Comparison · Published November 3, 2026

Best Print on Demand Supplier for Embroidery (2026): Printful vs Printify vs Gelato

Quick answer: Printful is the best print on demand supplier for embroidery on clothing. Its catalog flags 223 products for embroidery, including tees, polos, hoodies, sweatshirts and jackets, with published base costs and up to six or more stitch placements per garment. Printify flags about 90 embroidery products and digitizes your artwork for free, which is the least work, but it doesn't publish base cost in its catalog feed. Gelato flags 32, and 31 of them are hats or beanies, so it's a headwear option rather than an embroidered apparel one. Every number below came from the live catalogs on November 3, 2026.

Embroidery is the easiest way to make a print on demand product feel premium. A stitched left chest logo on a polo or a heavyweight hoodie reads as a brand rather than a print, and buyers will pay more for it. It's also the decoration method with the most rules: a fixed thread palette, minimum text sizes, a digitizing step that turns your image into stitches, and placements that work very differently from a DTG print area.

We run all three suppliers. ApparelHub connects to Printful, Printify and Gelato, all three are live for our merchants, and we don't take a cut of anyone's print margin, so we've no reason to steer you to one. If you only sell hats, our hat supplier guide goes deeper on headwear. This post is about embroidery across your whole range, and mostly about clothing.

Which print on demand supplier is best for embroidery?

It depends on what you're stitching and how much control you want.

• Embroidered clothing with known costs: Printful. It has the widest embroidered apparel range of the three, its prices are published, and most garments offer left chest, center chest, sleeve and wrist placements.
• The least setup work: Printify. You place your design on the embroidery position and Printify's team digitizes it after the order comes in, at no charge. You don't pick thread colours at all.
• Hats and beanies only: Gelato is a real contender here, with prices close to Printful's on the same blanks. For embroidered shirts and hoodies, its catalog feed doesn't offer much today.

How many embroidery products does each supplier carry?

We counted every product each supplier's catalog flags for embroidery.

Two things are worth knowing about those numbers. On Printful, 127 of the 223 offer both DTG and embroidery on the same garment, so a single blank like the Bella + Canvas 3001 can carry a printed back and a stitched chest logo. On Printify, a handful of products are flagged from their name or description rather than a declared technique, and some dual decoration blanks list both embroidery and DTF placements, so read each product's placements before you build.

Gelato does market embroidered clothing on its own website, so if you already use Gelato for apparel, check its product pages directly. In the catalog it publishes to connected platforms, embroidery is a headwear offer.

What does print on demand embroidery actually cost?

These are live base costs from Printful's catalog for popular embroidered blanks, size M, before shipping, tax and channel fees.

Two extra costs sit on top of those numbers on Printful. Its own pricing guide says each embroidered product includes one standard placement, and every additional placement adds $2.95. New designs also carry a one-time digitization fee (Printful's guide uses $6.50 as its example), which you pay once per design and then reuse. So a polo with a left chest logo and a sleeve hit costs more than the table shows, and your first order of a new design costs more than your second.

On Printify, every variant comes through the catalog feed with a cost of zero. That isn't an error; Printify doesn't share base cost with platforms until a product is built. More on that below.

Same blank, two suppliers: embroidered hats

Hats are the one category all three carry, which makes them a fair price test. Gelato's costs here come from its live catalog feed.

Neither supplier wins across the board. If your range is mostly headwear, it's worth pricing each blank on both rather than picking one supplier for everything.

How do thread colours work on each supplier?

Embroidery doesn't reproduce your colours. Each region of the design is stitched in a real thread, and there are only so many threads.

Printful uses a fixed palette of 15 thread colours and expects you to name which ones each placement uses. A colour outside that list is rejected rather than approximated, so matching your artwork to the palette is part of building the product, not something you fix after. It's the most control of the three and the most upfront work.

Printify uses the same 15 colour values (with different names), caps a design at six colours, and doesn't ask you for thread colours at all. Its digitizing team converts the design to a stitch file after the order arrives, which can take up to about 36 hours, and colours outside the palette get matched to the nearest thread. Because that step is done by hand, two almost identical uploads can come out slightly differently.

Gelato also caps designs at six thread colours and will choose them for you if you don't specify.

Because the palette values match between Printful and Printify, a design built to the 15 colours works on both without changes. That's useful if you want a second supplier ready as a backup when one runs out of stock.

Where can you put embroidery on a garment?

Placements are named positions, not a free print area you drag artwork around in. Across Printful's 223 embroidery products, the most common are left chest (135 products), center chest (126), right and left wrist (about 60 each) and the top of each sleeve (about 40). Hats add front, large front, back and side positions. A few garments offer outside or inside label placements, and some hats have a right or left corner position.

Some placements can't be combined. On Printful's dad hat, for example, the large front position excludes the standard front one, so you choose one or the other.

Printify publishes sizes by area: left or center chest is up to 4 by 4 inches, sleeve and wrist up to 2 by 3 inches, caps 4 by 2.25 inches, and a larger 10 by 6 inch area on selected jackets, hoodies and sweatshirts.

For most brands, the left chest is where embroidery earns its money. It's small, it's where buyers expect a logo, and it keeps the stitch count (and the cost) down. If you want a big front graphic, a print is usually the better tool; our DTG vs DTF guide covers the options.

What artwork works for embroidery?

The rules are similar on every supplier, and they're stricter than for printing.

• Bold, flat shapes in solid colours. No gradients, photos, soft shadows or fine texture. Thread can't hold them.
• Five colours or fewer. Each extra colour adds stitch density and cost. Two or three is the sweet spot for a chest logo.
• Big enough text. Printify's guidance is at least a quarter of an inch for lowercase and about 0.3 inches for capitals, measured on the thinnest stroke. Smaller text gets resized or dropped.
• Lines at least about 0.05 inches thick. Hairlines vanish or blob.
• A transparent background. Anywhere the file is transparent, nothing gets stitched and the fabric shows through. A solid background block becomes a dense, stiff patch of thread.
• High enough resolution. Printify asks for at least 1200 by 1200 pixels at 300 DPI for apparel.

If you're starting from an AI generated design, simplify it before you build. A detailed illustration that looks great as a print will turn to mush as a 2 inch chest logo. Our print ready file guide covers file preparation in general.

What goes wrong with embroidered listings?

The mockup doesn't show what you think. On some Printify dual decoration blanks (a polo that offers both embroidery and DTF on the chest, for example), the automatic mockups only show the embroidery version. If you decorate the DTF position, it prints correctly but there's no preview of it. Check every mockup before you list.

Off-palette colours on Printful. A design with a colour outside the 15 threads won't go through. Map it to the palette first.

Forgetting the extra placement cost. A logo on the chest and another on the sleeve is two placements on Printful, and the second one costs extra. Price it in.

Detail that doesn't survive digitizing. If a design depends on thin strokes or small text, it'll be simplified or lost. When in doubt, order a sample. A mockup isn't a sample, and for stitching, that difference matters more than for print.

How do you price an embroidered product so it makes money?

Start from the base cost, add the placements you use, and price above a printed version of the same blank. Buyers expect to pay more for embroidery, and the costs are genuinely higher.

Take Printful's Gildan 64800 polo at $17.64 with one left chest logo. At $34.99 retail, that leaves $17.35 before shipping and channel fees. Add a sleeve logo and the base rises by $2.95, so the same price leaves $14.40. The Bella + Canvas 3001 tee with a stitched chest logo starts at $11.92; at $27.99 that leaves $16.07, but sizes above XL cost $2 to $8 more, so price your plus sizes separately or accept a thinner margin there.

Two habits help:

• Absorb the one-time digitization fee across the design, not the first order. It's paid once per design, so a design that sells ten times barely notices it.
• Re-check Printify costs after you build. Once the real per-variant cost lands, compare it with your planned price before the listing goes live.

For the full method, see how to price print on demand products. If polos are your main embroidered product, our polo shirt supplier guide compares them in more depth.

Why can't you see Printify's embroidery costs up front?

Printify doesn't include base cost in the catalog data it publishes to platforms, so every variant arrives with a cost of zero.

That doesn't mean typing costs in by hand. Printify returns the real per-variant cost when a product is created on its side, and building a product through ApparelHub, mockup included, does exactly that, so the cost lands on every colour and size as part of the build. What you can't do is sort Printify's embroidery range by price before building anything. That part still happens in Printify's own catalog.

Where ApparelHub fits, and where it doesn't

ApparelHub runs the pipeline around these suppliers rather than replacing them. Printful, Printify and Gelato are all live today, you connect your own accounts, and the margin stays yours. We don't take a percentage of print cost.

For embroidery, that means browsing every supplier's embroidery range side by side, building to the placement each supplier actually offers, sending Printful the thread colour selection it requires (and not sending one to Printify, which doesn't want it), mockups rendered by the supplier that would stitch the garment, real Printify costs landing on your variants when you build, and margin guardrails that can hold an order instead of fulfilling it at a loss. Listings sync to Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix and TikTok Shop.

What it doesn't do: we don't digitize your artwork, we can't add colours to a supplier's thread palette, and we can't make embroidery reproduce a photograph. We can quote a full pre-order estimate covering production, shipping and tax for Printful and Gelato, but not for Printify. Printify's pre-digitized embroidery fonts live in Printify's own product creator. We don't integrate Etsy, and we've explained why.

If you'd rather not work through placements and thread palettes by hand, connect your own AI agent, Claude or any assistant that supports connectors, and have it compare embroidered blanks, check which placements a garment offers, keep your design inside the thread palette and review the mockups through ApparelHub. Agent access is on every plan, including Free, and setup is at apparelhub.ai/agents.

Frequently asked questions

Which print on demand supplier has the most embroidered products? Printful, by a wide margin for clothing. As of November 2026 its catalog flags 223 products for embroidery, against about 90 on Printify and 32 on Gelato, almost all of Gelato's being hats.

Does print on demand embroidery cost extra? Yes, in two ways on Printful. Each product includes one standard placement, and every extra placement adds $2.95. New designs also have a one-time digitization fee. Printify digitizes for free, and you'll see its real costs once you build the product.

How many thread colours can I use? All three suppliers work from a 15 colour thread palette. Printify and Gelato cap a design at six colours, and five or fewer keeps the stitching crisp on any supplier.

Can I put a photo or gradient on an embroidered product? No. Thread can't reproduce photos, gradients or soft shading. Use a print method for that, and keep embroidery for bold, flat logos and lettering.

Can I combine a print and embroidery on one garment? Often, yes. On Printful, 127 of the embroidery products also offer DTG, so you can print a large back design and stitch a small chest logo on the same shirt.

Where to start

If you're adding embroidery for the first time, start with one left chest logo on a polo or a heavyweight tee from Printful, because the cost is visible and the placement is the one buyers expect. Keep the design to two or three thread colours, order a sample, and expand to sleeves, hats and hoodies once you've seen it stitched. When you're ready, create a free account and compare the embroidery ranges side by side, or read our Printful vs Printify vs Gelato comparison for the bigger picture.