Creatopy

Pros

I LOVE how much Bannersnack has increased in features in just over a year. They are constantly updating their software and taking customers' feedback into actual consideration. For those who are not so design-minded, they supply a large amount of aesthetically-pleasing templates and pre-made copy designs. Additionally, there are SO many options when designing a custom banner as well. As someone who is accustomed to Photoshop, I feel like I am not missing out on a ton of features when designing in Bannersnack.

Another wonderful feature is being able to upload my own fonts and logos. Designing banners as Sets also saves me a lot of time when I am putting the same design on multiple banner sizes. The reason we started using Bannersnack in the first place was the ability to export as HTML5 and have animated banner ads. I've been so happy with how they have continued advancing the customization options of the animated features! So many of our clients are happy with these animated ads we create.

Cons

Bannersnack does occasionally have bugs. Occasionally the editor screen will lead to a blank white page, and if I haven't saved my banner, I will have to start over. I've also had issues with Bannersnack changing the font when exported with my own uploaded fonts. Another thing I would like to see at some point is the ability to preview all the sizes of banners I make in one link, instead of having three separate links for 3 separate sizes.

Pros

This is very simple and easy to use to create multiple ad formats to use across display networks. There are lots of templates to use within the platform and only takes small tweaks to produce different sizes to use across networks.

Cons

Each time you create an ad there are some bits you need to change, even if you've loaded up the brand settings. You have to change small parts of the ad to make it fit across all formats but these are tiny changes.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Creatopy

Pros

Bannersnack was a top tier product, but now everything seems to be broken with the rebranding.

Cons

Not honoring previous paying customer commitments with rebrand.

Rebranding makes everything more complicated to use and not less.

Pros

> Software was intuitive and learning curve was quite quick.
> Able to make global changes to a set of banners

Cons

> the resolution of GIFs and PNG banners were not great quality
> nice that I could create HTML5 banners

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Creatopy

Pros

The software is easy to use to create good graphics with good templates that can be customized

Cons

The software pricing is not favorable enough for smaller businesses to use the tool

Pros

As a company who does not have a designer on staff, Bannernack allows us to easily create banners for our AdWords advertising, Facebook posts, etc. We also sell advertising space on our homepage, and are able to use Bannersnack to quickly churn out simple dynamic HTML banners for companies who pay to advertise on our site. Their feedback has all been positive.

The functionality is intuitive and advanced, and since they are constantly adding new pre-made designs it's incredibly easy to pick a base template and customize it. Though, for someone with a more creative acumen building something from scratch would be very easy, as well.

Cons

Only real downside to the software is that if you design a Banner Set and attempt to use their exported ZIP file into Doubleclick it will not import properly. It's a huge inconvenience, as you then have to download each banner as a GIF (which sometimes affects the animation fluidity) individually and add them into DFP individually.

I was assured by customer service that this was something they were working on when I wrote in to them in June 2018. It's been almost two months at the time of writing this review but I haven't heard any updates. Outside of this one issue, I have no other complaints.

Pros

Bannersnack's display ad templates and ad creator are world class. Being able to place your headline, CTA and image into a sidebar and have Bannersnack create many display ads that look beautiful is incredible.

They also have great templates for social media posts as well.

Cons

I've been using Bannersnack for just about two years now and sometimes I find the auto-saving doesn't work as expected and I find myself losing work I got distracted from. Other than that, I have no other complaints!

Pros

The fact that you can quickly and easily create HTML 5 ads in different sizes quickly and easily is a life saver. The design process is simple and they have a lot of easy to use features. I started using it several years ago and it has just gotten better. The ability to create standard size ads is great, but what is even better is you can create custom banners for all of your needs. I use it to create headers for customers websites along with Facebook and instagram ads. I highly recommend it. I don't embed the ads, but the analytics they provide are very useful for you to see how people are interacting with your ads.

Cons

Some times it's tough to make changes across frames. They have the ability to have elements that persist across frames, but they don't have great in-app advise. You have to search that information out. Their support is ok, but they could certainly be more responsive. But for an affordable product, it is adequate.

Pros

I can make whatever I want with this, the UI very simple and I can just drag and drop the asset and make something good. Creatopy also offers free high-resolution stock image I can use for my Social Media branding and it never fails to impress me.

Cons

For a small business, the monthly plan may be a bit pricy than another competitor, but In my opinion it worth the price. Sometimes I have problems downloading the files like the download won't start

Pros

Very easy to use to create static or HTML5 banners. Our agency has a huge need for a design solution that doesn't take up a lot of designer time (and thus takes forever to get done). BannerSnack is so simple to quickly make banners even if you are not designer, and with a click of a button makes the ads HTML5 for higher performing ad choices.

Cheap to use - stunning templates - no design chops needed. Use it to quickly spin up banner ads that don't make it look like Bill from accounting did them.

Simple downloading of files to upload into Adwords or Adroll etc.

Cons

The 'suite' service to create 1 ad and then apply it to different sizes doesn't work great so I need to create each banner separately but not a big deal.

Would love if they had an option to add all info individually and then the system spits out ads.

Pros

The Banner Generator! I work in online advertising and this tool has been very helpful in getting a number of ads made in all sizes for the networks we use quickly and efficiently. We used to rely on designers doing a bunch of work by hand and have to wait days or even weeks for mediocre results. Now I can make the ads myself in less than a day and the animation has made our clients much more appreciative. We can dial in the layouts we like the most, then it's a simple matter to duplicate banner sets and make revisions to get unique banners for each client. Bannersnack has saved us a ton of time and gave our service a fresh new look.

Though we use HTML5 for the actual advertising, I like that I can send GIFs as example files to my clients. I'm excited to see what the Branded share links look like, since right now we're sending GIFs as previews. I'd love to see a bulk download feature for GIFs, but I can understand why this might be a bit daunting in terms of resource usage.

Cons

Though the process of creating images using the generator is getting better, there are still a few bugs that need sorting. There are definitely some quirks and the occasional service outage where a banner set might take a long time to save or you can't export for a bit, but this is definitely the exception and not the rule. I can only recall one particularly bad day where the service wasn't working for a few hours, but I didn't end up losing any work, just time.

Sometimes text elements don't get updated when you copy banner sets. The workaround is you have to remove the image from the set, then add it back in to get it to update correctly. Sometimes drop shadows look incongruous across all image sizes and you need to update the global values if you've been resizing or moving elements within individual ads. I've gotten used to these slight irritations and I'm sure they'll be fixed over time, but I'm happy overall with what I can achieve with the service.

I'd love more options to change the text, like a stroke which helps text stand out against wider ranges of colors for background images. The 'Hit' animation template is a bit buggy and doesn't always play nice when you have a lot of elements, so I typically just opt for a different template that's more consistent. I'd love to see more templates, both for layout and animation.

There was a recent rate hike for adding multiple users which our team will be needing soon, which is a bummer, but comes with the territory I reckon.

Pros

Very easy to use straight away if you have used similar animation. The animation user engine is identical to Prezi (cloud-based PowerPoint clone) app.

Cons

Discovered a disappointing bug in a layer transition, that turns out the developers have known about for some time. Support said they have no plans to fix it in the short term.

When using the slide-in animation in a layered scene, the image can have its advanced Alpha function turned on to 100%. This allows the image to be 100% visual at the start of the layers animation. This isn't required if the image is sliding into the viewed area from outside the area, but if it is to start in the viewed area, the bug is apparent.

Unfortunately, the image is present at the start of the slide even if the layer is not set to operate until further into the slide transition. The image dominates all of the layers and becomes the "Front" layer. The bug IS NOT apparent when playing the scene from the scene timeline button. It is if the scene is played in the preview screen or downloaded for use.

Pros

There's the obvious - the robust and super intuitive UI for creating designs... I would also say the overall layout and organizational structure of Bannersnack is great. It's easy to upload assets, and to keep track of hundreds, and even thousands of designs.

Cons

I wish they had more sizes available with templates, but I had to struggle to think of a 'con' for Bannersnack.

Pros

Allows you to be creative as you want! Unlimited possibilities, easy to use, amazing customer support, a must-have for anyone in marketing or web design. I use Bannersnack for many things: ads (obviously), editing images, reformatting photos, simple logo design, the list goes on. It’s just a great and simple tool to have.

Cons

A little pricey, but you get what you pay for! I’ve experienced a few glitches, but I will not complain because I haven’t tried it on other browsers.

Pros

The software has a ton of flexibility for me to create any banner using any graphics or fonts. I am no designer so the ease of use was very important. Another great thing is the predefined layouts and font combos. When I try to do it myself, i always looks funky! Bannersnack to the rescue. Once I discovered the text layouts I was able to create banners that look like they were designed a by a pro.

Cons

The saving, and saving into different folders is a tad bit clunky but now I'm really being nit picky.

Pros

I would say Bannersnack is like Canva for display ads- great product when used properly, easy collaboration, and no technical issues.

Cons

The way creative is sorted on a per-user basis is a little clunky, but it's manageable. Otherwise no complaints!

Pros

The team! I have been using Bannersnack for a little over a year and have only had positive experiences with the support team and our Account Manager. Whenever things come up that I think could be improved or issues that I'm having, the Bannersnack team works tirelessly to help out, have a conversation and come up with a solution.

Cons

It does have a few bugs and kinks that need to be worked out. However, the team is open to hearing about these issues and fixing them!

Pros

I like that I can quickly create an idea for a banner ad and quickly scale to covering a series of sizes and formats. In photoshop, this task can be tedious and time-consuming. I also like the many templates included that allow me to get inspiration.

Cons

I wish the UI was a bit more responsive. I also wish there was a layer functionality like in photoshop, but I understand that it's not complex as a professional-grade design tool.

Pros

I loved that we could give members of team access quickly, and they were able to quickly ramp up on how to create banners using the platform. It's a great solution that allows us to leverage the inherent creative abilities of our team without the typical learning curve that comes with some of the Adobe Creative Cloud platforms.

Cons

The platform is a bit limited in terms of functionality vs. the Adobe equivalent; however, it's a great tradeoff when you consider the price and ease of use of the platform. It's not so much a "con", as it is just a different tool.

Pros

Makes creating different banner sizes and iterations for A/B testing much less painful by providing pre-made templates and template sets that you can customize with a fair amount of freedom (similar to Canva). Not only that, but my favorite part is the motion designer to create animated banners. It's much more intuitive than most software is when it comes to creating motion ads, with simple controls and options to quickly create animations. The hours you or your team will save is easily worth the price of admission. Has built in stock photos to choose from and you can download your files in all the formats you would need. There's also some nifty features like heatmapping and a scoring system that they assign to your ads.

Cons

There's a lot to love, so I guess the only negative I've found is the lack of complete and total freedom that you would get by using a traditional graphics design program. You won't have all of those options available to you, but you will have a streamlined tool-set that will be sufficient for creating good-looking ads.

Pros

It's very intuitive. Our entire team uses it, from our graphic designer to our coordinators because it doesn't take a ton of skill to get what you need out of it. The animation process is really easy and the image overlay and elements can almost always do what you need them to for static images/animation of graphics.

Cons

It doesn't support video, which isn't a big deal, but it would come in handy.

Pros

The ease of use is what I like most about the software. I love the wide range of templates that are available. Whenever my team uses the software, we always start with a template and build from there. I would also like to note that the exporting options are fantastic and very comprehensive.

Cons

One issue that we ran into time and time again was the limited functionality of the AMP HTML banners. I understand that the feature is still in beta, but I am hoping that features available with HTML5 banners such as click tracking and looping will also be available with AMP HTML banners eventually.

I also felt that the number of transitions between different slides was limited.

Pros

I love this site. I love how I can choose from loads of images for my banner or take one of my photos from my desktop to put on my banner. There are many image choices and some sites don’t have that. This site has many images which helps my creative process. When I create the banners I want I can add different types of text and put each text how I want to on my banner. I am not limited. I also love how when I add the text I want in the text box I can also enlarge the text and also the banner template. I like to move stuff around as I work on my text banner ideas. The next thing I like about this site is that I can add logo images or basic shapes to my banner for my social media pages. I can add more than one as well. This is an easy tool to use.

Cons

When you use the tools on this website there are many options or choices to choose from, but if you don’t have premium you can’t get the extra options you may want. The free version is very good, but it would be nice to have a bit more options added to it as well. The other thing that I noticed about this site is that you only have a set amount of free banners you can set up. I would love at least a few more. It would be nice.

Pros

I like how fast and easy it is to make a beautiful, functional banner ad that can be easily uploaded to Google AdWords.

Cons

Some of the templates don't follow best practices for high CTR.

Pros

Bannersnack is very flexible to use, easy for non-designers, and great cost for what you get.

Cons

I wish that creating multiple sized banners at one time were more accurate - there is still a lot of work to be done on each individual banner after you create the entire set - just mostly slight adjustments but still a bit more time consuming than I wish it could be