Shutterstock vs Pexels

Meet the contenders

Shutterstock — Full-service stock marketplace

The everything marketplace: a claimed 600M+ assets, editorial, 3D models, a built-in design editor and enterprise licensing with serious indemnification.

Shutterstock is the incumbent's incumbent: two decades of marketplace gravity, a claimed 600M+ assets — photos, vectors, illustrations, footage, music, sound effects and 3D models — and an editorial arm with 50M+ news, sport and entertainment images that pure creative libraries cannot replicate. It has spent that gravity widely: a design editor (Create, formerly Creative Flow) with AI background removal and smart resizing, native mobile and desktop apps, a custom-production arm, and an enterprise tier, Premier, that sells unlimited indemnification, SSO, dedicated account management and human curation. Judged as a standalone marketplace, our research found it the most feature-rich of all.

Its AI has arrived as a bundle rather than a product: Unlimited Plus, the $69/mo annual plan, folds unlimited media together with 100 AI generation credits a month spanning Runway, Google and OpenAI models, and a standalone GenAI tier sells generation on its own. That is convenient, though reviewers note the unlimited plan still carries a 100-downloads-a-day ceiling, and generation is a credits sidecar rather than a labelled, integrated part of the library the way Brollvia treats it.

The cost of everything is fragmentation. Images, video, music and AI each have their own plan ladders, prices differ between monthly and annual in jumps ($69 vs $199 for the same Unlimited Plus), and team pricing starts around $489/mo in trackers. There is an API — Shutterstock's is well established — but no MCP agent licensing, no script matching, and no public licence verification. Shutterstock is a department store with an excellent legal department; Brollvia is a specialist shop with better machinery at the counter.

Pexels — Free stock library

The free library done well: genuinely good photos and videos, a beloved free API, and no price at all — with the limits that come with free.

Pexels is what happens when a free library is run with taste. Owned by Canva, it offers millions of photos and videos — its Play Store listing says 3M+ — shot by a large contributor community and curated well above the free-library average, under a simple licence that does not even require attribution. It is the first tab most creators open for moodboards, prototypes and personal projects, and it earns that position. Any comparison that cannot say "for a lot of work, Pexels is simply enough" is not being straight with you.

The limits are the business model's limits. There is no music and no sound effects at all — two of the four media types simply do not exist here. There is no paid tier, which means there is also no licence record, no indemnification, no extended licence, no teams product and nobody whose job is to answer when a platform or client challenges your right to use a clip. The Pexels licence is permissive and broadly trusted, but trust is not paperwork: when a brand's lawyer asks for the licence, "it was on Pexels" is a weaker answer than a verification link.

Its API deserves the praise it gets: free, well documented, and playful in ways paid APIs are not, including search by colour. Brollvia's API exists for a different job — licensing with records, through REST and MCP — and for pure exploration a developer may honestly prefer Pexels'. The platforms are complements more than rivals: draft on free, ship on licensed. These pages exist to make that boundary precise rather than to pretend free is worthless.

Pricing, in each platform's own terms

Shutterstock

Price Shutterstock by assembling your actual basket. Ten image downloads run ~$25–29/mo annual; add serious video and music and you are quickly guided to Unlimited Plus at $69/mo annual — $828 a year — or $199/mo if you refuse the annual term, a spread that tells you how the pricing is engineered. Team sits near $489/mo, and Premier is a negotiation. Against that, Brollvia Pro is $99/yr with everything in, and Teams is $12 a seat. For a solo filmmaker the difference is roughly eightfold; for an agency, Shutterstock's consolidation and indemnification may still be the cheaper risk decision.

Indemnification is the line item to read carefully. Standard Shutterstock coverage is $10,000; Enhanced raises it to $250,000; Premier is unlimited. Brollvia's extended licence covers broader uses per asset, but it does not publish a Shutterstock-scale indemnification ladder, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of claim these pages refuse to make. If your clients contractually demand six-figure coverage, that requirement alone can decide this comparison — for most independent and commercial work, it never comes up.

Pexels

There is nothing to analyse and that is the point: Pexels costs $0, forever, for everything it has. Brollvia's Free plan is the honest counterweight — free searching and limited watermarked comps, with Pro at $15/mo unlocking the licensed originals — and it still does not beat $0 for the media Pexels carries. Where money re-enters the argument is downstream: a Content ID dispute, a client indemnity clause, a brand-safety review. One avoided dispute pays for years of Pro; zero disputes means Pexels was the right price all along. Price the risk, not the download.

Also price the missing media. A project that needs music and SFX cannot be finished on Pexels at any price — you will buy those elsewhere, per-track or by subscription, and the "free" project quietly acquires a budget anyway. Brollvia's case is one invoice for all four media types with the paperwork included. If your work is video-only and non-commercial, ignore this section and enjoy the free library; it is a good one.

In the edit: workflow

Shutterstock

Shutterstock's workflow is breadth-first: whatever the brief, something in 600M assets approximates it, the Create editor polishes stills without another app, and the mobile apps keep approvals moving. Video editors work through the browser or its integrations rather than a licence-recording NLE panel, and agents get an API aimed at integrations, not a conversation-native licensing flow. Licence proof is enterprise-grade inside your account — Premier even adds humans to curate — but it is not a public link a client can check at midnight.

Pexels

Pexels' workflow is frictionless browsing backed by a lovely API — teams even build internal tools on it. The friction arrives at delivery: no licence artefact to attach to the project, no verification for a client, and a hard stop when the timeline needs a track or a whoosh. Brollvia's loop is built for the delivery end: brief in, verified licensed assets out, in the editor or through your agent. Different moments of the same week, honestly served by different tools.

Switching away

From Shutterstock

Shutterstock licences for published work persist after cancellation, and Enhanced/Premier paperwork should be archived with the project files it covers — that indemnification trail is part of what you paid for. Practically, most switchers keep a minimal Shutterstock plan for editorial and oddities while moving day-to-day creative work to a flat-rate library; a full exit makes sense only when editorial truly never appears in your briefs. Either way, download and file your licence history before the term ends.

From Pexels

There is nothing to cancel and nothing to migrate — Pexels asks nothing of you, which is its charm. The practical switch is a habit: start new commercial work in a licensed library so the paperwork exists from day one, and keep Pexels for the exploratory phase it is perfect for. Past Pexels downloads remain governed by the Pexels licence as published when you took them; keep a note of source URLs in the project file, as you would for any free asset.