Shutterfly vs. Mixbook Photo Books: What’s the Difference?

Shutterfly and Mixbook both offer customizable photo books with a range of sizes, designs, page types, and tools for bringing your photos together in one place. But the two services aren’t identical. Differences in book formats, creation tools, printing options, premium upgrades, and other features can shape the experience from your first upload to the finished book.

To make those differences easier to understand, we compared Shutterfly and Mixbook photo books across the features customers are likely to consider when creating a book.

Shutterfly vs. Mixbook Photo Books at a Glance

Photo Book Sizes and Page Counts

Both Shutterfly and Mixbook offer square, landscape, and portrait photo books, with different dimensions available from each service.

Shutterfly’s core photo books come in 8×8, 8×11, 10×10, 11×8, 11×14, and 12×12 sizes, covering popular square, portrait, and landscape formats. Photo books start at 20 pages and can include up to 111 pages.

Mixbook offers sizes ranging from 6×6 to 14×11, with availability varying by book type. Select softcover and hardcover books can contain up to 400 pages.

While Mixbook supports a higher maximum page count, Shutterfly’s 111-page limit accommodates many common projects, including annual family yearbooks, vacations, weddings, baby books, and milestone celebrations.

Cover, Page, and Premium Album Options

Shutterfly and Mixbook both offer several ways to customize how a finished photo book looks and feels, but they organize these options differently.

Shutterfly photo books are available with softcovers and hardcovers, including glossy and matte hardcover finishes. Premium leather covers are also available for eligible photo books. For the inside of the book, choose from Standard Pages, Standard Layflat, or Deluxe Layflat. Standard Layflat pages use a hinged binding that allows spreads to open flat, while Deluxe Layflat books feature double-thick pages with a satin finish and seamless two-page spreads.

Eligible Shutterfly photo books can also be upgraded with Professional 6-Color Printing, which adds lighter cyan and magenta inks to the standard CMYK printing process to help create smoother color transitions and tonal detail.

Mixbook organizes its options somewhat differently. Cover choices vary by book type, including softcover and glossy or matte hardcover options. Its available paper finishes include semi-gloss, matte, and lustre, while its layflat books use thicker pages designed for seamless spreads.

For a higher-end option, both brands also offer premium albums. Shutterfly’s premium albums are available in 31 templates and feature thick seamless pages, rounded corners, a protective box, an included cloth cover, and additional premium cover options. Mixbook’s Album tier pairs ultra-thick layflat pages with matte or lustre finishes and a keepsake presentation box.

Photo Book Designs and Customization

Starting with a professionally designed template can make it much easier to turn a large photo collection into a cohesive book.

Shutterfly offers 122 photo book styles, not including its 31 premium album templates. Designs cover occasions and themes including travel, weddings, family, celebrations, and everyday memories.

Mixbook offers 762 photo book templates across its collection.

Both editors provide tools for changing layouts, arranging and resizing photos, adding text, selecting backgrounds, and incorporating decorative elements. Shutterfly also lets you customize the cover, back, and spine on eligible hardcover books and provides tools for adjusting photos with zoom, rotation, auto-enhance, and filters.

The services handle some book-level options differently. Shutterfly surfaces options for changing book specifications within the creation experience. During our Mixbook testing, choices including book type, size, paper finish, and cover finish appeared after selecting Order rather than within the primary design editor.

A Free Professional Photo Book Designer

One feature that sets Shutterfly apart is its free professional design service.

With the free 24-Hour Photo Book Designer Service, you upload your photos and provide your preferences, and a Shutterfly designer creates the book for you within 24 hours. Once the design is ready, you can order it as created or make your own edits first.

We did not find a comparable professional design service from Mixbook.

This gives you three different ways to approach a Shutterfly photo book: design every page yourself, get a head start with AI-powered Autofill, or have a professional designer build it for you at no additional cost.

AI Tools That Make Photo Books Easier to Create

Both companies have introduced automated tools that can reduce the amount of time it takes to build a photo book from scratch.

Shutterfly’s AI-powered Autofill organizes selected photos and automatically arranges them into book layouts. You can choose the photos you want to include and set design preferences before Autofill creates the book, then continue adjusting layouts, photos, backgrounds, text, and other elements yourself.

For help with the words that go alongside your photos, Magic Writer can generate caption suggestions.

Mixbook offers Auto-Create and Story Mode. Its Story Mode analyzes uploaded photos and information about the project to generate book designs with layouts and suggested text. During our testing, Story Mode created a complete book from an uploaded photo collection, which could then be customized in the editor.

Whichever automated creation tool you use, reviewing generated layouts, photo placement, and text before ordering is an important final step.

Editing Tools and Pre-Order Checks

A photo book can contain dozens of photos and captions, so tools that catch potential problems before printing can be particularly helpful.

Both services provide safeguards for photo quality and incomplete designs. Shutterfly alerts you when a photo’s resolution may be too low for the selected placement and includes warnings designed to help catch potential text and layout problems.

Shutterfly also includes built-in spellcheck, which underlines potential misspellings while you’re working.

Mixbook checks for issues including low-resolution photos, blank pages, missing images, and empty photo boxes. In our hands-on test, Mixbook identified an intentionally empty photo box after we selected Order and prompted us to return to the project to correct it. However, intentional spelling errors were not flagged in the editor, preview, or pre-order check during our test.

Sharing and Collaboration

Both platforms provide ways to share photo book projects, although the functionality differs.

Shutterfly projects can be shared with others, who can save a copy to their own account and continue editing their version.

Mixbook supports multi-user collaboration and allows up to 30 people to contribute to a project, with one person actively editing at a time.

For Shutterfly projects where several people have photos to contribute, photos can also be collected and stored in your Shutterfly account before building the book.

Photo Book Finishing Options

Shutterfly also offers finishing options for customers who want to further customize their book. Depending on the book and configuration, options include metallic cover accents, memorabilia pockets, gift boxes, and logo removal.

One difference is branding. Shutterfly customers can remove the Shutterfly logo from eligible photo books for an additional charge, and logo removal is included with premium albums. Mixbook states that its logo cannot be removed from photo books, although its color can be changed to better coordinate with the design.

Photo Book Delivery Options

When you’re creating a photo book for a birthday, anniversary, holiday, or another deadline, available delivery speeds can matter just as much as the design.

Shutterfly offers several shipping speeds. Expedited has an estimated production and delivery time of 4–5 business days, while Rush is estimated at 3–4 business days. Eligible standard photo books can also qualify for Super Rush, with an estimated production and delivery time of just 1–2 business days.

Mixbook estimates hardcover production at approximately three business days and layflat production at approximately four business days. Shipping is calculated separately, with Rush shipping estimated at an additional 1–2 business days.

Because production and delivery can vary based on the exact book configuration and destination, check the estimated arrival date shown for your project before placing an order.

Why Choose Shutterfly for Photo Books?

Shutterfly and Mixbook share many of the features you’d expect from a modern photo book service, including customizable templates, flexible layouts, multiple book formats, layflat pages, and automated creation tools. The differences are often in the additional choices available as you create and finish your book.

With Shutterfly, you can create your photo book yourself, use AI-powered Autofill, or have a professional build it with the free 24-Hour Designer Service. You can choose from 122 photo book styles, multiple page types, Professional 6-Color Printing on eligible books, premium finishing options, and premium albums. Built-in spellcheck and photo-quality warnings can also help catch potential problems before your book goes to print.

For customers who want multiple ways to create a book, access to professional design assistance, premium printing upgrades, and a wide range of finishing options, Shutterfly provides flexibility from the first upload through the final printed product.

Additional Resources:

• How to Make a Photo Book
• Baby Photo Book FAQs
• Make a Photo Book with AI
• Shutterfly Photo Books FAQs
• Photo Books Pricing Guide
• How Many Photos Should  Be in a Photo Book?