Printful vs Apliiq 2025: The Battle of The POD Services?

Let me be real with you.

If you’re trying to build a print on demand brand and stuck choosing between Apliiq and Printful, the answer isn’t simple — it depends on whether you want to build a real clothing brand or just sell some quick merch.

I’ve run multiple POD stores over the last decade, scaled and failed with both platforms, and tested everything from DTG to embroidery to full private label setups.

This guide’s gonna break it all down — no corporate BS.
Just the stuff you actually need to know to make money with print on demand.

The Biggest Difference: Brand Control vs Speed

Let’s cut through it:

• Apliiq = Fashion branding powerhouse. Think woven labels, private label streetwear, and customisation that actually makes your product look pro.
• Printful = Swiss Army knife for speed and scale. It gets stuff printed and shipped fast, but your product looks like every other POD store out there.

If you care about brand perception and building something that people wear — not just buy once — Apliiq’s the stronger choice.

If you just want to push merch for followers or test ideas quickly? Printful's a beast.

So, without further ado, let’s crack on.

Printful vs Apliiq: Their Similarities

• Both companies offer dropshipping services.
• Both provide a range of customization options to choose from
• Both are compatible with Shopify stores
• Both manage your inventory for you

Printful vs Apliiq: Their Differences

• Apliiq offers other services like embroidery design and patches, which Printful doesn't
• Printful allows users to design products like canvases and mugs, whereas Apliiq specializes in clothing.
• Apliiq’s specialty is ‘streetwear,’ whereas Printful is more varied
• Apliiq’s integrations are limited (just two), whereas Printful has a much more comprehensive range of options

What is Printful?

Printful is a print-on-demand service that offers warehousing and fulfillment services to help online merchants fulfill and ship high-quality products and merch.

Printful was founded in 2013, and since then, the company has grown from strength to strength. In 2019, they celebrated their10m fulfilled products milestone.

Then, in 2020, the company began to expand its services and enter new markets. As a result, Printful is a strong competitor in the print-on-demand world. They’ve even won awards likeForbes 2021 ‘Americas Best Startup Employers.'

Prinftul offers its services to online businesses and people wanting to gift personalized t-shirts (or other items) to family or friends. Whenever a purchase is made (by you or your customers), Printful automatically receives the order, fulfills it, and ships it.

The service is free to set up, and there are no minimum order requirements or monthly fees. Printful also offers its customers a range of features like private packaging, branding options, product labeling, creative design, and more.

What is Apliiq?

Apliiq was founded in 2009, and since then, the company has generated a staggering$845,000 in funding. They’ve beenrecognized by the Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Comedy Central, and many other reputable names.

Like Printful, Apliiq is another print-on-demand company that helps online merchants bring their brand ideas to life. Apliiq also offers fulfillment and shipping services, so managing your store has never been easier. However, Apliiq specializes in streetwear clothing, so you can't use their printing services for other custom items like mugs and canvases.

Apliiq enables you to work with their artists to design your own labels and clothing. You can order samples and/or your entire collection in bulk. If you opt to do so, you'll benefit from a discount. Apliiq is free to use, but you’ll incur costs for shipping products. In addition, their dropshipping services mean you won’t have to worry about looking after your own inventory. 

Printful's: Pros and Cons

As this review comes to a close, let's take a quick look at both platform's pros and cons, starting with Printful's pros:

Apliiq: Pros and Cons

Now let's take a look at Apliiq's pros and cons:

Printful's Key Features

Now we’ve touched on the central premise of Printful’s services, but what key features does it offer? Let’s take a closer look below.

Mockup Generator

Printful has its own unique mockup and print file generator. This feature allows customers to bring their brand’s vision to life and create print ideas to customize their unique products.

Simply choose a product from the product catalog, upload an existing design to the product (or create a new design with the generator), and place it on it.

You can do this to get a simple, visual idea of what your product will look like. Alternatively, if you’re happy with the final image, you can use it on your store to promote your product.

You can create mockup images for all products, from t-shirts, leggings, totes, and hoodies to canvases and phone cases.

Warehouse and Fulfilment

With Printful, you can take advantage of their dropshipping services. You can store products at one of their warehouses, and when a customer makes a purchase through your online store, Printful will fulfill and ship the orders for you.

Printful offers same-day shipping for warehouse orders placed before 12pm. In addition, you can store inventory at several fulfillment centers across Europe, America, Canada, Latvia, Spain, Barcelona, or Riga. For a complete list of fulfillment centers, head over to Printful's website.

Printful Warehousing & Fulfillment Pricing

		US	Europe	UK	Canada
Processing & Fulfillment Fees	Product fulfillment fee (per order)	$2.00	€1.75	£1.60	C$2.80
	Product picking fee (per product)	$0.95	€0.80	£0.75	C$1.30
	Pack-in fulfillment fee (per order with pack-ins)	Free	Free	Free	Free
	Pack-in picking fee (per pack-in added to order)	$0.50	€0.45	£0.45	C$0.70
	Custom packaging fulfillment fee (per order with packing)	Free	Free	Free	Free
	Custom packaging picking fee (per packaging used for order)	$0.50	€0.45	£0.45	C$0.70
	Receiving & processing fee	Free	Free	Free	Free
	Packaging materials	Fee varies	Fee varies	Fee varies	Fee varies
	Stock removal fee	Fee varies	Fee varies	Fee varies	Fee varies
Storage fees (per cu. ft.)	1–25 cu. ft.	$1.60	€1.40	£1.30	C$2.20
	25–300 cu. ft.	$1.25	€1.10	£1.05	C$1.70
	300+ cu. ft.	$0.80	€0.70	£0.65	C$1.00
Minimum monthly storage fee	Products	$150	€150	£135	C$210
	Only branding items (custom packaging and pack-ins)	$25	€22	£20	C$35

Product Catalog

Printful offers its customers an extensiveproduct catalog, including:

• Men and women’s clothing
• Kids and youth clothing
• Accessories
• Home living
• Collections (including loungewear, fall and winter clothing, gifts, eco-friendly clothing, and more).

Simply pick an item from the catalog you want to customize, upload your design to Printful or create a text-based design using Printful's editor and order.

This is great for anyone looking to customize apparel to create their own clothing line. You don't have to worry about investing in printing equipment, inventory, or minimum order volumes.

Custom Branding Options

With Printful, there are numerous ways to brand your products. Their range of custom branding options include:

• Pack-ins:These could be custom flyers or coupons, business cards, branded stickers, postcards, or hand-written cards. You can choose any of these to include with your order for that personalized touch.
• White-label branding:You can brand the inside label of your t-shirt directly through Printful’s platform. According to their website, this costs $2.49 per label. You can also print custom labels on the outside of your t-shirts for the same price.
• Branded stickers:You can add branded stickers to your packaging to promote your business, completely free of charge. This can be done directly through Printful's dashboard.
• Printful return address:You can use Printful’s return address. They'll take care of shipping and returns for you, but your address and company name will be the ones listed on the packaging. That way, your partnership with Printful isn’t explicitly apparent to your customers. Instead, you can focus on boosting your brand awareness rather than promoting Printful.

Shipping Options

Printful has several shipping options available. On average, fulfillment takes between 2-7 business days, and the average shipping time is 6 business days (depending on delivery method/destination).

Each product has its own shipping price, and this price varies depending on the country you’re shipping to. For example, t-shirts shipping to America cost $3.10 for the first product and $1 for each additional product.

Mobile App

The Printful mobile app allows you to run your Printful store from anywhere. The app is currently available for both iOS and Android, and it has powerful capabilities, including:

• Order creation
• You can confirm incoming orders (so Printful can fulfill your orders and send them to your customers)
• Contact customer support
• Order hold (place orders on hold, or remove order holds, when necessary)
• Track orders(You can see the progress of your order and track it all the way through the fulfillment and shipment process)

Affiliate Program

If you’re a Printful user, you can join their affiliate program. After you sign up, simply promote your affiliate link to your audience and earn a 10% commission on every order you make.

According to Printful, their affiliates have made a combined$1.3m in commissions. The ways you could promote your affiliate products are seemingly endless.

For example, you could:

• Run a blog:Create blog posts or articles with affiliate links, talking about how to use Printful, review pieces, pros and cons pieces, or ‘how to’ guides.
• Run influencer promotions:If you’re an influencer (or have a large following online), you could run promotions and competitions to generate interest in Printful.
• Use Youtube:You could publish videos on Youtube reviewing your experience with Printful, encouraging others to use the service.

Creative Services

Printful has a range of creative services that you could take advantage of. Here, you’ll work directly with Printful. Just tell them what you need, and they’ll get back to you with a quote and start designing. Simple, right?

Printful's creative services include:

• Merchandise design:Typography design, pattern design, vector graphics designs, and other custom designs.
• Print file editing: Reformatting files, recreating files to a higher quality, changing the color of designs, Photoshop editing, other print adjustments.
• Illustration design:Character design, line art design, colored graphic design illustration, digital painting design.
• Branding design:Logo design, logo redesign, sticker design, business card design, brand style guide design.
• Social media design: Facebook cover design, Instagram, Facebook ads, and blog post graphics.

Because Printful designs everything from scratch, it can take up to two weeks to complete orders. They also work with a prepayment system, meaning they’ll only start fulfilling your orders once you’ve covered your fees.

Integrations

Printful offers its users several integrations, including:

• Shopify
• Etsy
• WooCommerce
• Wix
• Squarespace
• Webflow
• Amazon
• eBay

…and many more.

Apliiq's Key Features

Now we’ve had an in-depth look at Printful’s essential features, let’s see what Apliiq has to offer.

Product Catalog

Like Printful, Apliiq has an extensive product catalog for customers to browse, including:

• Women’s clothing
• Men’s clothing
• Kids and youth clothing
• Hoodies
• Hats
• Pants
• Jackets
• Patches

They also have a range of collections including, ‘eco-friendly,’ ‘hot-new’ and ‘face-scarves.’

Printing Options

With Apliiq, you have a few different printing options to choose from, including:

• Digital printing: You can print realistic photo artwork in multiple colors.
• Screen printing: Upload your artwork to custom shirts.
• Embroidery:If you don’t want to print, you can stitch your designs instead. With Apliiq, you can embroider hats, joggers, hoodies, and more.
• Applique:With this option, you can create your design from fabric and stitching. Stitch your own designs onto hoodies, sweatshirts, and more. Here, Apliiq takes your design, traces it onto fabric, then cuts it out and sews it onto a garment.

Plus, all of Apliiq’s printing techniques are environmentally friendly. Everything is non-toxic, non-hazardous, vegan, organic, and biodegradable.

Customization Options

With Apliiq, you can benefit from the following branding customization options:

• Custom clothing tags:Design your own branded tags for your clothing. These can be flat beanie labels, neck tags, folded clothing tags, and more.
• Custom packaging: Send Apliiq your custom packaging, and they’ll use it to ship the orders you choose.
• Packaging slips:You can send off customized packaging slips to customers with each order. You can include information like social media handles, a thank you message, sticker inserts, and more.

Please note: According to Apliiq, custom options are only available if you send out more than 250 orders a month.

Product Descriptions

You’ll have the choice of creating your own product descriptions or letting Apliiq generate a description for you. You can edit these descriptions whenever you like, according to your own preferences. You can also change your settings at any time so that you can have a mixture of auto-generated descriptions as well as your own work.

Shipping Options

Apliiq offers a range of shipping options. However, standard shipping is only available on dropshipping orders.

In addition, to standard shipping, the following are available for sample and bulk orders:

• Upgraded shipping: This option takes 2-7 days to ship, and it’s available for items weighing 16oz or more.
• Rush shipping:Shipping timescales aren’t listed for this option, but Apliiq brand it as an “extremely fast” shipping service. This is available for shipments of all sizes.

Apliiq also ships internationally using USPS to over 150 countries worldwide.

Integrations

Apliiq integrates with Shopify and Flamory. Flamory is software that allows you to create online and offline bookmarks.

Printful Pricing: The Real Breakdown for 2025

If you’re confused about Printful pricing in 2025 — you’re not alone.

Printful’s changed its pricing model a few times over the years, and what used to feel expensive is now actually one of the best value setups in the POD space.

Right now, here’s how it works:

Two Simple Plans

• Free Plan — No monthly fee. You only pay when a customer places an order.
• Growth Plan — $24.99/month or free if your store hits $12k/year in sales.

Let me pause right there.

That “Growth Plan is free when you make $12k/year” thing? It’s a gamechanger. No other POD platform rewards scale like that. Once you're generating consistent sales, the monthly fee disappears.

What You Get on the Free Plan

If you’re just getting started, the free plan gives you everything you need to build and run your store:

• Unlimited access to their product catalog
• Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, TikTok Shop integrations
• Mockup generator with built-in design tools
• Global fulfilment through Printful’s network
• 24/7 support via chat and email
• Free logo maker and white-label packaging slips
• Access to Printful Academy, blogs, tutorials

You can launch and run a full POD store without paying a single monthly fee.

What You Get on the Growth Plan

When you're ready to scale, this plan pays for itself (and then some). Here's why:

• Up to 33% off products
• 9% off branding add-ons (neck labels, sleeves, packaging, etc.)
• 25% off sample orders
• Free embroidery digitisation (normally $6.50)
• Exclusive member-only discounts
• Unlimited stores across multiple platforms
• Larger print areas unlocked (front chest to full front)

And yes — Printful slashed DTG prices another 20% on top of that for Growth members.

This is where Printful shifts from just “cheap” to profitable at scale.

Understanding Printful’s True Costs

Let’s talk real numbers now.

Base Product Costs (2025 Examples):

• Gildan 64000 tee: $10.50
• Gildan 18500 hoodie: $22.25
• Trucker hat: $11.95
• All-over hoodie: $41.25
• 11oz mug: $6.50
• Poster (12×18): $7.75

Extra Print Areas:

• Back print: $5.95
• Sleeve: $2.49
• Outside label: $2.49
• Inside label: $0.99

Embroidery Add-Ons:

• Sweatshirt (standard): $24.30
• Sweatshirt (unlimited colours): $28.50
• Digitisation: $6.50 (waived for Growth/sample orders)

So yes — you can create premium, multi-print apparel, but expect higher base costs.

Printful – Branding Pricing

	Type	Price
Product Branding	Inside label	$2.49 per label
	Outside label	$2.49 per label
	Short sleeve print	$2.49 per sleeve
	Long sleeve print	$5.95 per sleeve
	Embroidered logo	$2.95 per additional placement
Packaging Branding	Custom packaging	$0.50 per custom packaging used for an order ($25 monthly minimum for storage)
	Pack-ins	$0.50 per pack-in added to order ($25 monthly minimum for storage)
	Packing slips	$0
Website Branding	White-label tracking page	$0

Apliiq Pricing: What It Really Costs to Build a Brand

If Printful’s built for merch, Apliiq is built for brands. And like anything brand-focused, it’s gonna cost more upfront — but you’re not playing the low-ticket game here.

With Apliiq, you’re not just buying a t-shirt.
You’re paying for how it looks, how it feels, and how it makes your customer see your brand.

So let’s break it down.

No Monthly Fees

First off, Apliiq’s platform is free to use.
No subscriptions. No forced plans.

You only pay when someone buys.

Base Product Costs

Apliiq’s product pricing is higher than Printful’s.
But the selection is way more curated for fashion-forward brands.

Here’s a quick look at some common base costs:

Product	Base Price
Bella + Canvas 3001 Tee	~$12.50
AS Colour 5026 Staple Tee	~$15.50
Independent Trading Co Hoodie	~$25.00
LA Apparel Fleece Joggers	~$29.50
AS Colour Staple Hoodie	~$35.00

These aren’t cheap blanks. These are retail-grade garments you’d find in actual streetwear stores.

And they feel it.

Branding Add-Ons (Where Apliiq Shines)

This is why you choose Apliiq — custom branding.

You can make your product look like it came off a factory line, even though it’s printed on demand.

Here’s the breakdown:

Branding Feature	Cost Per Item
Woven Labels	$2.50
Printed Inside Neck Label	$2.00
Hem Tags	$2.50
Sleeve Prints	$3.00
Hang Tags	$1.50
Custom Packaging	Starts at $1.00
Embroidery Digitization	$10 one-time fee per design

They also offer label sewing as a service. That’s right — you can get real woven labels stitched in to your gear.

You can even send them your custom woven labels in bulk and they’ll apply them for you.

Pro tip: After your first few orders, you can set everything to apply automatically so you don’t have to approve every order manually.

Shipping Costs

Apliiq ships everything from Los Angeles (and a second warehouse in Philadelphia for East Coast orders).

Shipping is straightforward:

Region	Flat Rate
US Orders	$4.99 base + $2.00 per additional item
Canada	$9.99 base + $3.00 per item
International	Starts at $13.99

They don’t offer live rate shipping, so it’s flat-rate all the way.

Keep that in mind when you’re setting pricing — especially for bulk orders or free shipping offers.

Sample Orders and Bulk Discounts

• Sample Orders: 20% off your first sample.
• Bulk Discounts: Start at 10% for 10+ units and scale from there.

If you're running preorders, drops, or influencer collabs, these bulk breaks help a lot.

They’re not trying to be the cheapest. They’re trying to help you look like a real brand.

Key Notes on Apliiq’s Pricing Structure

• You’re gonna pay more per unit.
• But you’ll also charge more per unit.
• And you can build a brand that commands $60+ hoodies and $35+ tees without anyone blinking.

If you want $10 margins on a $20 tee, Apliiq’s not for you.
If you want $30 margins on a $50 product that looks like Supreme or Kith? This is your platform.

Apliiq lets you create your own label — not just sell merch.

That’s the difference.

FAQ’s

What I Personally Use (and Why)

I’ve used both for different brands.

• For my streetwear brand, I use Apliiq. The quality and branding makes it feel legit. I can sell $70 hoodies with $30 profit margins.
• For quick merch stores or influencer collabs, I use Printful. It’s fast, it works, and I can launch in a day.

But if I had to pick ONE platform for building a long-term brand?

It’s Apliiq. Every time.

You’ll need to work harder up front. But the product speaks for itself. And when your customers post photos? It doesn’t look like POD.

It looks real. And that’s everything.

Printful vs Apliiq: Final Verdict

Hopefully, you now have enough info to make an informed decision between our two competitors. While both of these services are print-on-demand, they have different capabilities, and your choice will depend on the nature of your eCommerce store.

For example, suppose you’re looking to sell more than just clothing. In that case, you may want to choose Printful, which has a broader range of homeware and other accessories on offer.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to design streetwear clothing, Apliiq has a vast product catalog.

You should also consider which ecommerce platforms you want to sell on. Integrations are essential, and although Apliiq has a range of superb features on offer, your choice of integrations is limited. In contrast, Printful is much more suitable for retailers looking to sell on well-known platforms like Amazon, eBay, and more.

What are your thoughts? Which print-on-demand business will you opt for? Printful or Apliiq? Or, are you considering another competitor, like Printify, Spreadshirt, Spod, Customcat, Print Aura, Teespring, or Teelaunch? Tell us all about it in the comments box below. Speak soon!

FAQ

What payment types do Printful and Apliiq accept?

Both Printful and Apliiq make it super simple to pay. They accept all major debit and credit cards, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. PayPal is also available on both platforms, which is a bonus if you prefer not to share card details or want a faster checkout.

Can you track orders with Printful and Apliiq?

Yes — both platforms give you full order tracking. Once an order is fulfilled, tracking info is generated automatically and sent to your customer (via email, if your store’s connected).

Do Printful offer bulk discounts like Apliiq?

Yes, they do — and they’re actually pretty generous. Printful offers bulk discounts starting at 25 units, and the more you order, the higher the discount. For example, ordering 500+ units of a product like a hoodie or tee can slash your cost by up to 55%.

Let me know if you want to add more FAQs — or spin these into a separate comparison block.