When comparing Shutterfly vs Pixieset, the Slant community recommends Shutterfly for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud photo storage and portfolio services?” Shutterfly is ranked 9th while Pixieset is ranked 12th.
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Pros
Pro Used by a lot of sports teams for free photo gathering
Pro Commission-free sales for paid accounts
Only the free tier has a 15% commission taken from sales.
Pro Integrated Google analytics and downloads tracking
Pro Can set gallery expiration dates
Cons
Con Hard to download photos
Downloads are limited to single photos, not full albums.
Con No Lightroom integration
Shutterfly apparently has or had an API for uploading photos, but the only Lightroom plugin to do so is outdated and crashes while trying to upload.
Con Poor site design
There are multiple "silos" in the site with different user interfaces for the same function, and with different bugs in each. For instance, trying to import from Flickr the support person had me navigate to the Flickr connection UI via Create Photo Book (which actually worked, but didn't give me an easy way for others to draw from my Flickr-hosted photos), because the "Connect to Flickr" function in the main upload screen was broken. Albums in "My Photos" have drastically different capabilities compared to albums in "Shared Sites". This leads to confusion and completely unhelpful support/help documentation.
Con No brand logo
You can not put your own logo on gallery pages.
Con Brand name might not be taken seriously
A few photographers dislike the name Pixieset due to fears of them not being taken seriously by clients because the domain name contains the word "pixie". A workaround with a custom domain names can be implemented.