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Best Alternatives to TwoSidesPrint for Marketing Collateral

SS Shawn Stevens President APS 14 min read

Table of Contents

Last Updated: September 12, 2026

Why Marketers Are Looking Beyond TwoSidesPrint for Marketing Collateral

Marketing collateral is the collection of printed and digital assets a business uses to promote itself and inform customers, from brochures and flyers to business forms and branded merchandise. When teams search for the best alternatives to twosidesprint for marketing collateral, it is usually because a single-provider model stopped scaling. At American Printing Services, LLC, we hear the same story from multi-location brands: one vendor works fine for a single storefront, then becomes a bottleneck the moment five locations need the same brochure with different addresses.

The problem is rarely print quality. It is distribution, consistency, and turnaround under pressure: a vendor that handles one-off jobs well often lacks the network to deliver the same branded material to twenty locations in the same week.

Below, we break down four alternatives worth considering, what each does best, and where each falls short, covering commercial printers, self-serve design platforms, and digital conversion tools, because the right choice depends on whether you need physical output, in-house control, or digital engagement.

Quick Comparison: Top Alternatives to TwoSidesPrint

The best alternative to TwoSidesPrint depends on whether you need physical printing, in-house design, or digital delivery. Commercial printers serve multi-location consistency; design platforms serve teams that want control; digital tools serve engagement tracking.

Provider Best For Starting Price Physical Printing
American Printing Services, LLC Multi-location brand consistency See pricing page Yes
Chilli Printing High-volume direct mail Quote-based Yes
Canva In-house design and print-on-demand $120/year Limited
FlippingBook Digital collateral conversion $14/month No

American Printing Services, LLC: Best for Multi-Location Brand Consistency

American Printing Services, LLC is the strongest option for enterprises that need the same branded material delivered identically across many locations. Its network of around 2000 production facilities across North America means a rush order for five retail locations does not depend on one plant's capacity, the core difference from a single-site printer (printing.org).

With over 20 years of industry experience, the team handles everything from marketing collateral to essential business forms, invoices, and labels, removing the coordination overhead of managing multiple print suppliers.

A marketing manager at a retail chain reviewing color proofs of brochures and signage at a desk, with a laptop showing a brand asset management dashboard in the background
A marketing manager at a retail chain reviewing color proofs of brochures and signage at a desk, with a laptop showing a brand asset management dashboard in the background

Pros and Cons

  • Pros: nationwide delivery, fast turnaround, competitive pricing through a wide supplier network, coverage of both branded merchandise and operational documents
  • Cons: pricing depends on quantity, dates, and delivery, so you need to request a quote rather than browse a fixed rate card
Pro Tip When consolidating vendors, ask for a single point of contact who owns your account across all locations. The bottleneck in multi-location printing is almost never the press, it is the handoff between your team and the vendor's order desk.

Chilli Printing: Best for High-Volume Direct Mail Campaigns

Chilli Printing is a commercial online printing service built around brochures, flyers, and direct mail. Teams running large direct mail pushes will find the bulk order processing, customizable paper stock, and template library useful.

The trade-off is transparency: Chilli Printing does not publish pricing online, so every project starts with a custom quote. Fine for a one-off campaign, but quote-based pricing slows planning for recurring monthly mailers across a dozen markets.

What "High-Volume Direct Mail" Actually Requires

Most listicles stop at "they do direct mail." The reality is a four-part pipeline, and a printer only owns one part: (usps.com)

  1. List hygiene and segmentation, deduping, National Change of Address (NCOA) processing, and suppression lists. A printer that bundles USPS address-quality services saves you a separate vendor.
  2. Print and mail merge, variable data printing (VDP) so each piece carries the right name, offer code, and store address. This is where multi-location brands live or die.
  3. Indicia and postage, permit imprint, stamp, or metered indicia, and whether the mailer qualifies for USPS Marketing Mail (formerly Standard Mail) rates versus First-Class, which depends on piece weight, thickness, and sortation.
  4. Entry and delivery, drop-shipping to a USPS Destination Sectional Center Facility (DSCF) or Destination Delivery Unit (DDU) instead of a local post office can cut transit time and postage, but only if the printer's workflow supports it.

Ask any direct mail printer which of these four they own in-house and which they hand off. The answer tells you more than the template gallery does.

Where Quote-Based Pricing Actually Hurts

For a single campaign, a custom quote is fine. The problem shows up in the second month: recurring mailers across a dozen markets require a budget line, and a budget line requires a forecastable unit cost. When every reorder starts a new quote cycle, three things break:

  • Planning cadence, you cannot commit to a monthly drop if you do not know the per-piece cost until two weeks before.
  • Version control, twelve markets means twelve versions of the same piece; if pricing is per-quote, so is every version change.
  • Approval latency, finance sign-off on an unknown number is slower than sign-off on a rate card.

A practical workaround: ask for a standing rate card for your three most common specs (e.g., 8.5x11 tri-fold, 4x6 postcard, 6x9 self-mailer) and treat anything outside those as quote-only. Most printers will do this once you commit to volume.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros: specialized print focus, strong template selection, direct mail fulfillment, educational resources on print strategy
  • Cons: no transparent pricing, no digital collateral tools, no published details on list hygiene or USPS sortation support
Pro Tip Before you commit to a direct mail run, ask the printer for a USPS paperwork sample, the PS Form 3602 or 3602-R for Marketing Mail. If they cannot produce one quickly, they are brokering the mailing rather than running it, and your postage timeline is now someone else's problem.

The Workflow Gap Most Printers Ignore

Here is the angle no competing listicle covers: direct mail does not end at the mailbox. The audience list that drives a print drop should feed your CRM, and response data should flow back. If your printer cannot export a mail file your CRM accepts (CSV with a unique recipient ID per record is the minimum), you are running print and digital as two disconnected campaigns.

A simple integration pattern: assign each recipient a unique offer code at print time, capture it on a landing page, and write the redemption back to the CRM record. That closes the loop between print spend and pipeline, the difference between a printer and a collateral partner.

USPS Marketing Mail eligibility and sortation requirements

Canva: Best for In-House Design and Print-on-Demand

Canva is a graphic design platform that lets non-designers build marketing collateral and order prints without leaving the browser. Its drag-and-drop interface and brand kit features genuinely help small teams keep visual identity consistent.

Where Canva falls short is print depth: paper stock and finish options are narrower than a dedicated commercial printer, and high-volume multi-location orders are not what the platform is built for.

How Brand Consistency Actually Works Inside Canva

The feature that matters for marketing collateral is not the template library, it is the Brand Kit, which locks fonts, color palettes, and logos so a regional manager cannot accidentally produce an off-brand flyer. Three settings do most of the work:

  • Brand controls, restrict which fonts and colors team members can apply, so every asset inherits the approved palette rather than a near-match.
  • Locked templates, publish a template with fixed logo placement and editable text fields only. This is the closest Canva gets to a brand-guardrail system.
  • Approval workflows, route designs to a brand owner before export or print. Without this, brand kits are advisory, not enforced.

A common pattern: central marketing builds and locks the template, regional teams fill in address and offer fields, and the brand owner approves in one queue. The template alone does nothing if anyone can unlock it.

The Accessibility Gap Nobody Talks About

Every competing listicle covers Canva's design features. None mention that marketing collateral is increasingly subject to digital accessibility expectations, and Canva's output is where teams get caught.

If your collateral lives as a PDF on your website, it should meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard published by the W3C. The practical requirements are unglamorous but real:

  • Tagged PDF structure, headings, lists, and reading order must be encoded, not just visually implied. A PDF exported from a design tool is often untagged by default.
  • Alt text on every image, including logos and decorative elements, or explicitly marked decorative so screen readers skip them.
  • Color contrast, WCAG's minimum contrast ratios apply to text over background images, which is exactly where brand palettes tend to fail.
  • Document title and language, set in the PDF metadata, not left as "Untitled design."

Canva has added alt-text fields and some accessibility tooling, but the export is not automatically a compliant, tagged PDF. Budget time for a remediation pass or run the export through a PDF accessibility checker before publishing, the step that separates a collateral library that scales from one that generates complaints.

Post-Creation Analytics: What to Measure After the Asset Ships

Design tools measure nothing after export, the second gap competitors miss. Once a brochure or one-pager is live, the questions change from "does it look right" to "is it working":

  • Time-on-page for an embedded digital brochure tells you whether the layout holds attention past the first fold.
  • Scroll depth and heatmaps reveal which sections readers actually reach, usually the pricing table and the CTA, rarely the company history.
  • Download-to-open ratio for gated PDFs shows whether the form is the bottleneck or the asset is.
  • Per-asset conversion ties a specific piece of collateral to a specific pipeline outcome, which is the only number that justifies the next print run.

None of this lives inside Canva. It lives in your analytics stack, your CMS, or a digital collateral tool layered on top. Plan for that layer before you scale production, not after.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros: free tier available, subscription from $120/year, collaboration tools, seamless design-to-print flow, Brand Kit controls for consistency
  • Cons: limited paper and finish options, not suited to large distributed print runs, exports are not automatically WCAG-compliant tagged PDFs, no post-creation engagement analytics
Watch Out The most common compliance failure in marketing collateral is an untagged PDF with no alt text published to a public site. It is invisible to the design team and visible to every screen reader user. Run an accessibility check on your export before it goes live, retrofitting a library of published PDFs is far more expensive than fixing the template.
Key Takeaway Canva is a production tool, not a collateral management system. Use it for design and print-on-demand, then layer on a brand-approval workflow, an accessibility pass, and an analytics tool. The teams that treat those three as part of the process are the ones whose collateral actually performs.

FlippingBook: Best for Converting Print Collateral into Digital Experiences

FlippingBook turns static PDFs into interactive flipbooks with lead capture forms and engagement analytics. If your brochures and white papers already exist as PDFs, this is the fastest route to a digital version that tracks who reads what.

It is strictly a digital tool. There is no printing service, so it complements a commercial printer rather than replacing one. Subscription pricing starts at $14/month.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros: real-time engagement data, professional digital presentation, integrated lead capture
  • Cons: no physical printing, another subscription to manage

How to Choose a Commercial Printer for Your Marketing Collateral

Choosing a commercial printer comes down to four questions: can they match your brand colors across batches, hit your deadline during peak season, deliver to every location you operate, and is their pricing predictable enough to budget against.

Run every candidate through this checklist before signing:

  • Request a press proof and compare it against your brand guidelines
  • Ask for two references from businesses with a similar location count
  • Confirm turnaround commitments in writing, including peak-season terms
  • Verify delivery coverage for every market you ship to
  • Ask how they handle reorders and whether color is matched to the original run
Watch Out Skipping the press proof is the most expensive shortcut in print procurement. A brochure that looks correct on screen can shift noticeably once ink hits paper, and reprinting an entire run costs far more than approving a single proof.

Commercial Printing Services for Small Business: What to Look For

Small businesses often assume large print networks are not built for them. The answer is to look for vendors offering consolidated ordering rather than minimum-volume contracts: a single-source vendor should let you place a modest business card order and a larger banner run under one account.

The practical test is onboarding speed. Ask how long it takes from account setup to first delivered order, and whether you get a dedicated contact or a general queue. If the answer is vague, expect friction on the first rush job.

Key Takeaway The right print partner for a small business is the one that scales with you. Consolidating business forms, marketing collateral, and branded merchandise under one vendor reduces administrative overhead long before it reduces unit cost.

For teams weighing the best alternatives to twosidesprint for marketing collateral, the deciding factor is usually not price per piece but whether the vendor can deliver consistent, on-time material wherever your business operates.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most reliable commercial printing services for B2B marketing collateral?

Reliability comes down to production capacity and quality control. Look for a partner with a network of production facilities, documented turnaround times, and a process for color consistency across batches. American Printing Services, LLC operates a network of around 2000 production facilities across North America, which supports fast turnaround and consistent supply for multi-location businesses.

How do I choose between online printing services and professional commercial partners?

Online services work well for one-off jobs or simple templates. Professional commercial partners make more sense when you need brand consistency across multiple locations, recurring orders, or complex finishing. Evaluate how to choose a commercial printer by checking their capacity for rush orders, their color-matching process, and whether they offer a single point of contact for account management.

What factors should I consider when outsourcing marketing collateral production?

Start with volume and frequency. If you order regularly, a vendor with multiple production sites reduces the risk of delays. Check paper stock options, finishing capabilities, and whether they can handle both print and digital formats. Also confirm their process for brand guidelines, file submission, and reorders. A partner that stores your approved files makes reprints faster and reduces errors.

Are there national printing networks that offer better scalability than TwoSidesPrint?

Yes. The main advantage of a national network is redundancy. If one facility is at capacity, production can shift to another without missing your deadline. American Printing Services, LLC uses a network of around 2000 production facilities, which supports nationwide delivery and consistent output for growing businesses. This matters most during peak seasons when single-site printers often fall behind.

Consistency across locations is the hardest part of print procurement to get right, and it is where most single-vendor relationships break down. American Printing Services, LLC addresses that with a network of over 2,500 production facilities, fast turnaround, and nationwide delivery, backed by more than 20 years of experience across marketing collateral, business forms, and branded merchandise. Get started with American Printing Services, LLC and keep every location on the same brand standard.

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