for 3 days per handoff, and you can re-upload it any time the client comes back, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs on the account. That is a delivery mechanism, not an archive, and saying so is the honest version. The product hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video, and that is exactly what keeps one flat price viable.

The Lightroom Classic plugin closes the loop in both directions: publish web sized proofs straight from the catalog, and pull the client's picks back in as a collection. Galleries carry your studio's branding on your own subdomain, with no platform branding on anything the client sees. There is no print store, no commission, no per gallery fee and no storage tier to move between. Face Search is included, and sub galleries let you fold a long shoot into folders. The two way Lightroom workflow is written up in full here.

If you are coming from Pixieset, the move is a whole account import. On the Pixieset dashboard you click one bookmark, and it reads your account through the same dashboard interface the Pixieset web app already uses: every collection, its sets, titles, descriptions, event date, password and photo order. Galleries are reproduced one by one at full size under your brand. Pixieset is only read, never changed, and no password reaches clientgallery.io. Re-running skips what is already imported, so a large migration can run in stages without duplicates.

Stay on picdrop if your clients are agencies and the review is the product. Collaboration with an art director who marks selects and leaves notes, on a European contract in euros, is what picdrop is for, and it is a better tool for that job than a flat price delivery gallery. Budget for the tier your back catalogue needs and the quota question never arises.

Stay on Pixieset if your print sales run through the store and your bookings live in Studio Manager. Paid plans carry 0% commission, the store handles fulfilment, and the website builder and business layer sit in the same subscription. Leaving that for a delivery tool means giving up the store and the CRM. That is a real loss, not a marketing objection, and no gallery price makes it worth it if the store is earning.

Look at a flat plan if you are only delivering photos. If the store is not earning, the CRM is a spreadsheet, and the meter is the thing that keeps creeping upward, then you are paying for a suite to do one job. One plan, your branding, a two way Lightroom loop and published fair use ceilings is a simpler trade.

Every competitor statement above traces to one of these. Pixieset figures are cited with the update date of the help centre article that carries them, because that is the date Pixieset last published the claim.

• picdrop, FAQ (free plan limits of 3 galleries and 1 GB, over quota behaviour, downgrade timing, add on storage): picdrop.com/web/faq , fetched 11 September 2026.
• picdrop, pricing page (plan names Free, Pro, Advanced, Business, Enterprise only): picdrop.com/web/pricing , fetched 11 September 2026.
• Pixieset, "How does the 0% commission fee work?" (0% on paid plans, 15% on Free, the subtotal basis, processor fees on top, plan name taxonomy): help.pixieset.com article 115002975072 , article updated 8 September 2026.
• Pixieset, "What is the cost of goods sold / application fee?" (15% on the Free plan restated, entry price of $8 a month billed annually or $10 a month billed monthly): help.pixieset.com article 115003793352 , article updated 11 September 2026.
• Pixieset, "Managing your Pixieset subscription" (yearly plans offer up to a 20% discount compared to the monthly rate): help.pixieset.com article 115003816812 , article updated 11 September 2026.
• Pixieset, "Do my Collections expire?" (collections stay online while the subscription is active, kept for an unstated period after cancellation): help.pixieset.com article 115002975012 , article updated 14 July 2026.
• Pixieset, "How do I set an Expiry Date to the Gallery?" (Auto Expiry sets a collection to Hidden at 11:59pm local time on the chosen date): help.pixieset.com article 115003479211 , article updated 10 August 2026.
• clientgallery.io plan, fair use ceilings, full resolution ZIP behaviour, Lightroom plugin and Pixieset import: verified in the product code, 2 September 2026.