Venngage vs Piktochart: Which Infographic Maker is Better?

Infographics are an incredibly powerful way to communicate to both internal and external stakeholders.

That said, you may not have the time or know-how to make an infographic from scratch.

There are several infographic makers on the market and Piktochart and Venngage are two of them that offer a simple online editor and easy-to-edit templates. But, which infographic maker is better for your particular needs?

In this guide, we’ll offer you a comparison of Venngage and Piktochart’s features, templates, and resources to help you figure out which platform is best for your needs, whether you’re a student who wants a free, lightweight solution or a professional who wants a collaborative, high-quality solution for teams.

Who is Piktochart built for?
Who is Venngage built for?
Getting started
Picking a template
Editing an infographic
Cost and value
Infographic templates: Piktochart vs. Venngage
Adding your branding
Support and resources
Ease of use

Who is Piktochart built for?

Piktochart is a design tool intended for people with very basic graphic design needs who don’t need professional-level results.

There are only about 100 infographic templates and most templates seem geared for social media, not the workplace. There are plenty of simple list templates, but not more robust infographic templates for professionals such as roadmaps, timelines and plans.

Team functionality is also limited, with no real-time collaboration or robust Brand Kit offered, which means Piktochart’s use is limited for professionals.

Who is Venngage built for?

Venngage is a simple but powerful design solution. Its templates and easy-to-use online editor help people communicate complex and technical information in an engaging way.

Venngage is known for its infographic templates, but it also has a huge collection of presentation, flowchart, roadmap, timeline, report, poster and checklist templates (and much more).

For example:

Project managers use Venngage to create project roadmap infographics
Marketers use Venngage to create promotional materials for technical industries
Business consultants use Venngage to create thought leadership infographics

Looking to create a data-driven visual? Venngage has a wide variety of templates, with a focus on the needs of professionals such as strategizing, planning, reporting and promoting.

Venngage also offers templates in a variety of design styles, with fully customizable icons, illustrations and stock photos. We’ll cover that in more detail later on.

Getting started: Piktochart vs. Venngage

Piktochart and Venngage both boast of being simple design platforms. Here’s a walkthrough of using both.

Getting started with Piktochart

When you sign up for a free account with Piktochart, you can choose to sign up using a Gmail or Facebook account, or set it up manually with your email address.

On the next screen, you will be asked what you do for work and the size of your organization. There are many, many role choices that could be trimmed down to make it easier to navigate.

Next, you will be prompted to choose which tips or strategies you would like to have emailed to you. You are not asked what type of visual you may want to create. You’re not shown different types of infographics to select the ones you like either.

Once you are signed up, you will be directed to the Dashboard. There is unfortunately no information or prompts on how to get started.

This is where you will choose your template. You can search through the available templates by category or use the search bar to search by keyword.

There is also no indicator of what’s free and what’s paid, nor different infographic categories, like step-by-step or informational. Also, many of the template preview images are blurry. The suggested search terms are nice to have, though.

If you click on Graphics libraries and then Shapes & Icons, you can access Piktochart’s icon and graphics collections. From here you can drag and drop the graphic of your choice onto your project.

You can customize the colors and fonts in your graphic with the Editor and also add charts, maps, and other visual elements.

Once you have finished your infographic you can download it as an image, share it, or publish it.

Getting started with Venngage

Venngage’s onboarding process is longer than Piktochart’s but you get a much more tailored experience with customized template suggestions for your needs.

When you create an account, Venngage asks you what you need Venngage for. This helps Venngage pick templates for you based on your goals.

You’re then prompted to pick your organization, which helps Venngage curate templates related to your unique situation—whether you’re self-employed, work for a large company or NGO, work for or attend a school or university etc.

Venngage further customizes your experience by asking for your role, whether that’s in marketing, HR, management etc.

Then, pick three types of templates that you would like to create. This helps Venngage learn if you like simple infographics, reports with graphs/charts, engaging social media graphics, event posters etc.

After that, you are prompted to pick three design styles that you like: modern, simple, creative, conservative etc. Just pick the three that fit your creative goals.

From there, Venngage takes you to their templates library where there is a selection of curated templates based on your answers. You can either explore the templates by yourself or follow the pop-up prompts for an easy walkthrough of the editor.

If you select the prompt and click “Create”, you enter the editor where you get a walkthrough of its features and layout.

Then, either get to work customizing the template or visit the Help page, which delivers video tutorials that will help you become more confident in the editor.

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Picking an infographic template: Piktochart vs Venngage

Picking an infographic template with Piktochart

Piktochart offers about 500 template options to get you started, but only about 100 of them are infographics.

From the template page, you can enter keywords to search for an infographic to begin editing. If you don’t want to do a keyword search, you can also explore their templates via the menu in the left-sidebar, which categorizes the templates by type.

That said, infographics themselves are not broken down by type such as process, statistical, list etc.

Piktochart’s infographic templates are quite flat, meaning they don’t use elements such as icons or illustrations with much depth. In fact, there is a lack of variety of icons and illustrations in general. The data visualizations within the templates are also pretty basic and stick to simple bar, line or pie charts.

Another thing: many of the layouts are similar, though they do follow design best practices.

In a nutshell, Piktochart’s infographic templates are perfectly serviceable, but they are a bit boring and definitely not very eye-catching. They are not meant for the average professional, who needs beautiful, crisp designs with business use cases in mind.

You’ll also notice that the copy in the infographics is generally just nonsensical filler text, so you can’t use the copy as a guideline.

Picking an infographic template with Venngage

Venngage has over 6,100 templates and 2,600+ of them are infographics. Another plus: 1,400 of Venngage’s templates are completely free to use and don’t require a paid plan.

You can choose one of the templates specifically recommended for you or pick a type of template from the left-hand menu.

From there, you can find the specific type of infographic you want to create, whether that’s a simple list infographic for a blog post, a more detailed statistical infographic to use as a report, a timeline infographic to add to your presentation etc.

Use the top navigation bar to search by keywords, plan type (Free, Premium, Business), or page dimensions like landscape, square, letter or portrait.

Click on the hearts to Favorite templates you like. Access them later in your Favorites folder in the left-hand menu.

Any templates that can only be used with a paid plan are marked as “Premium” or “Business.” That way, you know immediately if you can use them based on your plan level.

There are many template styles—from simple and functional, to professional, to engaging and creative. It’s easy to find a template that will fit your company’s brand or your personal style.

Venngage’s team of in-house designers is constantly producing new templates every week–you can even filter templates by New vs. Old so you can see our freshest templates.

Don’t see exactly what you need? Use a blank canvas and start from scratch.

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Editing an infographic: Piktochart vs Venngage

Editing an infographic in Piktochart

Piktochart has a drag-and-drop interface that lets you rearrange their infographic template’s existing elements or add additional elements such as graphics or charts.

Using the left-hand navigation panel, you can add frames, change your color scheme and insert other design components. You can add images to the background for extra texture, which is a nice touch, though many look blurry once you apply them.

Another nice feature is when you scroll over font options, it changes the existing text in your infographic, letting you preview the results.

The only fonts available, unfortunately, are free Google fonts that are available widely. If you upgrade to a paid plan on Piktochart, you can add custom fonts.

Adding and editing charts

Again, on the left-hand navigation panel, you will find a tab for adding charts under tools. Once you have selected the type of chart you would like to use, you can import your data or enter it manually. You will be able to select the chart style that works for your data and customize it with the colors of your choice.

The charts/graphs tool is an easy-to-use pop-up that lets you easily edit information. Finding the color, formatting and settings can be a bit tough as it’s hidden behind a gear icon.

There are many graph options: bar, line, scatter, pie, donut, etc. That said, there are not a lot of design options for colors, fonts, labels, etc. and no other diagrams like word clouds.

The map editor is very similar, easy to use and allows for a lot of custom edits and formatting. You can’t add labels for geographic areas, though, and there are only world, continent and national maps, no state or county maps.

Adding and editing icons

You can add icons by opening the graphic tab on the left-hand navigation panel. From there, you can drag and drop your chosen icon or shape right into your project.

Piktochart’s icons are very simple and wouldn’t work well in a professional environment. Piktochart only has flat icons and about 75 illustrations. There is a clear lack of people illustrations, too.

The icons are hidden in a drop-down box which makes scrolling through them challenging. That said, being able to sort between color and mono is a nice feature. Plus, when you hover on an icon it is blown up so you get a better view of what it looks like.

There’s no icon or image replace tool that I could see, so you’re stuck deleting old icons and repositioning new ones. If you choose a bunch of icons, Piktochart piles them all on top of each other on your canvas.

As for shapes, Piktochart often uses shapes to build scenes instead of single icons, like buildings being made up of 10 shapes instead of one building icon. Obviously, this is confusing to edit or delete.

Shapes are not found with icons in the Piktochart editor and you only get horizontal lines, no vertical ones, which is odd.

Adding and editing photos

With Piktochart, you can upload up to 40 MB of images with a free account, and 1 GB with a paid account. Once you have uploaded your images, it is easy to drag them into your graphic.

The stock photo library comes from Unsplash and some of the previews are too small or optimized to see what you are adding to the template. There’s a preview pop-up when you hover on the image, but the images are commonly pretty blurry.

You can also mask an image by inserting it into any shape using the shapes and icons graphics tools.

Another drawback: the only way to crop images is to use a photo frame. There’s no image replace feature either—you need to manually delete, add a new image and resize it.

Finally, at times Piktochart’s photo library takes you to the Unsplash page instead of adding the photo. So, some images are impossible to add to templates because of this bug.

Aligning elements on the page

Piktochart uses a drag-and-drop interface to make it relatively simple to change the appearance of your infographic. Gridlines appear as you move objects, helping you to align them with other elements on the canvas.

For more precise adjustments, you can also highlight the selected item and move it using your arrow keys.

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Editing an infographic in Venngage

Venngage also uses a simple drag-and-drop interface with grid lines that help you align elements on your canvas. But once you start using Venngage, its powerful data visualization and information design capability are obvious.

Similar to Piktochart, Venngage has a sidebar where you can select specific design elements like stock photos, charts and icons and a top menu to help you customize design elements.

Another big plus: Venngage’s extensive icon and photo libraries are completely free to use.

Venngage has 23,000+ creative icons and over 3 million free, professional stock images that you can browse in the Venngage editor and add to your infographic. All templates already include the icons and photos in them—you don’t need to pay an additional $1 or so per element.