The 14 Best T-Shirt Design Software Options in 2023

Utilizing the proper t-shirt design software program is essential if you wish to begin designing some spectacular custom t-shirts.

On this article, we’ll discover 15 software program choices for t-shirt design, bearing in mind the professionals, cons, and pricing. No matter your earlier expertise or design expertise are, this listing will enable you discover one of the best instrument in your wants.

High 14 t-shirt design software program instruments in 2023

With out additional ado, let’s dive into our prime 15 t-shirt design software program choices for 2023.

Printful’s Design Maker 

Let’s begin with Printful’s personal instrument: the Design Maker. It comes with the built-in Mockup Generator, permitting you to remodel your design from a 2D picture to a 3D product.

Utilizing our Design Maker, you may simply mess around together with your t-shirt design—from choosing the best t-shirt for printing to switching up the colours to including textual content (in additional than 791+ fonts!) and creating patterns. 

You may as well add and customise your art work or take pre-made photos and clip artwork from the in depth library. 

Supply: Printful

Execs and cons 

The beginner-friendly interface makes it a wonderful selection for design newbies. Appropriate for DTG printing and embroidery design, the Design Maker lets you add new designs you create to your print-on-demand retailer instantly.

There are only a few limitations. First, you may’t obtain your design with out your Printful account. Second, the design choices are barely extra restricted when in comparison with skilled software program. 

Pricing

Printful prospects can use the Design Maker without cost (and it’s free to get began with Printful). 

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the trade normal {many professional} designers depend on. This design software program presents wealthy capabilities for t-shirt design, like background and object removing, layering, coloring, and extra.

Out there for desktop and iPad, Photoshop additionally options integrations with many synthetic intelligence-powered instruments to hurry up the creation course of.

Supply: Adobe

Execs and cons

Photoshop’s superior modifying instruments and integration with Adobe Artistic Cloud (which provides you entry to different Adobe merchandise) guarantee virtually limitless design choices to create and improve your t-shirt design.

Adobe Photoshop is perhaps funding for those who’re a seasoned design knowledgeable, but it surely’s a fancy program that may take a very long time to grasp. Newbies will want some coaching (like taking a category or a shopping for tutorial) to take full benefit of its high-end performance.

Pricing 

Photoshop presents three month-to-month plans, starting from $19.99 to $54.99. All plans include a free 7-day trial and embrace Photoshop for desktop and iPad. 

Adobe Illustrator

Whereas Photoshop is a pixel-based photograph modifying software program, one other Adobe product, Illustrator, is an software for vector graphic design. 

With sturdy software program like Adobe Illustrator, you may exactly management each side of the design course of to create crisp, flawless visuals.

When Photoshop and Illustrator are built-in, you may create a vector graphic utilizing Illustrator and place it into a picture of a clean t-shirt utilizing Photoshop.

Supply: Adobe

Execs and cons

Illustrator contains many built-in belongings and tutorials that can assist you with the design course of. Along with superior vector drawing instruments, Illustrator can flip your hand-drawn artwork right into a vector format.

Illustrator would possibly take you a while to grasp. As well as, the app is sort of resource-intensive, so it’s more likely to work slower for those who run a number of applications concurrently.

Pricing 

Like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator follows a subscription mannequin with month-to-month plans beginning at $20.99/month for desktop and iPad.

Canva

Identified for its simplicity, Canva is a well-liked graphic design instrument that fits each expertise degree.  

Canva operates as a drag-and-drop instrument with an in depth library of fonts, design belongings, photos, and ready-to-use templates. Plus, you may add your personal visuals, take away the background, and alter colours, textual content, and the place of components.

In relation to t-shirts and different merchandise, Canva means that you can not solely create and customise designs however to order and print them as effectively. 

Supply: Canva

Execs and cons

Apart from being thought-about one of the vital beginner-friendly design instruments in the marketplace, Canva has one other benefit: each pre-made component is copyright-free.

For skilled designers, Canva would possibly lack some superior options. For instance, there’s no choice to mix designs or get picture-perfect alignment (aside from manually). And the variety of templates and different design belongings without cost model customers is restricted.

Pricing

You may select between a free model with primary options and a premium model with extra design components. The premium month-to-month plan is $12.99/month (or $119.99/12 months) for people.

GIMP

As free photograph and graphic modifying software program, GIMP has many helpful options for designing t-shirts on a finances. 

As open-source software program, GIMP is accessible for many working methods and may be modified and enhanced by its customers.

Apart from its core performance, GIMP has varied plugins that stretch its capabilities.

Supply: GIMP

Execs and cons

With GIMP’s wealthy assortment of instruments, you’ve the whole lot it’s good to tweak inventory graphics or create your customized designs. This system helps many various file codecs, together with those who work greatest for t-shirt printing.

As for its cons, the instrument lacks extra devoted tech help and is taken into account exhausting to study. Even for professional customers conversant in comparable instruments, it may be complicated and counterintuitive at first. Additionally, GIMP is especially a raster (pixel) graphics program and has comparatively restricted help for drawing and modifying vectors.

Pricing

GIMP has no obtain charges—its superior instruments and options are free.

CorelDRAW 

CorelDRAW is a downloadable vector graphics editor that additionally helps pixel-based picture modifying.

CorelDRAW is available in a wealthy household of merchandise. What you select will depend on the extent of your earlier expertise and your wants. 

For graphics fans and hobbyists, CorelDRAW presents CorelDRAW Necessities and CorelDRAW Normal. For graphics professionals, there’s a fully-featured Graphics Suite bundle. 

Supply: CorelDRAW

Execs and cons

CorelDRAW’s options and in-app tips are well-suited for designers of all expertise. It’s extremely versatile for modifying images and making vector graphics like logos, illustrations, and typography. On prime of that, CorelDRAW’s perspective impact was made for the print trade—you need to use it to create reasonable, detailed t-shirt designs and mockups.

That mentioned, CorelDRAW is sort of an funding and is priced larger than different market alternate options. Its cheaper merchandise are additionally restricted to 1 working system solely (Home windows) and have fewer options. 

Pricing

CorelDRAW may be bought by means of a one-time cost (for the Important and Normal packages). The Important bundle prices $142, whereas the Normal is priced at $389. Its most full bundle, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, prices $851.

Inkscape

Much like GIMP, Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor which might additionally enable you design t-shirts.

As a free software program various to different high-end design options, it’s tailor-made particularly for vector imagery and options many built-in instruments.

Other than a devoted group, which continues to help improve and develop the software, the instrument accommodates complete written and video tutorials to ease the training curve. 

Supply: Inkscape

Execs and cons

Suitable with Home windows, macOS, and Linux working methods, this instrument is a go-to for zero-cost t-shirt designing.

The native help for normal file codecs in Inkscape makes it straightforward to export recordsdata which are well-tailored for printing. Plus, you may flip your pixel photos into vector photos. 

Nonetheless, Inkscape might deal with design tasks much less sophisticatedly than its paid alternate options. And it operates within the RGB color mode (used for digital functions) moderately than the CMYK (greatest for printing).

Pricing

The Inkscape software program is a superb decide if you’re on the lookout for a cost-free upmarket software program various for designing t-shirts.

Design Wizard

Much like Canva, Design Wizard is a drag-and-drop design instrument. 

With reasonably priced pricing, an intuitive interface, and little to no studying required, Design Wizard can help and ease your design course of. The instrument comes with 1000’s of pre-made components, which you’ll be able to tweak to your liking.

Execs and cons

Along with providing an unlimited assortment of ready-to-use design belongings like fonts, clip artwork photos, and design components, Design Wizard options drag-and-drop performance, which makes it splendid for novices.

Though you may personalize each component, the design choices and libraries aren’t as expansive as different instruments. As well as, you may solely obtain the recordsdata in PNG, JPG, or SVG codecs.

Pricing

Design Wizard presents a free model with important options and premium (annual or month-to-month) subscription plans Professional and Enterprise. 

All premium plans include a 7-day free trial. After that, the Professional plan will value you $9.99 a month, whereas the Marketing strategy is $49.99 per 30 days.

Supply: Design Wizard

Sketch

Sketch is a well-liked app for Mac customers that focuses on vector graphics. Whereas it’s wildly recognized for its highly effective capabilities in digital design creation, you can too use Sketch to create gorgeous t-shirt designs. 

This software program ensures a clean design workflow and allows you to benefit from an in depth plugin ecosystem.

Execs and cons

Sketch has a big assortment of each easy and superior design instruments and components. It additionally helps pixel photos, permits importing and exporting recordsdata from different graphics software program, and presents a real-time collaboration characteristic.

Regardless of this, Sketch isn’t designed for print tasks and doesn’t produce print-ready recordsdata. To resolve this, chances are you’ll want one other instrument (like Adobe Illustrator) to regulate the Sketch file and make it prepared for printing. For much less tech-savvy people, this may very well be a problem. 

Pricing

Sketch comes with a free 30-day trial. After that, you should buy one among two plans beginning at $10 month-to-month or get a Mac-only license for $120.

Supply: Sketch

Figma

Figma is a extra accessible various to Sketch, obtainable on Home windows, Linux, and macOS. A beloved instrument for UI/UX designers, it additionally works for t-shirt designs. 

Figma’s seamless real-time collaboration perform makes it nice for groups engaged on t-shirt designs. Plus, everybody can see the modifications immediately.

Execs and cons

Figma operates in a cloud-based atmosphere, that means you don’t must obtain something—all of your work is occurring on-line.

However this makes Figma unavailable offline. And, since Figma is extra oriented towards UX design, it doesn’t provide templates for t-shirt design.

Pricing

You may select from Figma’s beneficiant free plan or varied paid plans that begin at $12/month and supply prolonged options and extra collaborators.

Supply: Figma

Affinity Designer

The Affinity Suite presents a set of apps for macOS, Home windows, and iPad. 

It contains Affinity Designer—a vector graphic design software program that features vector drawing, typography, picture modifying instruments, and different sturdy options to create t-shirt designs and different print tasks. 

Execs and cons

The stability between Affinity Designer’s functionality, efficiency, and comparatively low value, makes it a robust competitor to different costly subscription software program. The interface of the instrument is obvious and well-organized.

As for the cons, the instrument doesn’t embrace the choice to transform pixel photos to vectors. One other downside is that this system doesn’t work throughout a number of working methods.

Pricing

Affinity Designer may be bought with a one-time cost beginning at $18.49. The value will depend on whether or not you utilize macOS, Home windows, or iPad. 

inkXE

inkXE is a web-based product design instrument that works as web-to-print software program. Made for POD companies, it helps all printing strategies, from DTG and display printing to sublimation and embroidery. 

This design instrument contains picture and textual content modifying, a ready-to-use art work assortment, layering, hand drawing, 3D preview, and extra. 

Other than designing your customized tee, you can too use it for different print merchandise.

Supply: inkXE

Execs and cons

Other than on-line entry, inkXE presents a backend admin system for modifying the instrument’s capabilities and capabilities in response to particular enterprise wants. 

Whereas it’s splendid for POD companies on the lookout for an built-in resolution to assist prospects design their attire, inkXE isn’t actually appropriate for particular person customers due to its concentrate on serving bigger enterprises. And it’s extraordinarily costly in comparison with different instruments on this listing.

Pricing

This software program has one-time cost plans beginning at $2999. 

Procreate

Primarily designed for the creation of digital sketches, work, illustrations, and animations, Procreate is made for a novel t-shirt design with a hand-drawn contact. 

In case you’re an illustrator at coronary heart, you’ll love its touch-responsiveness, in depth brush library, full shade, font management, and 3D mannequin portray options. 

Supply: Procreate

Execs and cons

This instrument might be one of the best for hand drawing. You’ve gotten 200 customizable brushes readily available and might even create your personal.

Out there completely on iPad and iPhone, Procreate has restricted accessibility to customers with different gadgets and working methods. Additionally, chances are you’ll want an Apple Pencil to get optimum outcomes out of this software program. 

Pricing

Procreate for iPad prices $12.99 on the App Retailer. Procreate Pocket, constructed for iPhone customers, prices $5.99. Each options require a one-time buy solely.

Placeit

Placeit is an all-in-one in-browser design platform for creating t-shirt mockups and designs (and extra). It’s straightforward to navigate, because the interface is organized into self-explanatory sections and classes. 

Placeit presents an intuitive design expertise with an choice to begin with pre-made templates or to add and edit your personal design. It has an unlimited assortment of mockups for males’s, girls’s, and youngsters’ t-shirts.

Supply: Pleceit

Execs and cons

Placeit’s in depth library of templates, tremendous easy interface, and no set up setup streamline the design course of. Plus, you’ve a dwell preview characteristic and might create your model package. 

However compared with different professionally-oriented platforms, with Placeit, you’ve only a few choices to change the weather. Additionally, you may’t obtain the design without cost or select a format aside from PNG (even with a paid plan).

Pricing

Placeit presents a subscription-based plan for limitless entry to its design belongings, which begins at $9.99 a month. You may as well buy a single design beginning at $2.95.

What’s one of the best software program to make use of in your t-shirt design?

With so many t-shirt design software program instruments obtainable, selecting the best one might sound difficult. However it doesn’t need to be.

Simply take into consideration your wants, finances, and degree of design expertise. These parameters will information you to the only option. See what matches you greatest, get impressed by some cool t-shirt design ideas, and also you’re in your approach!

What’s your favourite t-shirt design software program? Lets us know within the feedback.