Discover the best Shutterstock alternatives just in time for your next project! Here are 11 free and paid options, including stock photo and image creation site
Shutterstock is a go-to site for finding stock visuals and audio. According to SimilarWeb, its traffic numbers routinely sit at over 64 million site visits per month.
And with the release of Shutterstock’s AI art generator in January 2023, it’s now also a go-to for creating unique visuals.
But what if you’re not a Shutterstock fan or you can’t find what you’re looking for there? In either case, here are 12 of the best Shutterstock alternatives. We’ll start by going over the drawbacks of Shutterstock and then dive into options that have features for creating custom images and videos.
Canceling a Shutterstock account can be a real pain because they lock you into annual rates for commercial use. With Shutterstock alternatives, you won’t have to deal with contracts and you can cancel or downgrade your account at any time. This gives you more flexibility and control over your marketing budget.
Many stock photo sites offer pay-as-you-go options where you only pay for the images you need instead of committing to a monthly or annual subscription. This can save you money in the long run, especially if you only need a few images here and there.
Plus, with no contract commitment, you can easily switch to a different stock photo site if you find a better deal or more suitable images elsewhere.
According to reviews on G2, Shutterstock has uncooperative customer service, unable to help you out if you’re trying to cancel or downgrade your plan. There have also been many reports that after signing up for a free trial, they were locked into a paid plan without consent. This can be frustrating and costly, especially for small businesses on a tight budget.
On alternative platforms, you may experience better customer service as many of them are smaller companies that prioritize their customers and communicate more effectively. You can also find reviews from other users on sites like G2 or Capterra to ensure you're choosing the right site for your needs.
While Shutterstock boasts millions of images in their library, it may not have the exact content you're looking for. This is especially true if your brand has a specific aesthetic or target audience.
Alternatives to Shutterstock may offer more diverse and niche content that caters to different industries and demographics. Some sites even specialize in certain types of imagery, such as vintage photos or illustrations, providing unique options for your marketing materials.
As mentioned earlier, pay-as-you-go options can save you money if you only need a few images here and there. In addition, many Shutterstock alternatives offer more affordable subscription plans for high volume users compared to Shutterstock's expensive annual rates.
Some alternatives even have free options or free trials for new users to test out their service and decide if it's the right fit for them. This can be a great way to save money and find the perfect site for your business needs.
The following are the best sites for creating unique, original visuals—even if you only have beginner-level design skills.
First up is our AI image suite. It’s a lifesaver when you want an easy way to create unique visuals without spending hours creating images and artwork manually.
As we all know, stock photos can come in handy when you don’t have the time or budget to schedule a photo shoot. However, since they’re so generic and the same images are often overused, they lack the uniqueness you need to make your work stand out.
With Jasper's AI Image Suite, you can create unique images that are tailored to your project—and you can generate them in a fraction of the time it would take to create them from scratch. Simply write a prompt and, optionally, adjust the image settings. You can even upload an image for inspiration. In seconds, Jasper will give you four options to choose from.
Alternatively, you can use templates to create certain types of images with even fewer inputs than the free form option. The cool thing is: There’s an option to create completely original stock photography. Instead of downloading the same photos everyone already has access to, you can make your own and put them to use in your marketing before anyone else does.
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Pricing: There’s a 7-day free trial during which you can generate up to 200 high-resolution images with no watermark.
As you probably know, Canva is one of the most popular tools for creating professional-looking images quickly. It has a huge library of templates and assets and makes customizing them easy with drag-and-drop functionality. Canva has made design accessible to non-designers—many marketers included.
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Pricing: Canva has a free plan and paid plans starting at $12.99.
Storyblocks is a subscription-based service. It offers unlimited downloads of stock video, audio, images, music, and sound effects. It’s especially useful for marketers and others with a focus on video content, since it has an online video editing tool built in.
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Pricing: Storyblocks has pricing for individuals starting at $15 per month (billed annually). You can also request monthly pricing or pricing for business.
Freepik is another online platform that offers a wide range of high-definition images, illustrations, vectors, icons, and Photoshop Document (PSD) files. Thousands of these assets are available for free and can be used for personal or commercial projects (attribution required). Millions more are available on the Premium plan with no attribution required.
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Pricing: Freepik has a free plan, an individual plan for $24 per month, and a team plan starting at $22.80 per seat per month for two seats.
Several of the sites on this list, like Pixabay, link to and offer discount codes for iStock. Why? Because the site has millions of premium stock images and videos, including many of which are exclusive to iStock. If you can’t find assets elsewhere—or that haven’t already been overused—this site can save the day.
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Pricing: iStock has three subscription plans. Pricing for each is based on the number of downloads you need per month. The Basic plan starts at $40 per month, Premium starts at $99, and Premium + Video starts at $199. Pay-as-you-go credit packs are also available.
Another good option for royalty-free stock photos and music is Depositphotos. It has over 258 million assets available, with more added every two weeks. In addition to assets that can be used commercially, there’s also a huge collection of editorial photos available.
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Pricing: Some images and videos are free to download. Depositphotos’ photo and vector subscription starts at $36, and the video subscription starts at $89 monthly. Music and sound effects cost $12.99 monthly for unlimited downloads. On-demand, editorial, and enterprise pricing are also available.
While the following sites don’t have image editors like most of the tools above, or an image generator like Jasper, they’re still worth bookmarking. They can offer some extra options when you can’t find what you need on other sites. They also come in handy when you’d like to take advantage of Jasper Art’s image-to-image generation capability and need a stock image for the stock photography template, for example.
Pixabay has more variety than some alternative sites. This makes it a good tool to have in your arsenal if you need more than images. While they vary in quality, this site offers images, videos, vector graphics, illustrations, music, sound effects, and GIFs.
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Pricing: Pixabay is free.
Burst by Shopify doesn’t have as big a library as some of the other platforms we’ve talked about. Nor does it offer illustrations, vectors, videos, or the other bells and whistles that other sites do. But it does have over 20,000 free photos for websites, blogs, and commercial use. The ability to integrate these directly into a Shopify store makes Burst especially handy for ecommerce marketers.
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Pricing: Burst is free.
Pexels is another good option for stock photography. While many of its images are generic (as are most stock images), they’re typically high-quality. Since they're free to use and modify for personal or commercial purposes, they can be a great starting point.
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Pricing: Pexels is free.
If you’re looking only for images and don’t need video or audio, Unsplash can be a good place to start. This site features over a million high-resolution images that are free to use and modify for personal or commercial projects. For convenience, it’s available for macOS and iOS, as a Chrome extension, and as a plugin for Figma and WordPress.
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Pricing: You can use Unsplash for free or upgrade to Unsplash+ for $20 per month.
One of the most popular Shutterstock alternatives is Adobe Stock. It has a massive library of assets with a good mix of simplistic stock photos and more complex, specific images. And while you can download an image and go, you can also adapt the available templates for your brand.
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Pricing: Adobe Stock has a limited library of free assets. Its paid plans start at $29.99 per month.
Very similar to Unsplash, Kaboompics is a free stock photo website you can use for just about any type of design work, marketing content included. One cool thing about this platform is that you can search images by color, making it extremely powerful when you want to find images that are on-brand or consistent with other design assets.
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Pricing: Kaboompics is free to use.
Between the 11 sites on this list, you could have access to tens of millions of stock images and other assets to complement your marketing efforts or creative projects. But—even better—with Jasper, you can create unlimited fresh images that reflect your brand personality and attract the right people.
Jasper Art is especially helpful because, unlike many AI image generation tools that are only good for artwork, it’s flexible enough to work for marketers. This is largely thanks to its templates for product closeups, news graphics, realistic people, and even creating original stock photos.
Plus, it enables image creation at breakneck speed. Forget about spending ages trying to perfect your latest social media graphic or other visual assets in a tool like Canva or Photoshop. Give Jasper some quick creative direction and watch it generate eye-catching images or artwork in seconds. Sign up for a demo today and experience it for yourself.
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