Photoroom vs Pikes AI for Brands

Photoroom vs Pikes AI for Brands

Most e-commerce brands rely on product photography tools to create aesthetic product images that attract and impress their consumers. With platforms like Photoroom and Pikes AI, the cost of studio sessions for every item in your catalog can be reduced or completely erased. These tools blend generative AI models with image editing technology to create visuals that consumers can connect with.

However, using some of these AI product photography tools, like Photoroom, can lead to disappointment. Most e-commerce brand owners complain of distorted branded content, poor customer support, and substandard image quality generated on the platform.

If you're stuck choosing between Photoroom and Pikes AI, this article comparatively analyzes the features, pros, and cons of Photoroom and Pikes for AI product photography.

What Does Photoroom Offer? 

Photoroom is a photo editing and product photography tool that is popular for its background removal and batch editing features. It is mostly used by business owners who need images for product listings on e-commerce websites like eBay.

It integrates a number of features, including background remover, virtual modeling, magic retouch, and AI background, to help business owners edit multiple product images at once, thereby saving time and energy.

The platform is widely known by businesses for its free trial use, simple-to-use interface, and batch editing feature.

Pros

  • Fast and easy to use
  • Freemium plan available
  • Batch edits and export
  • AI-powered image generation 
  • Mobile optimization

Cons

  • Frequent system crashes
  • Poor customer support
  • Limited to image generation and editing 
  • Feature gating and removal
  • Export limits 
  • Occasional low-quality images
  • Poor AI image generation capability 

Pikes AI

Pikes AI is an all-in-one Gen-AI platform for creating studio-quality product images and videos for e-commerce brand owners. It uses a best-in-class model to generate on-brand content that can be uploaded to e-commerce websites like eBay and Amazon or used for social media and ads.

Pikes AI specifically caters to the content needs of e-commerce brands. It has a number of features, including image animation, custom-style trained modelling, and text-to-image in its tool stack to help you stay ahead. It also has an inspiration section to show you ads that your competitors are running.

The tool is currently used (and loved) by over 500 fast-growing consumer brands.

Pros 

  • Consistent product labels
  • A complete content creation suite for e-commerce brands
  • Free trial available for testing (no credit card required)
  • Lifestyle image generation
  • UGC creation 
  • Full customer support
  • Easy subscription cancellation

Which Is Best For E-Commerce Brands? Photoroom Vs Pikes

Now, let's see how these two product photography platforms compare against each other. 

Image Output Quality 

The quality of your product images on listing sites largely influences its ranking, your target consumers’ perception, and, ultimately, the amount of sales you make. Therefore, you should consider the quality of any Gen-AI output before choosing it for your brand marketing. 

Photoroom does a relatively good job through its powerful background removal tool. The clean output makes it applicable for e-commerce websites (like eBay) that prefer a plain white background for higher ranking.

The platform also recently rolled out a virtual model feature that allows you to test your products on AI-generated models. However, this recent update has been met with backlash by the platform users due to the low-quality results.

Like this review by a Redditor, most users report having their logos replaced or the original product distorted in the final result, making it unusable in reality.

Pikes AI, however, creates studio-quality images without distorting your product labels, logos, or form. It combines the perfect lighting, tone, and mood to create images that look like they were taken by expert product photographers in NYC.

Image Generated with Pikes AI

Not only are the images high-quality and realistic, but your product's logo, label, and text style remain the same. The platform also allows you to upload up to 4 reference images that you can use to create and train your unique brand model for product demos or lifestyle videos.

Price-to-usage Structure 

When comparing prices of tools, you need to look beyond just the pricing. Compare the features to the value and practical usability.

Photoroom offers 3 major pricing plans, namely Free, Pro, and Max (starting at $0, $7.5, and $20.83/month, respectively, when billed annually). These plans promise 50 image downloads for free users and an unlimited number of downloads for paid users. Yet, many users on Trustpilot report having their downloads limited to only 20 images per week.

This is not only frustrating and disappointing but also unfeasible for fast-growing consumer brands with a large volume of content needs.

Pikes AI, on the other hand, offers three pricing plans: Starter, Growth, and Pro (billed at $49, $99, and $299 per month, respectively), allowing you to create up to 325, 1000, and 3000 studio-quality brand assets, respectively.

The value of Pikes AI in comparison to its cost goes beyond the number of images you can generate, but also their quality. Each image you get is professional-level, on-brand, and applicable for any use case.

Customer Service

The duty of any customer service team is to ensure that users receive support on any issue and enjoy value for their money.

Although Photoroom has been around for years, most 1-star users on Trustpilot mention unresponsive customer service as their reason for being dissatisfied with the platform's service.

Pikes AI, however, has a full customer support team in place to respond to and solve customers' issues.

Platform Features

Having a tool that can perform all your content creation tasks helps you save costs and stay organized. Photoroom platforms offer background removal, image retouching, AI backgrounds, and virtual modeling.

Pikes AI offers all of Photoroom’s features in addition to AI video editing and generation, image generation and animation, text-to-image, and custom-trained modelling. This is a robust package that caters to all your brand's content needs. Pikes AI is like a one-stop shop for e-commerce brands looking to create any type of brand and marketing asset consistently.

Why Photoroom May Not Be Ideal for E-commerce Brands

Photoroom is arguably one of the most popular tools for background removal and image editing. However, 86% of e-commerce brand owners on Trustpilot find it to be less functional for creating marketable, on-brand product images.

Users on G2 also express their displeasure with the platform being unable to meet their expectations.

Here are some of the reasons why Photoroom may be a bad choice for e-commerce brands:

Distorted Product Images

Photoroom does exceptionally well at removing and replacing image backgrounds. But when it comes to branded product images, the tool is limited. It distorts product labels and logos, making the final output entirely different from the original product.

A user on Reddit also attested to this, showing his use of the virtual model feature on Photoroom.

Here, the image generated appears to be a different product from the original version. The collar of the jacket is different, the stripes on the right-hand side are far apart, and the logo is distorted. This lacks practicality, and it’s unusable for e-commerce brands looking to generate marketing content. Using such images for marketing will diminish brand trust and hurt your brand image because customers will get a different product from what is displayed. 

Unrealistic Virtual Models

AI image generation has advanced over the years, and most brands now comfortably use Gen-AI tools to create hyper-realistic models for product demos. Photoroom appears to be lagging in this quality, as the models generated on the platform are far from real and appear fake to potential customers.

Limited Use

Even after subscribing to the paid plan, most users complain of being limited to 20 downloads per week, as against the “unlimited downloads” offer displayed by the website. This is unprofitable if you have a wide catalog of products, as it could slow down your product marketing and sales.

Low Creative Prowess

Photoroom is good for replacing backgrounds, but it lacks creativity and originality. It is good for replacing product backgrounds with white, plain, or generic images. But if you want unique concepts, creative angles, and professional lighting, Photoroom is not the ideal platform for you.

Poor Customer Support

An unresponsive customer support team does no good to a customer. Photoroom does just that. Multiple users on Trustpilot complain of unresponded complaints and unattended emails. This is a red flag, especially if having reliable customer support service is a big deal for you.

Advantages of Pikes AI Over Photoroom

If you’re wondering why we can’t stop recommending Pikes AI for eCommerce brands, it’s because it does so much more than basic photo editing. While Photoroom is great for removing backgrounds, Pikes AI helps you create stunning, brand-ready product images in minutes. It’s smart, fast, and designed to help your products look their best and sell more. Here are some of the advantages of Pikes over Photoroom for ecomerce brands and marketers. 

Comprehensive Suite for E-commerce Brands

Pikes AI goes beyond image generation and editing to offer a full-stack content creation toolkit for all your content needs. You can edit product images using AI-enhanced prompts, animate your still product into engaging videos, and create video ads from scratch in minutes.

Unique Studio-Quality Images

When it comes to creative, studio-quality visuals, Pikes AI does it best. It's one-of-a-kind model generates images that cannot be found anywhere else. The powerful image and video generation tool allows you to create content that matches a professional's work. 

Custom-Trained Model

People connect with humans, and this is why brands hire models to market their products. With Pikes AI, you can upload up to 4 reference images of yourself (or your model), and the tool simply creates as many model images as you want.

Full Customer Support

Pikes AI has a committed customer support team in place to attend to your inquiries, complaints, and requests. For every inquiry you send to the team, you get a real human response with full support and solutions to your issues in record time.

Ideal for Fast-Growing Consumer Brands

Selling multiple fast-selling products means creating several batches of images per day without a compromise on quality. Pikes AI pricing plans fully support large image generation, as each tier allows hundreds of image generations per month.

Final Thoughts

Photoroom is good for removing product backgrounds and replacing them with white or AI-generated ones. However, Pikes AI offers a more robust package for brands that want to scale faster with high-quality product content. With Pikes AI, you get all the tools and help you need to create product content that not only gets attention but also converts.

Mike Lehman

Mike Lehman

Mike Lehman is a senior content strategist at Pikes. Before joining Pikes, Mike spent nearly a decade working with Glossier, Haus, and Athletic Brewing, leading campaigns that blended storytelling and data.
San Francisco, CA