The 4 Best Holiday Photo Cards of 2025
Top pick
This service delivered our favorite prints and made it easy to create an adorable custom card (free design review included).
In side-by-side comparisons with cards from other contenders, the holiday photo cards from Simply to Impress were our favorites, delivering accurate colors that accentuated skin tones. The easy-to-use site lets you create high-quality photo cards from a wide variety of tasteful, holiday-themed designs, with many layout, paper-stock, and finish options to choose from. The ordering process is straightforward, with clearly defined options and simple image-editing tools.
It’s the easiest to find the right design for you. The most difficult part of ordering photo cards might be filtering through the hundreds of templates many sites offer. Simply to Impress has a comprehensive set of search filters, and they make it much easier to find something that suits you, compared with using other sites. And this service has over 2,000 holiday-themed cards.
But filtering the selection to show only, say, New Year’s greetings with a horizontal format, rounded corners (great for avoiding dings in the mail), and a single-photo layout quickly cuts the list to 255. To avoid having to scroll through designs that don’t fit your needs, you can filter even further, selecting by theme, color, and style.
It has the widest array of themes. Simply to Impress also offers one of the most comprehensive design libraries we looked at, with a diverse selection of Kwanzaa, Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah, Feliz Navidad, New Year’s, and neutral season’s greetings sentiments.
You can customize almost everything. Most designs offer two options for card size (4 by 5.5 inches and 5 by 7 inches) and your choice of five paper finishes. Even the most affordable classic card stock (available in matte and satin) feels great. If you splurge on the premium card stock, at 77¢ more per card, you can choose from matte, glossy, and pearl shimmer finishes, and you can incorporate a backside design. There’s also a double-thick paper option.
The card-design process is easy. Among the services we tested, Simply to Impress provided one of the simplest and most intuitive card-design experiences. The step-by-step interface guiding you through the process of personalizing your card is basically foolproof.
You add a photo by uploading it from your computer, social media accounts (like Instagram and Facebook), or cloud services (such as Dropbox and Google Drive). You can also upload images directly from your phone: Just enter your phone number, and Simply to Impress will text you a link. The link will allow you to select phone photos, which instantly appear in your photo library on your desktop.
You can place custom text, choosing the font, size, and color. If you forget to change placeholder text, like “The Smith Family,” a handy pop-up window will appear.
It has live design support. In addition to customer support via phone, Simply to Impress offers live chat support within the card editor. This is key if you have questions about your design and don’t want to keep clicking between windows, which some other services force you to do.
The free envelopes are of extremely high quality. The envelopes that come with every order (you can select white or ivory) are thicker than those offered by other services, and they feel nice in the hand.
After finalizing the design, you can choose upgrades, like foil-lined envelopes, and addressing and mailing services. Kudos to you if you have your entire holiday-card list formatted into a spreadsheet, but you can also manually input each recipient’s address.
The pricing is very straightforward. Simply to Impress offers one of the clearest shopping experiences, with the price of each add-on noted throughout the process and an itemized list of your chosen options at checkout (along with links to edit them individually, if you wish).
It’s the only service that offers free design review. Simply to Impress was the only card service we tested that offered a free digital design review of image quality, color, brightness and contrast, and text legibility and positioning. (Additional photo retouching is available for $25.) You can opt in or out of this, and if you’re on a tight holiday deadline, it could slow down your delivery.
In our 2021 testing, we opted for the recommended “Only send a proof if there’s an issue with my photo.” And we were pleased when the company sent us a link via text to approve a change to our proof (it suggested moving the text overlay so it wasn’t covering any faces in our photo). The process was smooth and easy to approve from a smartphone.
The shipping is reasonably priced and fast. For our test order, we chose the least expensive standard shipping option (the company estimates two to five business days), at $8.75. And our cards came to my rural Idaho home in three business days, arriving in good condition in a thin cardboard envelope. We signed up for shipping updates, and we received a text and email update when the order was shipped and when it was delivered, with links to USPS tracking.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
There’s no discount for creating your own design. If you’re handy with Photoshop and prefer to design your own card from scratch, you can also choose to upload a custom card design. However, unlike many competing sites, Simply to Impress doesn’t offer a discount for create-your-own cards; they cost exactly the same as premade designs.
