Designity vs Design Pickle: Creative Director-Led or Queue-Based?

Designity publishes two plans, $5,995 and $8,995 a month, bills month to month, gives you a two-week trial with no upfront payment, and lets you cancel with seven days’ notice. Design Pickle publishes no price, sizes a plan on a consultation call, and bills quarterly or annually with no refunds once a period renews. The two companies sell something similar, ongoing design and motion for a marketing team, and they sell it in opposite ways.

I work at Moonb, and we compete with both, so read this as an informed competitor’s comparison and check the links, which go to each company’s own pages or to review platforms. Where something is not published, I say “not publicly stated” rather than guess.

If you only want the numbers:

• Designity: Plus $5,995 a month for 120 dedicated hours, Premium $8,995 for 180 hours, Custom from $6,000, month to month, two-week trial, seven-day cancellation
• Design Pickle: no published price, plans from two hours of daily creative time, quarterly or annual billing, no refunds after renewal
• Who leads: a dedicated Creative Director at Designity; a matched team with an art director on request at Design Pickle
• Revisions: unlimited at both in their own words
• Reviews: Designity 4.5 on Trustpilot and 4.8 on Clutch; Design Pickle 3.4 on Trustpilot and no Clutch reviews

What each one is

Designity’s homepage opens with “Your ON-DEMAND CREATIVE SERVICES TEAM” and its model in three phrases: “Full-Stack. Creative Director-Led. Month-to-Month.” Its services run from social and digital ads, email, account-based marketing, SEO and content, through motion graphics and video, website and app design, branding, presentations and packaging. Every client is matched with a dedicated Creative Director who specialises in their industry, and the company says it takes the top one percent of applicants.

Design Pickle’s homepage calls it “a creative-as-a-service platform delivering graphic design, motion, and illustration.” Its categories cover brand and identity, marketing and advertising, digital and web, motion and video, print, illustration, ebooks, presentations, packaging, apparel and event design, and it is an official Canva partner offering custom Canva templates. The structure is a queue with a brand-trained team behind it, an art director and production coordinator “on tap when a project needs it” (both carry an asterisk on the pricing page whose condition is not published), and a separate quality-review step on every deliverable.

The short way to hold the difference in your head: Designity sells a person, Design Pickle sells a process.

Pricing and terms, as published

Designity’s pricing page lists Plus at “$5,995 /mo” with “120 hours dedicated /mo,” “2 active creatives/projects simultaneously” and “24-hour turnaround for minor requests”; Premium at “$8,995 /mo” with “180 hours dedicated /mo,” “3 active creatives/projects simultaneously” and “12-hour turnaround for minor requests”; and Custom “from $6k /mo.” Every plan includes a “2-week trial with no upfront payment,” cancellation “with a 7-day notice before your renewal date,” a pause for “$995” for “2 weeks per quarter,” “Unlimited requests, revisions & storage,” and “Full copyright ownership.” Quarterly and yearly billing lower the monthly figure; the toggle shows “Save $1,500 /Qtr” and “Save $10,800 /Yr,” and the same page says “unused hours don’t roll over.” By my arithmetic both plans work out to about $50 a dedicated hour, which is the unit to ask Design Pickle to quote in. One caution: Designity’s enterprise page quotes Plus at $5,495 in one example and a $395 a month pause, against $5,995 and a $995 two-week pause on the pricing page; $5,495 matches the quarterly rate, so ask which billing cycle any quoted figure assumes.

Design Pickle’s pricing page says “Flat-rate, not hourly. No retainers. We size your plan to what you need. You get the number on the call.” Plans are built from daily creative hours, “starting with just two hours of daily design time,” per its help center. “All plans are on quarterly or annual billing cycles,” they auto-renew, and the refund policy is that “once a subscription renews, there are no refunds for unused time on any plan under any circumstances.” A trial is not publicly stated. If you want to pause, the route is to keep a platform-only plan without creative services.

Who leads the work, and where they sit

At Designity, the FAQ says each client “is matched with a dedicated Creative Director who specializes in your industry” and that this Creative Director “acts as your main point of contact,” with support from project managers and strategists. Plans “include unlimited revisions while you remain an active client.” The same FAQ says “every member of our creative and marketing community works within US time zones,” while the vetting page says its creatives “are located globally.”

At Design Pickle, the pricing page promises “a matched team that learns your brand and sticks with it,” while its designer article acknowledges that “different designers may work on your request queue sometimes,” and you can ask for a specific designer to be excluded. Creative direction is an art director “on tap when a project needs it.” Every deliverable passes a quality review, first drafts arrive next business day, there are “no per-change fees,” and the production schedule runs Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm, in Pacific, Eastern, Australian Central and British time. Where designers physically sit is not publicly stated.

I would put the practical difference this way. With Designity you are buying a Creative Director’s time and judgement, sized in hours, and that person carries your brand in their head. With Design Pickle you are buying throughput with a quality gate, and creative direction is something you request rather than something you get by default.

Three things to ask before you sign with either: what an hour beyond the Designity plan costs, since the page says extra hours can be bought but not at what price; what the asterisk on Design Pickle’s art director and production coordinator means on your plan; and how many people are on the matched team.

What the review sites say

On Trustpilot, Designity has a 4.5 from 111 reviews on a claimed profile. On Clutch, it holds a 4.8 from 28 reviews with a minimum project of $5,000 and New York as headquarters. I could not find a Designity product page on G2, so there is no G2 figure to quote.

Design Pickle’s Trustpilot score is a 3.4 from 365 reviews, and its Clutch profile has no reviews (Scottsdale, Arizona, founded 2015). G2 shows 4.4 stars from 228 reviews. Design Pickle’s homepage reports a “4.8/5 Customer satisfaction rate,” which is a company figure rather than a review site.

Designity, in more detail

Design Pickle, in more detail

Choose Designity if

You want one accountable Creative Director who knows your brand and answers your messages, you are not willing to commit to a quarter or a year, your monthly work fits inside 120 to 180 dedicated hours, and you want to see the price before you talk to sales. If Designity is close but not right, the wider field is in our Superside alternatives roundup, which covers the more expensive end of this market.

Choose Design Pickle if

You need a high volume of graphic design and presentations with a quality gate, you are happy to request art direction when it matters rather than have it by default, you can commit for a quarter or a year, and the consultation-call pricing does not bother you. If it does, the Design Pickle alternatives guide lists services that publish their prices, and my colleague’s guide to what unlimited design services really include explains what “unlimited” tends to mean in practice.

Where Moonb sits

Since I work at Moonb, one paragraph and then I am out of the way. We are a dedicated creative team for marketing teams: video, motion and design from one Creative Director-led team on an ongoing monthly basis. That makes us closest to Designity on the contact model, with more weight on video and motion than either company here leads with. We do not publish a price, so there is no column for us in the table below. The creative-as-a-service guide explains where each of these models fits before you compare vendors.

Every fact in one table

Two talks that frame the choice

Uber’s design team at Config, on growing a design function inside a company that is not design-led, maps neatly onto the build-versus-buy question both of these services answer.

David Hoang’s Config talk on the problems every scaling design team hits, headcount, process, quality, explains why a Creative Director matters more as volume grows.