Bring your creations to life with the best t-shirt design software. When you’re looking for your new software, make sure it’s compatible with your computer or laptop and that it’s easy to use.
If you are a beginner, an online platform like Design Shirt at designashirt.com makes the process easy. Seasoned professionals who want a free template will appreciate a website like Prankful at printful.com. The best t-shirt design software is easy to use and suits your needs.
Best online design tool: Design A Shirt
As one of the leading online t-shirt design and printing services, Design A Shirt has designed and delivered millions of t-shirts to customers around the world. The company’s experience shows that a simple and clean interface helps even those without design skills to create eye-catching shirts quickly and easily.
Once you have chosen the type, style and color of the shirt from dozens of options, creating an eye-catcher is easy. Choose from existing clipart images or submit your own photo, add text in a variety of fonts, adjust colors, sizes, effects like distress and outline, and that’s it.
If you can’t find a design that suits you, Design Shirt also offers an affordable concierge service, where a product consultant will do it for you. Despite the name, T-shirts are not the only option – hoodies, caps, polo shirts and much more are also available.
With simple tools, free 10-day shipping, and competitive pricing, Design A Shirt is our first choice for an online t-shirt design tool.
Best for speed: Rush Order T-shirts
Creating custom t-shirt designs on Rush Order Tees is easy. It’s fast, easy to use, and offers many customizable options.
Starting with a wide selection of t-shirt colors, styles and manufacturers, the site guides you through simple steps to ensure you get a design you’re happy with. Adding images and text takes seconds, and there are tons of customization options to get exactly the look you want.
With over 50,000 clipart images to choose from, you should be able to find great images for your design. But you have something special in mind, you can always upload your own images.
The company’s in-house team reviews each project and corrects any obvious errors before sending it to the press, offering both live chat and phone support when needed. Add super-fast delivery options (including next day delivery) and Rush Order Tees offers a great and fast t-shirt design and printing service.
Ideal for mobile devices: Snap tee
While most t-shirt design apps and websites work best on a laptop or desktop computer, Snap tee does not. Designed especially for mobile devices, this iOS and Android app lets you choose from a variety of designs uploaded and rated by app users and then remix them in different ways.
Once you’ve chosen the design you want to start with, the app lets you choose the style and basic layout of the shirt. From there, you can use an existing image for the design or upload your own from your phone’s camera roll, Instagram, and other sources.
The interface takes some getting used to, but it’s simple and powerful enough for most simple projects. Customizations of colors, effects, fonts and more are handled in the app, and when you’re happy with the end result, all you have to do is send your masterpiece to Snap tee for printing.
Payment is handled by credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay or PayPal on the phone, and the Hong Kong-based company delivers the products anywhere in the world at a fixed price. If you think your design is particularly good, you can share it with others and get paid when other customers order it.
Best for models: Place it
Place it focuses on creating realistic design templates for all types of products, including T-shirts. It’s one of the simplest and most beautiful t-shirt design tools we’ve ever come across, with hundreds of attractive templates to get you started.
Instead of searching through a gallery of thousands of unrelated clip art images, Place it provides a curated selection of images for each section of the template. Although you lose flexibility with this approach, it speeds up the design process and often leads to a better end result.
Best Free Patterns: Printed
Unlike Placeit, Printful does not charge for downloading high-resolution designs of designs created with its tools. It can be used for all kinds of clothes, accessories, posters and more, it is not as elegant as the Placeit tool, but it is more flexible.
Once you’ve chosen your shirt style and color, you can upload your own design or create your own business with basic clipart and font options. What’s a bit unusual, however, is that you’re not limited to designing just the front and back of the shirts – text can be added on both sleeves, as well as an external label.
Once you have the look of the shirt you want, you can send the shirt to print or download the template files to use as you wish. Printful also acts as a marketplace where you can sell your designs or acts as a print-to-order service if you sell your t-shirts elsewhere.
Best for professionals: Adobe Illustrator
While we never recommend buying Adobe’s advanced graphics software to design a casual T-shirt, Illustrator is an ideal tool for creating professional-quality T-shirt designs if you’re already paying for it.
The software’s focus on vector graphics ensures that logos and texts can be easily adapted to any shirt size without loss of quality. Your design will look just as good on a business card as it would on a billboard or anywhere in between, and if you plan on screen printing your T-shirt, Illustrator makes it easy to create the spot layer layered file of your typography need.
As with all professional software, Illustrator has a steep learning curve, although Adobe does at least publish tutorials with sample files to get you started. Dozens of sites also offer free or other templates that can be imported directly into the software.
The best free design tool: Inkscape
You can’t afford to request Adobe’s design tools, but still want something powerful and flexible? Check out Inkscape, an open source vector graphic design tool with many of the same features as Illustrator, at no cost.
While the software itself doesn’t feature specific T-shirt designs or tutorials, many designers and other users have filled the gap by offering their skills and files to the community for free. Once you’ve learned how to use Inkscape, you can easily apply your knowledge to designing attractive t-shirts without having to start over.
The application is available for MacOS, Windows and Linux and allows you to convert existing bitmap images into vectors using the trace function. This allows you to scale up and down the image for your design and export it to a size suitable for screen printing. However, if you need a raster image format like .png or .jpg, Inkscape can provide it too.
Best Alternative Free Design Tool: GIMP
Just like Inkscape vs. Illustrator, you don’t have to pay a lot of money (or really nothing) to get a professional alternative to Photoshop. The GIMP open source graphics editing software has been around for over two decades and has proven itself to be a viable alternative for serious design work among many designers on a budget.
Like other high-end tools, GIMP requires some effort to get a firm grip. But if you still have reason to develop in it, it is just as useful for making t-shirts as it is for any other graphic design company.As with the other apps mentioned above, there are free templates and YouTube tutorials to get you started, as well as paid courses aimed at helping you create beautiful designs and export them in a format suitable for finishing. To push.
Available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux, and with a wide variety of text and image editing and layout options, GIMP’s powerful tools let you create almost any T-shirt template.
Our process
Our writers spent 10 hours researching the most popular t-shirt design software on the market. Before making their final recommendations, they considered a total of 15 different software, looked at options from 14 different brands and manufacturers, read over 20 user reviews (both positive and negative), and tested 6 software themselves. All this research provides advice you can rely on.