The best logo designer

(Image credit: ICONA)

The best logo designer (and even some the best free logo designer options) can be an essential tool when it comes to building a bold and compelling brand identity. Whether you're a designer looking to craft professional logos or a business owner who doesn't (yet) have any design knowledge (yet), the best logo creator can offer you the help you need to create a logo, with different options available for different budgets.

If you're a professional logo designer, we would recommend choosing from the top three paid-for best logo maker options on our list since these will give you the creative flexibility and wealth of features that you need to create truly original bespoke logo designs. Numbers four to eight on the list below are cheaper options aimed at non-designers who want the software to do at least a lot of the work for the. They will do the job when it comes to needing a logo that looks "good enough" for, say, a local event a hobby group or a personal project or presentation, but let's be honest, they're not going to compare to a professionally designed identity.

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Adobe Illustrator remains the industry standard tool for vector editing. It's the most used software among freelancers and design agencies for everything from illustration to poster design, icons, and, of course, designing logos. It's a powerful, feature-rich piece software package that works smoothly and efficiently with other Adobe apps, such as Photoshop and InDesign. You can access assets such as Adobe fonts and Adobe Stock within its interface too.

If you’re completely new to design software, Illustrator does involve quite a steep learning curve, although our selection of the best Adobe Illustrator tutorials and our guide to designing a killer logo in Illustrator can help there. Also, note that you can't buy Illustrator as a one-off purchase, but only as a subscription, which can be quite expensive (although an Adobe Creative Cloud discount can help keep the price down).

The upside of the subscription model is that Adobe is constantly updating the software, and as a subscriber, you always have access to the newest features. The latest version, launched in late 2021, makes it easy to work with linked Photoshop Creative Cloud files in Illustrator and adds a new dedicated 3D and materials panel. The fact that Illustrator's now available for iPad also sweetens the deal, and Illustrator for iPad is one of the best tools there are for logo design on an iPad.

Admittedly, it still lacks some of Illustrator's features and tools, but it also offers some improvements, such as million-plus Zoom, and the fact that the iPad version is exactly the same as the desktop one. Affinity Designer runs super-fast on the latest hardware, and the most recent update (V1.10) in August, has made it faster still. Take advantage of the 30-day free trial to give it a try with the help of our Affinity Designer logo tutorial.

If you have no design skills at all, your best option is Tailor Brands Logo Maker. It's the best logo designer software for non-designers, and that's because it basically does all of the designing for you. You type in the wording you want in your logo, then you're presented with a series of binary font options, and asked which you like better (you can say if you dislike both). It only takes a minute or two and once you’re done, the tool uses some clever AI to conjure up a selection of potential logo designs based on your choices.

Tailor Brands Logo Maker is free to try, but you’ll have to subscribe for access to the high-resolution logo files. Subscribing will also give you access to a logo resize tool, your logo in different social media sizes, plus a graphic design tool, stock photos and icons, and an AI-driven website builder, which is quite a package. All in all, we found the platform very easy to use when we reviewed it, but we found that logos could be generic, with few options for customisation. See our hands-on Tailor Brands review for more details.

You get a range of customisation options (though more would certainly be welcome. You also have the ability to change colours, fonts, layouts, and symbols. There are over 300 templates to choose from and it's all very easy to use. Designing a logo is free; the sting is that you'll need to pay to download. There's a range of pricing options, including a 'logo-only' fee plus subscription options, and you can download your logo as a PNG image or vector file. If you need more design options, you can also use Looka's Brand Kit tools to make social media assets, business cards, websites, posters and flyers.

ICONA Logo Maker is a paid-for app for iPhone and iPad that makes a very poor first impression due to its misspelled tagline "Porfessional Logo Studio" on the App Store, which inexplicably in over 4 years ICONA still hasn't corrected. Apart from that, though, this logo designer is actually quite good. With more than a million customisable designs, 350K+ image backgrounds and custom hues ranging from solid colours to gradients, there’s a lot of flexibility, so you're less likely to create a generic logo that looks the same as everyone else's.

Despite the 'Pro' in the title (yes, so many products throw in a 'pro' that it's started to become meaningless), Logo Design Studio Pro isn't really for professionals at all. It's closer to the Canva Logo Maker (number 3 on our list), with a simple interface that makes it easy for novice designers to make a basic logo. This option uses a subscription model for payment, but that allows you to design as many logos as you like. There are plenty of assets to help you, including thousands of templates and graphics, and hundreds of commercially licensed fonts.

Looking for the best free logo designer software? Well here goes. Note that many apps will provide you with logo tools that appear to be free but then demand you cough up to if you want to download the logo you've generated. To save you wasted time, we've included that type of software above in the paid-for section. Below you'll find three tools that let you create a logo for free AND actually download it without having to pay (albeit with some restrictions).

And just another word of warning. We can't stress enough that even the best free logo designer software is no match for paid software. We really only recommended using the free logo designers below for experimenting, trying out ideas or for designing a logo for a hobby or personal project. When it comes to designing a real logo for a business that you expect to last, it's really worth paying to get it right!

The upside of so little in the way of customisation is that the process is extremely quick, just don't expect anything visually amazing. You don't need to be a Squarespace customer to use the service or to download a free low-res version of your logo, but you do need to be a customer to download a high-res version of your logo (you could always take out a 14-day free trial of Squarespace, and if you cancel before the end of the two weeks if the logo design is really all you need.)

Want to craft something original of your own rather than depend on an auto-generated logo? The website building platform Ucraft is one of the few to offer a Free Logo Maker that lets you do that. Click on the 'Text' button, type your text and tweak the size, font, etc. Then add shapes, icons and/or backgrounds to complete your design. Of course, this is no Adobe Illustrator. Your options are limited, but it is very easy to use, and you can download a hi-res PNG version of your logo without paying a penny. (Note, that an SVG file costs $7.)

What's the best logo design software?

If you're a designer, the absolute best software for logo design is Adobe Illustrator. This professional vector editing software is the industry standard for designing logos, offering you all the tools and AI-powered features you need. It operates smoothly with other Adobe apps, and services like Adobe Fonts and Adobe Stock. That said, Adobe Illustrator is quite expensive, and it's available only with a subscription. If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, Affinity Designer is available as a one-off purchase.

However, if you have no design skills or experience, you really won't know where to start with either of these tools. In that case, we'd recommend Canva Logo Maker, which makes it very easy to create a logo using templates and a drag-and-drop interface.

What's the best free logo design software?

Free logo designers are very limited, and we'd generally avoid using them if at all possible. Getting the logo right is so important for any brand, company or organisation, that trying to save by using a free logo designer is a false economy in the long term.

That said, free logo designers do have their place and can at least be useful for coming up with logo ideas or for designing quick logos for personal, non-professional projects. For that, we'd recommend Shopify Hatchful. You don't need to be a Shopify subscriber to use it, and you have the flexibility of being able to use it in your browser or by downloading the free iOS or Android app.

How can I design my own logo?

There are many different ways to design your own logo if you don't want to pay a professional designer (of course, if you have the budget for it, that's always the ideal solution to go for).

You can design a logo from scratch using software such as Illustrator, Affinity Designer or Canva, the first three tools on our list. This will give you the maximum flexibility in finessing your design and getting it just how you want it. If you're a non-designer, and don't know how to get started, read our guide to the fundamentals of logo design first.

If you find that too steep a learning curve, you may prefer AI-driven logo design software that does most of the work for you. These tools, from number 4 onwards on our list above tend to work in a similar way, asking you some quick questions about your brand and then presenting you with a selection of logo designs that you can modify to various degrees. You have a lot less control over the final result, but you do get a sometimes passable logo very, very quickly.

Do I own my logo design?

If you use logo design software to create your own logo, who owns your design: you, or the software company? It's always worth checking the terms and conditions of your software provider (you know, the ones you usually skip past when downloading the tool). In most cases, you will own the design you create using the software. That's certainly the case with general graphic design software such as Illustrator or Affinity Designer, but it's always worth checking with the auto-generating logo design tools.

Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.

With contributions from

Daniel JohnSenior News Editor

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