Finding the perfect WooCommerce product customizer or designer can be tough. The right tool needs to strike a balance between functionality and ease of use.
Too many features and your product customizer can overwhelm shoppers. On the other hand, a tool with too few features will prevent shoppers from laying out the designs they’re after.
Many great design and customization plugins exist, but the right one for your shop will depend on your needs.
- Why would I need this type of plugin?
- How will plugins be scored?
- The Competitors
- Zakeke Review
- Extra Product Options Review
- Lumise Review
- MyStyle Review
- WooCommerce Custom Product Designer Review
- WooCommerce PPOM Review
- Fancy Product Designer Review
- The Results: Best WooCommerce Product Customizer and Runners-up
- How can I print customized WooCommerce products?
- Which WooCommerce product designer is right for me?
Why would I need this type of plugin?
As you probably know, WooCommerce is a free plugin that transforms any WordPress website into a full-featured online store. If you’re already running WooCommerce then you can sell products like shirts, hats, and mugs that feature fixed designs without any issues.
But what if you want to allow your customers to create their own designs and then place them on your products? That’s when you’ll need to turn to a product customizer.
Tools like these range in complexity from super simple to feature-packed. The most basic plugins will add customization fields to your existing product pages. Plugins like these introduce little to no learning curve to you or your shopper but offer no real-time previews of product designs.
More advanced plugins will turn your store’s products into blank canvases on which shoppers can create. Customers can drag and drop text, images, and other elements around your products as they design.
Live previews will show shoppers what the final product should look like as they apply design changes. These previews can lead to a decrease in returns and an increase in shop profits since your customer has a better idea of what customizations will look like in person.
Many of the best WooCommerce product customizer plugins support design templates. After you’ve created templates for your customers, they can use them as starting points for their work and then add their own graphics and text as needed.
WooCommerce plugins that support design templates can be especially useful if you’re selling products for an event or a sports team. As a shop owner, you can lay out designs that include placeholder text and logos for teams or events. When you’re ready to sell, you can invite shoppers to customize designs with names and player numbers. The use cases for product design templates are limitless, and most of the plugins that you’ll find below support them.
How will plugins be scored?
Now that you have an idea of what features to look out for when browsing WooCommerce product editors, it’s time to review the most popular choices. All plugins will be scored in three categories. They are:
Value
A plugin’s ability to justify its cost will determine its value. Many of these plugins offer free versions with fewer features. In order to give every tool a fair shot, free versions will earn competitors no more than one or two points.
Features
Each plugin will receive a score based on its number of customization options. Features can include settings available to you (the shop owner) as well as design tools built for your customers. Extra features offer greater control over the design process, but features that are too complicated will cost a plugin points in the final category.
User Experience
Admin options and design tools that are easy to understand will earn plugins a higher UX (user experience) score. UX is essential to keeping a customer around from the start of the design process to the point of purchase. For this reason, plugins that are likely to confuse or frustrate will lose big points in this category.
Overall Score
Each plugin will receive an overall score based on the sum of its points in all three categories. After scores are tallied, the plugins will be listed again, this time in order of total rating. The plugin with the highest score will be featured first, but your pick should depend on the needs of your shop and its customers.
The Competitors
There are dozens of plugins that add design options to WooCommerce products. That being said, only the top performers will be considered for this matchup.
Head over to CodeCanyon or to the WordPress repository if you’d prefer to browse the entire selection – the winners, the stinkers, and everything in between. There’s always a chance that you’ll uncover a hidden gem among lesser known plugins. But first, consider these popular picks:
Zakeke Review
Our first featured plugin can be installed from the WordPress repository. Its rating currently sits at an impressive 4.7 out of 5 stars based on nearly 100 reviews.
Zakeke is a popular plugin built on top of a well-established cloud service. As such, your editor and admin area will be hosted by the Zakeke team and outside of your WordPress control panel, but your customers will never know the difference. The transition from a product page to the editor to your checkout page is seamless. That’s because the Zakeke editor is embedded in the pages of your WooCommerce website.
Like most cloud services, Zakeke is offered on a subscription basis. Webmasters who pay monthly will spend as little as $8.99 each month for a basic plan and up to $199.99 a month for the most advanced. Discounted rates of 30% are available to customers who choose to pay annually.
So what sets the four available plans apart? The least expensive Zakeke offering will meet the needs of most shop owners. The plan allows for deep customization of product images and text via a drag-and-drop interface. You can build design templates for your customers to work from, while shoppers can import product images from their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Unfortunately, that plan limits online stores to just three customizable products. The next plan up bumps that limit to 25 products and unlocks Zakeke’s flagship feature: 3D previews.
Zakeke isn’t the only plugin to offer 3D previews, but it does implement the feature best. With these previews, your customers can rotate customized products to view them from any angle and even view products in their homes via augmented reality.
Although this feature is impressive, it caters to a small fraction of webmasters. If you plan to offer 3D previews, you’ll need to prepare and upload OBJ and MTL files and you’ll need to possess a strong knowledge of 3D modeling. Fortunately, the use of 3D previews is optional.
Pricier plans allow for unlimited products and add support for a 3D product configurator. With the configurator, shoppers can swap out product parts and materials as they preview changes in real time. If you sell modular products made up of multiple components, Zakeke will likely provide your visitors with the best shopping experience.
Pros and Cons
Pros: The Zakeke front end is both clean and intuitive. You’ll find all of the standard features that you’d expect from a WooCommerce product customizer at any subscription level. Meanwhile, the 3D configurator tool is one of a kind, even if setup requires an understanding of 3D modeling that most people do not possess.
Cons: Recurring fees increase with product counts. As a result, Zakeke is more expensive than similar plugins if your store offers more than 25 items. The hosted back end forces you out of the WordPress admin area for some tasks, and the hosted editor could be considered an additional point of failure for your store. That is to say that if Zakeke’s servers go down, your shoppers lose the ability to create product designs.
Score
Value: While the service’s starting price of $8.99 per month is reasonable, advanced features like 3D previews require a plan upgrade and introduce a 1.9% transaction fee. That’s in addition to your normal payment processing fees. Otherwise, you’re getting a lot of bang for your monthly or yearly buck.
Features: Again, you’re sure to find nearly every option you would ever need in this WooCommerce product designer. Zakeke even offers built-in support for print-on-demand services like Printful (more on this service later)! The powerful 3D configurator earns this pick a couple points as well.
User Experience: Your product designer and back end will be hosted on Zakeke’s servers and not on your website’s. Your customers will never notice, but you definitely will when it comes time to perform admin tasks. That being said, both the hosted designer and admin area are top-notch.
Extra Product Options Review
Have a look at Extra Product Options if you’re on a budget and aren’t concerned with live design previews. While additional features can be added with a paid upgrade, the base version is completely free. For better or for worse, its feature set is far more focused than that of a plugin like Zakeke.
Instead of providing shoppers with a WYSIWYG designer or real-time preview, Extra Product Options adds extra fields to your WooCommerce product pages. These fields can take the form of text fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, and more.
If you’ve played around with WooCommerce’s built-in product attributes before, then you have a good idea of how a plugin like this might work. While attributes can add dropdowns for product options like color and size, Extra Product Options provides shop owners with additional field types.
This might sound restrictive at first, but plugins like these are very popular in the repository, and for good reason. For starters, developers of these tools almost always offer a free version of some kind. Furthermore, these tools can make a lot of sense if customizations to your products are not easily conveyed through a preview image.
Take an engraving for example. Customizations like these add depth to a product that can be tough to simulate with an auto-generated preview. Many shop owners prefer to manually prepare and email mockups when orders like these are placed. Tools like Extra Product Options complement this sort of workflow.
The free version adds support for hidden fields, radio buttons, and phone fields to your shop’s product pages. If you upgrade to the premium version, you’ll unlock a file upload field, which can be especially handy if you’re printing custom designs.
More importantly, an upgrade adds price fields to your shop’s admin area. With price fields, you can modify a product’s price based on user input.
Pros and Cons
Pros: Extra Product Options does not provide your shoppers with a designer, but the result is a tool that’s easy to use. A free version is available, and the premium version is inexpensive. Fields use your theme’s default styles, so they won’t look out of place on your product pages.
Cons: If you need to provide your visitors with live product previews, you won’t find those here. And while the free version is nice, it’s a shame that it does not include the file upload field. You’ll be limiting shoppers to very basic customizations without it.
Score
Value: Extra Product Options earns a point for its free offering, even if it excludes the most useful file upload field. The $39 upgrade adds extra field types (like the file upload type) as well as advanced display and validation rules for fields.
Features: While Extra Product Options is one of the most popular in its class, you can add live designs and previews to your store with plugins that are $20 to $30 more. The features that are present in the free and paid versions do work well enough.
User Experience: You won’t need to leave the WordPress admin panel to manage fields, and the product fields you create will use your theme’s styles. That’s more than can be said for a couple of the more complex designer tools.
Lumise Review
Available exclusively from the CodeCanyon marketplace, Lumise is a powerful product designer with a strong feature set and a clean UI. If you’re not familiar, CodeCanyon is a digital storefront that offers premium WordPress plugins at reasonable prices. Their selection includes everything from page builders to WordPress carousels, and their buyer rating system makes it easy to research a plugin like Lumise before making a purchase.
Lumise offers a design tool and live previews, and your visitors will be able to upload images from many sources. Shoppers can save designs, print their work from a browser, and even use keyboard shortcuts to speed up design. The editor interface is easy to navigate, and shop owners can recolor it from the WordPress admin panel.
The Lumise WooCommerce product customizer boasts a handful of features that set it apart from other plugins in this list. While tools like the QR code generator are of limited use, most options can be disabled from the back end.
Features like curved text and image masks, on the other hand, greatly expand your customers’ design options. You can even invite users to sketch handmade designs on your products with the built-in pencil tool!
Compare Lumise to other CodeCanyon plugins like it and you’ll find that it’s among the most highly regarded. Its rating at the time of writing is hovering around 4.9 stars out of five. Shop owners rave about the one-on-one support they’ve received from the tool’s developers.
Pros and Cons
Pros: Lumise offers many unique features, even if none of them are as impressive as Zakeke’s 3D configurator. The UI is sharp and customer support is rock solid.
Cons: While the product designer is one of the cleanest around, it uses its own layout that is separate from your theme’s. The result is a shopping experience that is less seamless, even if you can apply your site’s color scheme to the plugin’s designer.
Score
Value: Plugins of this caliber are usually provided in exchange for a monthly or annual fee. At just $59, the one-time cost of Lumise bests that of other tools in the lineup. After comparing its feature-to-dollar ratio against those of its competitors, Lumise earns big points in the value category.
Features: The developers have created a product design tool that offers every feature your WooCommerce shop is likely to require. The only exception is a 3D designer like Zakeke’s, and those guys demand a transaction fee in exchange for that.
User Experience: The UX is one of the best, even if the designer takes on a layout all its own. Lumise gets an additional user experience point for the team’s top-notch support.
MyStyle Review
Search the WordPress plugin repository for product customization plugins and you’ll likely spot MyStyle in the top results. With its prominent placement in the repository, it would be tempting to assume that MyStyle has been a top pick among other shop owners.
Think again. MyStyle’s high ranking is more a result of little variety in the WordPress repository than the quality of the plugin. Sample the plugin, read its reviews, and visit its pricing page to uncover a number of weaknesses.
Although its designer is packed with strong features and is easy to navigate, elements of it do feel dated. To be fair, MyStyle’s user-facing tools are very capable even if they’re not the most attractive.
Beyond its functional user interface, it’s hard to find reasons to recommend this plugin over others. Like Zakeke, the MyStyle team hosts your product editor and your print files on its own servers, but without the clean UI or unique features that Zakeke offers.
What’s more, the MyStyle service is far more expensive than Zakeke’s. Their developer license starts at $9 a month. And while this fee would be similar to that of the competition, the developer license isn’t even intended for live shops. If you hope to download print-ready versions of your customers’ designs, a standard MyStyle license will set you back $99 each month.
A hosted service can be a compelling option if you expect hundreds of shoppers on a daily basis, but not at this price. If cost is not a factor or the MyStyle UI really calls out to you, go ahead and test the service with a developer license. Otherwise, look elsewhere.
Pros and Cons
Pros: MyStyle guides shoppers through the design process in a friendly step-by-step format. The plugin includes many (but not all) of the tools found in other plugins in the lineup.
Cons: The cost is prohibitively expensive. And while a managed service like MyStyle’s can make a lot of sense for high-traffic stores, most users are better off hosting their own product designers and admin areas at this price.
Score
Value: Again, the cost is just too high. You can request a personalized demo of the service, but the MyStyle team reserves the right to reject that request. Otherwise, there are no real free offerings to speak of.
Features: MyStyle doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but it’s not missing many key features either. The lack of social media import and design templates is worth noting.
User Experience: The simple step-by-step design process is a welcome addition to an otherwise disappointing plugin. The designer itself does feel a little dated.
WooCommerce Custom Product Designer Review
The starting price of WooCommerce Custom Product Designer has made it a popular pick among CodeCanyon customers. At a one-time cost of just $50, it’s the cheapest plugin not locked behind a monthly fee.
But as you scan the plugin’s CodeCanyon description, you’ll soon learn that the $50 starting price paints only part of the whole picture. Sure, WooCommerce Custom Product Designer offers all of the essential features you would expect from a plugin like it, but similar CodeCanyon plugins offer a richer experience for only a few bucks more.
That’s not to say that you can’t add many of these same features to WooCommerce Custom Product Designer. You actually can, but only after you’ve paid another $49 for the plugin’s addon package.
The addon package adds text effects, 3D previews, and cosmetic improvements to the product designer. Additionally, the upgrade will allow shoppers to import product images from external sources like Facebook, Instagram, and Pixabay. If your shop requires any of these premium features, you’ll be spending just under $100 for them.
To make matters worse, the plugin offers very little in terms of customer support even after you’ve paid for addons. The tools you’ll use to manage the plugin are clunky, and requests for help can yield disappointing results. And judging from the plugin’s rating of 3.5 stars, results like these aren’t all that uncommon.
Pros and Cons
Pros: If all you need from a WooCommerce product customizer is the ability to supply customers with live design previews, Custom Product Designer will meet your requirements for less. The plugin’s standard interface should provide your visitors with a pleasant shopping experience even if you choose to forego the $49 upgrade.
Cons: Shop owners will pay far more to reach feature parity with similar WooCommerce product customizer plugins. And if you expect your purchase price to include strong customer support, you should look elsewhere.
Score
Value: The standard version of WooCommerce Custom Product Designer offers real-time previews at $50. This makes it the least expensive offering on CodeCanyon. Unfortunately, many of the more advanced editor features that you’ll find elsewhere will set you back an additional $49 when you choose Custom Product Designer.
Features: All of the basic features that you would expect from a drag-and-drop WooCommerce product customizer are here. These include text tools, layers, design templates, and customer photo uploads. If your shop requires 3D product previews or you prefer the plugin’s improved editor, you’ll need to pay extra for a separate addon.
User Experience: Shoppers should have no trouble designing products from your store once the plugin is up and running. The editor interface is fairly clean and even provides first-time customers with a guided tour. That being said, the initial setup process is not without bugs, and support for this plugin is hard to come by.
WooCommerce PPOM Review
WooCommerce PPOM (short for Personalized Product Option Manager) is a plugin in the same vein as Extra Product Options. PPOM ditches a real-time designer and live previews in favor of simple input fields.
In terms of features, there’s a lot of overlap between WooCommerce PPOM and Extra Product Options. The developers of both plugins offer free versions and allow users to manage the same types of fields with those limited releases. Likewise, you can upgrade both plugins for a relatively small fee.
But when you start taking paid features into account, PPOM begins to pull away from Extra Product Options. PPOM PRO includes all of the same field types as its closest competitor along with a few extra that make it a more powerful WooCommerce product customizer.
For example, the file upload field type allows shoppers to upload images and then crop them to an aspect ratio set by you. This is huge if you’re selling products whose designs need to fit within a fixed print area.
You can unlock more advanced field types like text counter fields and Google font dropdowns with plugin addons. These addons are made available in addition to the standard plugin upgrade but can be bundled at the time of purchase for increased savings.
Pros and Cons
Pros: Tools like PPOM are ideal when offering a real-time preview of product customizations is not feasible. And in terms of cost, the plugin’s premium version is the best in its class.
Cons: Product field plugins are obviously more limited than full-fledged designers, but that’s not really a shortcoming of PPOM. There are many great WYSIWYG plugins in the lineup if that’s what you’re after.
Score
Value: PPOM’s premium upgrade offers more field types than that of Extra Product Options. And interestingly enough, a PPOM upgrade is $9 cheaper at only $30.
Features: Field types like color swatches and cropped images are unique to PPOM. The plugin’s addons will provide shoppers with additional customization options, but those addons are sold separately from the premium upgrade.
User Experience: The average shopper should have no trouble requesting product customizations using the fields made available to her. PPOM uses your theme’s default style rules so that fields won’t look out of place on your product pages.
Fancy Product Designer Review
The final contender is another full-blown WooCommerce product customizer that you can find over at CodeCanyon. While Fancy Product Designer is the top-selling WYSIWYG product designer in its marketplace, it is not the most well-rated. Lumise holds that title with 4.9 stars compared to Fancy’s 4.6 stars.
Regardless of sales or ratings, Fancy Product Designer would serve as an excellent addition to most online shops. You’re probably well aware of what features to expect from a product design plugin by now, and Fancy offers almost all of them.
Yes, you can create design templates and allow your customers to edit those. Yes, shoppers can upload design images from a local device and from social media. And yes, customers can place, reposition, and recolor text within the design areas of your shop’s products.
Here’s what sets Fancy apart from the others: its design is modern, it’s intuitive, and it sits within your existing WordPress theme. Similar plugins with compelling UI/UX qualities usually “break away” from your theme in order to deliver them. With Fancy, you’re providing shoppers with a fantastic product designer in a familiar layout that they’ve come to expect from your store’s pages.
All that being said, Fancy Product Designer is lacking a few features shared by others in the lineup. Shop owners can add custom fonts to Fancy’s designer, but not through the admin panel. Instead, you’ll need to define a font folder in the plugin’s settings and then upload fonts manually. This can be managed easily enough with an FTP client or with a tool like cPanel’s file manager.
You won’t find any advanced text or image effects here either. On the bright side, these missing features make for a less cluttered designer.
Pros and Cons
Pros: When it comes to Fancy Product Designer, the seamless design interface is the star attraction. The price isn’t too shabby, either (more on that in the score breakdown).
Cons: Like most of CodeCanyon’s developers, the Fancy team offers no free version of its plugin, but you can play around with their demo store at no cost. Here’s hoping that they simplify the custom font upload process in the near future.
Score
Value: Fancy was once the cost leader among CodeCanyon offerings, but after a recent increase, its $69 price tag makes it the most expensive offering. That being said, Fancy Product Designer is still worth every penny, and a price difference of $10 to $20 can be recouped after a single sale.
Features: As you’ve probably noticed by now, it’s tough to find differentiating features between one great plugin and the next. Fancy is going to meet almost all of your store’s customization needs, while novel features like Pixabay integration will provide shoppers with additional image choices.
User Experience: Subjectively speaking, Fancy’s user interface is one of the best. The front end designer is a pleasure to navigate, while its elements are easily repositioned, recolored, and relabeled from the back end. It’s just a shame that you have to upload custom fonts outside of the standard WordPress control panel.
The Results: Best WooCommerce Product Customizer and Runners-up
It was a heated match, but a couple of conclusions can be drawn from these very unscientific scores. Most notably, if you’re in need of a product designer for your WooCommerce store at an affordable price, avoid MyStyle and Custom Product Designer. There are much better options out there, including every other plugin in this lineup.
- #1 – Lumise
- #2 – Fancy Product Designer (tie)
- #2 – Zakeke (tie)
- #3 – WooCommerce PPOM
- #4 – Extra Product Options
- #5 – WooCommerce Custom Product Designer
- #6 – MyStyle
As far as the rest of the competing plugins are concerned, there’s really no bad choice. Lumise edged out all others, but only slightly. It was the plugin’s relatively low price and seamless design experience that earned it the highest overall rating. Fancy Product Designer and Zakeke earned top spots as well, both trailing Lumise by just a single point.
If you’re looking for a hosted service or a powerful 3D product designer, it’s unlikely that you’ll be disappointed with Zakeke. It’s really the only “designer as a service” option on the list worth considering, and its monthly subscription model might be more appealing to those not ready to commit to a solution with a large upfront price tag.
If what you need are extra product page fields without the overhead of a product designer, Extra Product Options and PPOM are both great choices. The teams behind both plugins make free versions available to WooCommerce users, so you can test both before making a purchase. In fact, you may find that one plugin or the other suits your needs even without an upgrade.
How can I print customized WooCommerce products?
After selecting a WooCommerce product customizer, the next logical steps are to sell and to fulfill orders. The craftiest of shop owners will likely print customer designs on their own in-house products, but most everyone else will benefit from partnering with a local printer or an online print-on-demand service like Printful.
If you live in an area with reliable printers, call or visit with them to compare prices and product offerings. Explain to them that you will be providing them with your own print files and ask them about the printing options available to you. Keep in mind that when working with a local printer, the responsibility of shipping customer orders may fall on you.
If you can’t partner with a local printer, the advantages of working with an online print-on-demand service can be many. Printful is one such print-on-demand service. Companies like Printful will accept your print files, transfer them to their own products, and ship the finished items to your customers. As a shop owner, you only need to concern yourself with marketing your store and providing compelling design templates.
Most print-on-demand companies will list product offerings prominently on their websites. Printful’s available products include shirts, swimwear, hats, bags, framed prints, and many more. All of these items serve as blank canvases for you and your customers’ designs.
The Zakeke designer integrates with a small handful of print-on-demand services, including Printful. When paired together, Zakeke and Printful can automate most of the tasks required of a successful WooCommerce shop owner.
Which WooCommerce product designer is right for me?
Ultimately, the decision should come down to the needs of you and your customer. If tight integration with a print-on-demand service is important, take Zakeke for a spin. But if your customers value a seamless design experience, Lumise might be your best bet.
Whichever designer you choose, make sure you’re ready to print and ship products before you open your virtual doors. The thrill of your first sale will be short-lived if you’re not able to fulfill it.