Which is Faster for Non-Designers? A Head-to-Head Speed Test

Piktochart and Easelly are feature-rich and easy to use infographic design tools that allow you to create infographics and visuals.

If you’re a student, small business owner, or freelancer with a limited budget and no design experience, which is faster for you to learn how to use: Piktochart or Easelly?

For those of you who like to read Wikipedia summaries because you don’t want to sit through the entire two-hour film, here’s the deal: Piktochart creates infographics quicker, hands-down.

It took me thirty minutes on Easelly and ten minutes on Piktochart to recreate the image below given the allotted tools provided in the free plans.

I had so much time left over (literally twice as much time on Piktochart as I did on Easelly after my first recreation), I spent another twenty minutes tweaking my infographic to get the details as close as possible to the original. 

I believe that my utter lack of experience with infographics platforms is a fairly accurate way of showing how easy or fast it is for beginners to use Easelly and Piktochart to create their own infographics.

Even with no experience whatsoever making graphs and charts, I was able to create the images below.

To compare Piktochart and Easelly, I chose an infographic as my “control” to see how long it would take to recreate the same infographic in both tools.

I was curious whether it was possible to even replicate the same infographic in both Easelly and Piktochart using their free plans. Usually some advanced graphics, templates, and export options are only available on paid plans.

Finally, I wanted to test the customer service experience on both platforms. I wanted to know if someone would be able to help me if I had billing issues or platform usage problems.

To test this, I wanted to see how easy it would be to cancel each paid plan and get my money back. 

Thus, I upgraded to the paid plan on both platforms to see how long it would take to receive a refund if I wasn’t sold on the paid features.

In this experiment, I tested:

• How long it would take me to recreate the same infographic using free plans on Piktochart and Easelly
• Whether it was possible to recreate the infographic pixel for pixel using only free plans
• How easy or difficult it was to cancel a paid plan and receive a refund

It took ten minutes to create the graph in Piktochart versus thirty minutes in Easelly. 

There were way fewer premade graph options in Easelly, which meant I wasted valuable time weighing which template graph I could use. 

The radial graph on the right of the infographic was not a premade option in Easelly and there was no alternative way to draw layered opaque circles to recreate the radial. 

Piktochart has a much more intuitive user interface. 

It took way too long to figure out how to change my font color in Easelly. It was immediately clear how to change font colors in Piktochart’s editor. 

It turns out there might be a potential bug in Easelly’s color picker because I could not change my font to the last used color. 

About twenty percent of my time was spent trying to fix my font color alone.

Resizing images easily is important because the same infographic can be used in posters, presentations, blogs, and social media in different dimensions.

Easelly only allows free plan users to choose landscape or portrait and specify the pixel size, which is set as default. 

It took a long time to realize that switching from pixels to inches was an option in Easelly. This was extremely confusing. 

Changing the final image size in Piktochart was much more intuitive compared to Easelly. 

With Piktochart’s free plan, you can resize document size, portrait or landscape, social media size, and screen size, as well as custom size, all in the same drop-down menu.

Piktochart won when it came to auto-saving my work.

Easelly does not have auto-save turned on, which meant I lost my progress. With Piktochart, every change was autosaved, which let me know my work was safe.

I spent eight minutes customizing my bar chart in Easelly, including custom graph colors and data values. I clicked out of the graph without clicking “apply changes” and my entire graph disappeared.

I then had to spend another five minutes recreating the graph. I was very unhappy about this.

With Piktochart, even if I clicked out of the graph, my previous progress was still saved, which saved me a lot of time and stress.

If you need to cancel your upgraded plan within 30 days, Piktochart’s customer support is excellent. 

I canceled my subscription on Piktochart’s website, emailed customer support, and received a reply within ten minutes.

Three minutes after that, I got another email confirming my refund was processed and I would receive funds in three to five days. It was truly a quick and painless process.

This was a big contrast to my experience on Easelly.

When I upgraded my Easelly account, I received an error message but payment went through. I received a receipt in my email and through Stripe, but my account was not upgraded from basic to Pro.

I emailed Easelly and, a week later, have received neither an email acknowledging my lack of upgrade nor my cancellation and refund request. I’m still vaguely annoyed about this.

Paying for a professionally made infographic can be expensive, which is why many small businesses choose to DIY. 

Luckily, you can create basic graphs and resize the final image in both Piktochart and Easelly using free plans in under thirty minutes. 

Both Easelly and Piktochart offer ready made templates and charts that you can customize for your projects. 

While I didn’t use icons or templates for this test, both platforms offer these options, albeit Piktochart’s free plans offered entire libraries while Easelly’s only had a few options.

If you’re nervous about choosing colors, all you need to do is approximate the color you want using a color picker or dropper and your desired color and its corresponding hex code appear.

This means that it’s easy to use the same color you want again. While both platforms offer every color imaginable, Piktochart has at least twice as many font options as Easelly. 

Piktochart’s free plan makes it much easier to modify your visuals. There are more graph options available on Piktochart’s platform and it’s more intuitive to customize graphs based on Piktochart’s drop-down menu options.

If you just want to get your feet wet making visuals, Piktochart and Easelly have enough features in their free plans that anyone can create presentation-worthy infographics in thirty minutes or less. 

Extra tip for non-designers: if you’re nervous about design and don’t know where to start, Piktochart has an AI powered tool that will turn your inputted text into visual images that you can tweak to get you started.

Users for Easelly free plans have access to limited graphics, backgrounds, templates, and charts, and can only make public infographics with “low quality” PNG as an export option. 

Easelly Pro offers more templates, icons, and photos, as well as PDF, JPEG, GIF, and PNG export.

Easelly Pro plans start at $48 for students, $60 for teachers, and $72 for businesses per year. Easelly does not offer monthly billing, so users would need to pay annually upfront. 

At Easelly, teachers pay five dollars per month for access to 30 free student accounts, folders, and private infographics. 

Meanwhile, at Piktochart, teachers pay $3.33 per month for unlimited PNG, PDF, and PPT downloads, with access to more than 5 million icons, illustrations, and graphics, 500 AI credits, and 100 GB storage.

Annually, Piktochart’s plans start at:

• $39.99 for students and teachers
• $60 for nonprofit organizations
• $168 for businesses 

At Piktochart, teachers pay $3.33 per month for unlimited PNG, PDF, and PPT downloads and access to more than 5 million icons, illustrations, and graphics, 500 AI credits, and 100 GB storage.

While Piktochart’s free plans provide a lot of great tools for users, if you’re a power user who needs more than two PNG images per month, want to export visuals as PDFs or PowerPoints, and you have your own branding assets, then it’s definitely worth getting a paid plan on Piktochart. 

With Easelly, it’s almost a requirement to buy a paid plan if you want to create more than a very basic infographic. For example, I was unable to reproduce the control infographic because the radial graph was not an option and I couldn’t create circles using the available tools. 

I had a faster and easier time creating infographics in Piktochart. 

It took three times as long in Easelly to recreate a similar infographic as it did in Piktochart with worse results.

Creating the control infographic using only Easelly’s free plan wasn’t possible because Easelly offered free users only a few limited graph options. I had no issues recreating the same image using Piktochart’s free plan. 

While anyone can create infographics using Piktochart and Easelly, the quality of your final result can depend on whether you’re using a free or paid plan, especially with Easelly. 

Although you can create basic infographics using Easelly’s free plan, almost all icons, templates, and graphs are only available to paid users. 

For example, if you want to make an infographic that isn’t a bar, column, line, or radar chart in Easelly, you’ll have to sign up for a paid subscription. 

With Piktochart, there were way more icons, templates, and graphs accessible to users on free plans. Relatively few features were locked behind paid plans. Free users had unlimited access to 17 different chart types alone.

The other main difference between the two free plans was when it came to exporting work. 

With Easelly, the free plan only allowed users to download low quality PNG copies of their infographic. On Piktochart, users could download low, medium, and high quality PNG copies on the free plan, with the caveat that only two free downloads were included.

When it came to customer support, Piktochart won by a mile. Their support team solved my problem within twenty minutes. I’m still waiting to hear back from Easelly a week later.

If Easelly and Piktochart don’t have the features you’re looking for, there are other alternatives to creating infographics, also with free and paid plans, such as Canva and Visme. 

Currently, Canva is the market leader in the visual media space. 

Users turn to Canva to make posters, resumes, logos, brochures, and websites. Canva also touts its Canva AI, which can turn user texts into images. 

Piktochart offers several features that are on par with or better than Canva’s offerings. 

Piktochart also gives users access to outstanding AI capabilities that can turn complex data into customizable visuals more masterfully than other AI ChatGPT wrappers. 

Is Piktochart better than Canva? Piktochart offers users similar features at a competitive price, so you should try both to see which is better for you. 

Visme allows users to make graphs, infographics, social media graphics, forms, and interactive presentations with slide animations and data widgets.

Visme also offers AI design features that can help users create designs, presentations, documents, and edit images. 

Compared to Visme, Piktochart offers users more storage space, unlimited project creation, full access to all templates, customer support for free users, and AI auto-design from text. 

Piktochart even offers video tools like screen recorder, video-maker, and captioning. 

In short, Visme is a good tool, especially for users whose needs center on animated presentations, but is missing some core features that Piktochart offers.

There is no singular “best” platform for creating infographics, only the one that best fits your needs. 

While Canva offers an impressive suite of all-purpose design tools, Piktochart has specialized infographics visual tools and data integration, along with interactive maps, charts, and videos.

Visme gives users access to many chart types and interactive data widgets, an audio library, and analytics, but Piktochart provides users with better support and AI auto-design from text.  

Piktochart offers users a steadily growing suite of tools. Although there’s no clear winner when it comes to infographics creation platforms, Piktochart is definitely the one to watch.