The Best Alternatives to FlipSnack:

Free, Similar & Interactive

FlipSnack offers a technology platform that offers you the possibility to convert PDFs into online flipbooks. In terms of pricing, FlipSnack offers you a free plan next to their paid plans which start at 14USD monthly for 10 catalogs.

FlipSnack plays in the digital publishing space and has been active since 2011. The company originates from Romania, where its development and customer support staff is located.

According to FlipSnack they have seen over 1M people use their platform, so it is a good solution for some people. But it might not necessarily be the right solution for you, which is why you are here. So let's dig in a get started with our tour of FlipSnack alternatives.

A digital flipbook is the online version of a PDF file. It is different from a hosted PDF file, which allows other people to download your PDF from a server and then read the PDF on their local device with their own PDF reader. In contrast, a digital flipbook platform will not only host your PDF file, but it will also offer a PDF reader technology which allows people to read the PDF online without having to use their own PDF reader.

Often, digital flipbook platforms will allow you to embed the reader on your website as well.

Mobile Issues

While flipbooks are easy to implement, they do have a very significant downside, and that is readability on mobile. You are basically looking at very, very small fonts on mobile, and while you have something to show, flipbooks on mobile do not really produce good results on any level.

As any flipbook technology, you can upload PDF's and publish these immediately.

'Mobile Widgets'

Flipsnack's website touts 'mobile widgets' but if you are a current user of Flipsnack, you will know that this is mostly a marketing slogan.

On mobile, your PDF will look small, this is just pure mathematics and logic: if you shrink a print-size page to the size of a mobile phone, and it is not responsive, then the content will become small.

Flipsnack offers you some options to slightly change the UI for your flipbooks. No major changes, you will still be offering a flipbook, but some small appearance details:

You can set different background colors on the flipbook, adjust the shadows, and several other options.

You can also change some of the features, like allowing fullscreen or not, but mostly you will want to keep the default settings for these features. This is after all, what most readers seem to want.

Our flipsnack review would not be complete without looking at the editing features. Editing is probably the area where Flipsnack differentiates itself most from its competitors is the possibility to edit and change your PDF file. Or if you'd like, you can even start to build a PDF from the template pages.

- adding in links

- adding in videos

- adding in pages

- addin forms

- add some shopping functionalities

The editing functionality can be convenient. It is easy to be able to make quick changes and add some links to text boxes.

The tools to create a PDF from scratch are well-built. The templates are however, restrictive, and you will have to shoe-horn your content into one of these iron frameworks.

With the tools existing to make responsive and HTML-based digital publications. you might wonder why you would not spend the same amount of energy and get a fully responsive publication.

You can ask a price for your flipbook with flipsnack. Flipsnack charges no extra fee (apart from the higher plan with them), but of course, you will have to pay the Stripe transaction cost, so it is not free.

Having no subscriptions is a big disadvantage for publishers obviously. Likely, Issuu might be a better option for you in this case. If you'd like to learn more about Issuu, check this article with a .

Flipsnack offers you nicely visualized but limited analytics. You will be able to measure average time spent, views, and optionally clicks.

You will also be able to see if your flipbook is being read on desktop, tablet or mobile. The screenshot of the flipsnack analytics above will be very similar to the result flipsnack users will get. Because of the bad experience on tablet and mobile, there is almost no activity on these devices. Compare that with responsive publications where you can get >50% readership on mobile.

Flipsnack start with a free plan, carrying the Flipsnack logo. With this plan, you can upload 3 PDF's of 30 pages each. Higher plans allow you to publish 10 PDFs for 14 USD monthly, 50 PDFs for 35 USD monthly and 500 PDFs for 79 USD monthly.

Some functionalities such as selling your PDFs or private access require higher plans, which seems perfectly acceptable. Support of existing links in your PDF requires the Professional plan of 35 USD monthly.

To have a custom URL you need an Enterprise plan (210 USD monthly).

It could be you are happy with the sort of functionality offered by Flipsnack, but you just would like a similar, but different solution. It could be because of bad experiences with performance, the location of the HQ and support in Eastern Europe might be too far away from you or other reasons.

In this section we'll look at some very similar solutions.

Issuu, the 800-pound gorilla in the flipbook space, is certainly a valid alternative to check out.

Issuu offers a free plan, is stable, and offers analytics and other features. Issuu does allow you to sell subscriptions, but it comes at 30% commission.

Be sure to read our review of Issuu and possible .

Learn more here:

Visit the to learn more.

- . With existing examples and pre-made blocks, Readz makes it fast for you to publish interactive responsive content.

When you move to CSS/HTML based responsive publications such as offered by Readz, you gain more than responsive content and mobile readership.

You can get more business results. Readz offers advanced marketing techniques such as email integrations, exit intents, contextual welcome messages or timed popups to bring in new subscribers, etc. You can get more organic search results. Let's face it, flipbooks are pretty bad at SEO, no matter what vendors say. If you use HTML however, it is a different story. Readz also focusses on optimizing your publications for search engines, and follows all the latest technical recommendations and requirements of Google.

Flipsnack is ideally suited for scenarios where you want to put your PDF online as a Flipbook, and you still want to do a good chunk of editing on the PDF. Think about links, videos etc.

Or in one word, if you want to try to make your PDF richer, than Flipsnack definitely will be a good choice for you.

If you want to sell subscriptions, you'll probably be looking more for soluions like Issuu or Publitas.

If you believe PDFs are not the future of online and you don't want to invest too much energy in them but rather grow to a real responsive production, a platform like Readz offers you the flexbility to continue producing Flipbooks, and start growing into fully reponsive publications at your pace.