If you have a new business that needs branding, you may be reviewing online options for developing your logo and other elements of your brand. Two online services to consider are Tailor Brands and Branding Compass. Let’s look at how the two compare and which will be better, based on your skills and needs.

Tailor Brands

What is Tailor Brands?

Tailor Brands is an online logo maker. It uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help guide you through the process of creating a logo.

What does Tailor Brands offer?

Logos is their best-known product, but they also offer AI-driven website design templates and social media posts. You can also buy marketing items that feature your logos such as business cards and other merchandise.

How much does Tailor Brands cost?

It is free to design your logo, and you pay only when you’re ready to download the final files. They have moved to subscription plans (which feels strange for a logo product) that are priced at $9.99 – $49.99/month. There are discounts if you pay annually.

How does Tailor Brands work?

1. To get started with Tailor Brands you enter the name of your business and tell them what type of business you have. They encourage you to tell them about your business, as this will affect the AI-generated results.
2. You then have to choose whether you want an icon-based logo, a name-based logo (wordmark), or a letter-based logo (monogram). If you choose an icon-based logo you can begin looking through clipart icons or shapes and choose your top five.
3. Then, you’re asked to choose three fonts you like.

Then, ta-da, Tailor Brands starts serving up logo options for you.

From here, you can continue to customize the design. You can change the icon by choosing from their large library of icons. If you want to adjust the fonts, you don’t directly choose a typeface, rather you adjust your overall ‘style’ and the tool suggests more fonts.

Once you finalize the logo design, you can download your logo file. You can get the png and jpg files for free, but these are not as high-quality for scalable as eps vector files. You’ll need to pay to get those.

What’s good about Tailor Brands

Speed: Tailor Brands is really fast. In just a few minutes, you are starting to review logo designs.

Lots of options: After these initial options, you can continue to adjust and generate more and more options to review.

Free: You don’t have to pay until the logo is designed and you want the eps files.

What you may not like about Tailor Brands

They’re not really building your logo based on much information. Once you get past the initial recommendations you can customize a lot of the design. While this is fun, and their interface is easy to use, you can spend a lot of time just reviewing more and more options without focusing on what’s best for your brand.

Another shortcoming is how you choose fonts. There’s not a master list of typefaces as you’re used to seeing when you use most programs from Microsoft Word to web design tools. Even after you finalize your logo and get a brand book made, they never explicitly say what font is used in your logo. It’s important to create a consistent brand identity so it would be helpful to know the exact fonts used in your logo so you can use them in other things like business cards, websites, or social media posts.

Branding Compass

What is Branding Compass?

Branding Compass helps business owners discover the best words and visuals for their branding and marketing. It uses algorithms, automation, and a lot of input from the user.

What does Branding Compass offer?

The personalized Branding Compass report is their flagship product. This includes recommendations on the best colors, fonts, visual styles, words, and messaging. The online tool also helps you write a Unique Value Proposition and create an Ideal Client Profile. You can get a wordmark-style logo designed by professional designers that comes with a style guide.

How much does Branding Compass cost?

You can start your online discovery workbook for free. A starter report is $99, logos are $149, and additional packages run up to $399.

How does Branding Compass work?

1. You start by answering questions about your business in their online discovery workbook. This an in-depth look at what makes your product or service special.
2. After you submit your answers, you receive a 10-20 page report with customized recommendations on fonts, colors, and visuals. It also includes your Ideal Client Profile, UVP, a word cloud, a review of your competitors, and guidance on the best words to use in your marketing.
3. If you order a logo, you send in your preferred colors and fonts based on the recommendations in the report. Professional designers refine your wordmark-style logo over the course of three rounds of revisions. Your final logo files include a one-page style guide in addition to eps, jpg, png, and SVG files.

Branding Compass is less focused on just logos, it will help you understand much more about your whole visual identity. It will also give you guidance on design, messaging, marketing, and more.

What’s good about Branding Compass

Comprehensive. Branding Compass is much more than a logo design service. It will guide colors, fonts, words, messaging, ideal customers, and competitors.

New perspective. Branding Compass helps you look at your brand from the outside in. By asking similar questions that a branding expert would ask, you start to learn more about what makes you unique, who is most likely to buy from you, and how you can stand out from your competitors.

Real humans, not AI. With Branding Compass, your logo will be designed by a professional, who is likely a better designer than you are. If you’d rather have someone do-it-for-you rather than do-it-yourself, Branding Compass is a better choice.

What you may not like about Branding Compass

Expect to take at least an hour and put some real thought into answering the questions in the Branding Compass workbook. While this is a good exercise for any serious business owner, it may be too much if you’re simply looking for a logo.

Also, Branding Compass only offers wordmark or name-based logos. If you have your mindset on a logo that includes an icon, that’s not an option with Branding Compass.

Our Conclusion

If you believe that your brand is more than just a logo, Branding Compass is the service for you. If you just want a quick logo, Tailor Brands may be the right choice for you.

Can Branding Compass improve your Tailor Brands results?

One of the shortcomings of Tailor Brands is that the visuals they suggest may not be in sync with how you visualize your brand or what will be appealing to your target market. It’s really more based on what you like.

If you look through the Tailor Brands site, they provide these six logo design tips.

You can get help with #1-4 by using Branding Compass:

1. Branding Compass will help you create an in-depth ideal customer profile.
2. Branding Compass gives you an easy way to compare yourself to your competitors.
3. Branding Compass will recommend 5 Google fonts that match your key brand traits.
4. Branding Compass will recommend 12 color palettes to represent your brand.

Summary: Tailor Brand vs Branding Compass logos

While both Tailor Brands and Branding Compass offer logo design, the process is much different.

Tailor Brands will have you starting to review logo designs in just a few minutes. The platform is really easy to use and you might describe the whole process as fun.

Branding Compass takes more commitment from you as a business owner because you need to thoughtfully complete the discovery workbook. Expect to get a complete logo in about a week, but it’s created by US-based professional designers, rather than by AI. So, the result is likely to be more unique and definitely more in sync with your accurately representing your brand and attracting the right customers.