My Social Book and Mixbook are both excellent photo book services, but they solve completely different problems. One builds your book for you in under 60 seconds. The other hands you the most powerful photo book editor on the market and lets you design every detail yourself. Neither approach is wrong. It comes down to what you value more: your time or your creative control.

This comparison is not about picking a winner. It's about helping you figure out which service actually fits the way you want to make a photo book. If you've been going back and forth between the two, this guide will make the decision straightforward.

My Social Book vs Mixbook: Side-by-Side Comparison

Choose My Social Book If...

• You don't have hours to spend designing a book. My Social Book creates your entire photo book automatically. Connect your account, preview it, and order. The whole thing takes less than a minute.
• Your best photos live on social media. If your memories are on Facebook, Instagram, or Dropbox, My Social Book pulls them directly. No downloading, no re-uploading, no sorting through thousands of files on your phone.
• You want more than just photos in your book. The date you shared your first photo from that trip. The caption that made everyone laugh. The number of likes from friends and family. My Social Book preserves all of that. No other photo book service does this.
• You want a family yearbook without the project management. Creating an annual family photo book sounds wonderful until you realize it means spending a weekend selecting, uploading, and arranging hundreds of photos. My Social Book eliminates that entire process.
• You're looking for an affordable option. With competitive pricing and frequent discounts of 40% or more, My Social Book is one of the more budget-friendly choices, especially considering the book is built for you automatically.

Try My Social Book and see your free preview in seconds.

Choose Mixbook If...

• You love the design process. If arranging photos, choosing backgrounds, and tweaking every detail is something you genuinely enjoy, Mixbook gives you the best tools in the business. The editor is a pleasure to use.
• You're creating a wedding or event album. For milestone occasions where you want total creative control over the look and feel, Mixbook's templates and customization options are hard to beat. You can create something truly bespoke.
• You have high-resolution photos from a camera. If your photos come from a DSLR or professional shoot rather than social media, Mixbook's manual upload process makes more sense. You'll want to hand-pick your best shots anyway.
• Design flexibility matters more than speed. Mixbook offers over 500 templates with full drag-and-drop editing. If you have a specific vision for your book and the patience to execute it, you'll appreciate that level of control.
• You want layflat pages. Mixbook offers a layflat binding option that lies perfectly flat when opened, which is great for panoramic photos and double-page spreads. My Social Book doesn't offer this format.

How My Social Book Works

The experience with My Social Book is unlike any other photo book service. There are no templates to browse, no layouts to agonize over, and no photos to upload. Here's what the process actually looks like.

You start by connecting one or more of your social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, or Dropbox. The system scans your content and automatically generates a complete photo book, organized chronologically. Your photos are arranged with professional layouts, and the book is ready to preview in under 60 seconds.

What makes this more than a simple photo dump is the context preservation. Every post in your book includes the original date, the caption you wrote, the number of likes it received, and the location where you posted. Flip through a My Social Book and you're not just looking at pictures. You're reliving actual conversations, reactions, and moments exactly as they happened on social media.

Before you order, you can review the entire book and make edits. Remove pages you don't want, remove individual posts, or adjust the selection. You have control over the final product without having to build it from scratch. Once you're satisfied, choose between hardcover or softcover, and your book ships to your door.

This approach is particularly powerful for creating annual family yearbooks. Instead of spending a weekend each December trying to assemble 12 months of memories, you connect your account and let the system do the heavy lifting. Twelve years of doing this has resulted in over 700,000 books printed and a 4.7 out of 5 Trustpilot rating across 21,000 reviews. The automatic photo book approach clearly works.

How Mixbook Works

Mixbook takes the opposite approach, and it does it exceptionally well. This is a service built for people who want to be hands-on with their photo book design, and it gives you professional-grade tools to do exactly that.

You start by uploading your photos manually from your computer, phone, or cloud storage. There's no social media auto-import, so you'll need to download any photos from Facebook or Instagram first and then upload them to Mixbook's editor. For a large project, this step alone can take a while.

Once your photos are uploaded, you choose from over 500 templates or start with a blank canvas. The drag-and-drop editor is where Mixbook truly shines. You can move photos anywhere on the page, resize them freely, add text with custom fonts, layer in stickers and embellishments, change backgrounds, and fine-tune the layout with precision. Wirecutter calls it the best photo book editor available, and that reputation is well-earned.

The design process typically takes between 2 and 5 hours depending on the size of your book and how much customization you want. For some people, this creative time is the whole point. It's a craft project, and the editor makes it an enjoyable one. For others, particularly busy parents or anyone with hundreds of photos to include, those hours are hard to find.

Print quality is excellent. Colors are vibrant, paper stock is thick, and the binding is durable. Mixbook also offers multiple size options and a layflat binding for a premium upgrade. With 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot across over 43,000 reviews, customer satisfaction is among the highest in the industry.

The Verdict: Different Tools for Different People

Comparing My Social Book to Mixbook is a bit like comparing a personal chef to a gourmet kitchen. One prepares the meal for you. The other gives you world-class equipment to cook it yourself. Both deliver a great result, but the experience of getting there is completely different.

If your photos are primarily on social media and you want a meaningful photo book without investing hours in design, My Social Book is the clear choice. The automatic creation, combined with the preservation of captions, likes, dates, and locations, produces a book that's genuinely more than a photo album. It's a time capsule of your digital life. And for the vast majority of people who keep meaning to make a photo book but never find the time, the under-60-seconds creation process removes the one barrier that stops most projects from ever getting finished.

If you have photos from a camera or a specific event, you enjoy the design process, and you want complete creative freedom over every page, Mixbook is outstanding. It's the best manual photo book editor available, and the finished product reflects that quality. Just be ready to invest the time.

Many people actually use both services for different purposes: My Social Book for their annual family yearbook (because who has time to manually build a 200-page book every year) and Mixbook for special occasion albums like weddings where total design control matters. There's no rule that says you have to pick just one. If you're exploring other options as well, take a look at our roundup of the best Shutterfly alternatives for a broader comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can My Social Book import from the same sources as Mixbook?

My Social Book imports directly from Facebook, Instagram, and Dropbox. Mixbook requires manual photo uploads and does not connect to social media accounts. If your photos are already on social media, My Social Book saves you the step of downloading and re-uploading them. If your photos are on your computer or from a camera, Mixbook's upload process is straightforward.

Which service is faster for creating a photo book?

My Social Book is dramatically faster. Your book is generated automatically and ready to preview in under 60 seconds. Mixbook typically requires 2 to 5 hours of hands-on design time. The speed difference is the fundamental distinction between the two services: automation versus manual creative control.

Do both services include captions and likes from social media?

Only My Social Book preserves social media metadata. Your book includes the original post dates, captions, locations, and like counts. Mixbook treats uploaded photos as standalone images with no social context attached. This is one of My Social Book's most distinctive features and something no other photo book service replicates.

Which service has better print quality?

Both services produce well-made books with good print quality. Mixbook offers more format options, including a premium layflat binding, and has a slight edge in paper variety. My Social Book delivers a solid hardcover or softcover product that over 700,000 customers have been happy with. For most people, print quality is comparable. The real difference lies in the creation experience and the content of the book itself.

Ready to See Your Book?

If you want to find out what your social media memories look like as a printed book, it takes less than a minute to find out. Create your free preview with My Social Book and see how many pages your story is. No design work needed. No commitment required. Just connect your account and let the book build itself.