Flipbooks AI vs RELAYTO: A Flipbook You Publish or a Platform You Run?

The Short Answer

Choose Flipbooks AI if your PDF is finished and you want it online as a page turning flipbook in the next few minutes, with your own logo, brand colours on the reader controls and, on the top plan, background music and a separate password for each reader. You start on a free plan that does not expire, you pay a price that is printed on a page in dollars, and no document has to wait for a sales conversation before it goes live.

Choose RELAYTO if you need what a content platform gives you and a flipbook host does not: reader analytics with a retention window, content hubs that gather several documents into one destination, Salesforce, HubSpot and Marketo integrations, Google Analytics and Tag Manager, your own domain on the published content, three account users included as standard, an AI content copilot, more than a thousand widgets and web embeds inside the pages, and full white labelling, SAML single sign on and regional data residency on the Enterprise tier. Flipbooks AI has none of that at any price, and RELAYTO converts PDFs too, so the overlap is real rather than convenient.

Flipbooks AI vs RELAYTO at a Glance

Flipbooks AI wins 7 of these 11 rows, ties 4 and loses none. They are rows we picked, so read them that way. The sections below say plainly where RELAYTO is the better buy.

Pricing Compared

Here is the honest position, and it is a shrug. RELAYTO's pricing page lists Team, Business and Enterprise, and it describes each of them in detail, but the plan prices did not render as figures when this was checked in August 2026. Team and Business both showed a starting from $0 a month placeholder, with the word test sitting underneath on the business pricing page, and Enterprise is a contact us tier by design. Third party listings quote numbers for RELAYTO, and they disagree with each other, so none of them are repeated here. If the price is what decides this for you, check their current pricing page, which changes, or ask their sales team directly.

What did render, and what is therefore worth knowing, are the add on figures around the plans. An additional user costs $50 a month on Team and $70 a month on Business. Ten additional experiences cost $60 a month on Team and $100 a month on Business. A standard onboarding package is $2,000, premium customer support is $2,000, and priority support is $2,000 a year. Billing is offered monthly or annually with a saving of up to twenty per cent for paying yearly. Add ons priced at $50 to $100 a month, and a four figure onboarding package, tell you the shape of the thing even without the base numbers: this is software bought by a department with a budget, not by one person with a catalogue to publish.

Flipbooks AI sits at the other end and publishes everything. Starter is $59 a year and annual only. Plus is $14 a month or $108 a year. Ultra is $29 a month or $228 a year. Those are the only three numbers, they are the same wherever in the world you buy from, and there is a free plan underneath them that never expires. There are no seats to add, because there is no seat model, and no onboarding to buy, because there is nothing to onboard: you upload a PDF and it becomes a flipbook. Whether that is an advantage depends entirely on whether the things RELAYTO charges for are things you need.

What Each Free Plan Really Gives You

RELAYTO does not have a free plan. What it has is a free 30 day trial of the Team plan, offered for qualified use cases, with paid pilots available on Business and Enterprise instead. That is a normal way for a platform at this level to sell, and thirty days is a generous trial, longer than the fourteen days most of this category offers. It is still a trial. At the end of it there is a decision to make and a bill to pay, and the qualified use cases wording means the trial is something you are granted rather than something you simply take.

The Flipbooks AI free plan is a plan. You keep three flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage, with the magazine page turn effect and a small Flipbooks AI mark in the corner of the viewer. There is no page cap, so a 300 page catalogue goes up whole. There are no ads beside the reader. Readers never need an account to open it. One shared password is allowed. Nothing you publish is listed in any public directory. There is no inactivity rule, so a flipbook stays live until you delete it, and the three flipbook allowance is a rolling one rather than a lifetime count, so deleting one frees the slot straight away and a free account can publish far more than three documents across a year.

The comparison that actually matters is not three against thirty days, though. It is what the two free options are for. RELAYTO's trial exists so a team can evaluate a platform: build a couple of experiences, wire up the analytics, see whether the content hub idea fits how they work, and then make a case internally. Our free plan exists so someone with a finished PDF can put it online tonight without a card. If your document is a lookbook, a school newsletter, a menu, a portfolio or a report that simply needs to be readable on a phone, the second of those is the shape of your problem. If you are evaluating a system that a marketing team will live in for the next three years, it is the first.

Branding and Watermarks

Neither tool puts a watermark across your pages, and neither shows advertising. On Flipbooks AI a free flipbook carries a small Flipbooks AI mark in the corner of the viewer, and every paid plan removes it or swaps in your own logo in its place, starting with Starter at $59 a year. That same $59 also unlocks brand colours for the reader controls, so the chrome around your pages matches your palette rather than only carrying your logo.

RELAYTO handles this on a ladder, and the ladder is steeper. The Team tier gives you a branded subdomain, so your content sits at something like companyname.relayto.com, and the vendor's name is still in the address. Business adds what their plan table calls business branding customisation, and lets you connect your own domain so content publishes under your own URL, which is a more thorough job of looking like you than anything Flipbooks AI offers, since we have no custom domain feature at any price. Full white labelling, described on their page as removing all RELAYTO mentions, is an Enterprise feature only, and Enterprise is the contact us tier.

So the two products draw the line in different places and it is worth being precise about who wins where. If all you want is the vendor's mark gone and your own logo in its place, that costs $59 a year here and requires an Enterprise conversation there. If what you want is your content living on your own domain, that is a Business tier feature at RELAYTO and something Flipbooks AI cannot do for you at any price. Those are two different definitions of branding, and only you know which one your marketing team means when they ask for it.

Privacy and Who Can Find Your Flipbook

RELAYTO publishes four content security settings on the Team tier, which it groups as standard content security: Public, Password Protected, Private and Unlisted. That is a clear and sensible set, and having Private and Unlisted as distinct options is more granular than what Flipbooks AI offers. Business adds what the plan table calls advanced audience access controls and premium content hub security, and Enterprise adds SAML based single sign on, multi factor authentication and a choice of data residency in the USA, EU or UAE. If your documents are governed by a policy that names where data may physically live, that last one is not a nice to have and we have no answer to it.

Flipbooks AI is simpler and narrower. A flipbook is shared by link, it is never listed in a public directory, and we never submit it to a search engine. One shared password is available on every plan including free, and Ultra at $228 a year gives each reader a separate password instead of one code passed around.

Now the caveat, and most of it is about our own product rather than theirs. On Flipbooks AI a password gates the reader interface, not the file behind it. A shared link is a public URL, and any link that ends up somewhere public can be crawled. If a document genuinely must not leak, Flipbooks AI is not a substitute for a system with real access control, and this is the one place in this comparison where the difference is a category difference rather than a preference. RELAYTO's Private setting, its audience access controls and its Enterprise SSO are built for exactly that problem. We did not test how their access control behaves at the file level, so treat their side as unchecked rather than assuming it is stronger, but the intent of the two products is plainly different and you should buy accordingly.

Embedding and Sharing

Both tools share by link, and with either of them a reader opens the document in a browser from a URL with no account and no app. RELAYTO lists what it calls RELAYTO embeds on the Team tier, so putting an experience inside another page is available from their entry plan upward. On Flipbooks AI the embed code arrives on Plus, at $14 a month or $108 a year, along with an allowed domain list that controls which sites may frame your flipbook. If embedding on your own site is the whole point of the exercise and you are choosing between the entry tiers, that is a point to RELAYTO on availability, though without published plan prices there is no way to say which entry tier is cheaper.

Inside the page, RELAYTO does considerably more than we do, and this is the section where the gap is widest. Their plan table lists more than a thousand widgets and web embeds, an interactivity studio for assembling them, and content hubs, five of them on Team, that collect several experiences into a single destination for a reader to browse. Business turns those hubs AI powered and adds an AI content copilot. A RELAYTO experience can therefore hold live content, forms, calendars and third party tools rather than being a fixed set of pages. A Flipbooks AI flipbook is the PDF you uploaded, rendered as pages that turn. It is not trying to be the other thing.

Measurement is the same story. RELAYTO gives lightweight analytics with 90 day data retention on Team, content hub analytics with two year retention on Business, custom retention on Enterprise, plus Google Analytics and Tag Manager, and Salesforce, HubSpot and Marketo integrations so reader behaviour lands in the CRM your sales team already uses. Flipbooks AI has no reader analytics at all, no lead capture and no integrations. If you need to know who opened your document, how far they read and which account they belong to, that is not a feature we are missing by a little. It is not a thing we do.

Ease of Use and What Each Tool Is For

The fairest way to describe RELAYTO is that it is a content experience platform, and the PDF conversion is a door into it rather than the product itself. Their own plan pages list PDF to interactive flipbooks, slides and microsites on all three tiers, so the conversion is genuinely there and genuinely on every plan. What you get afterwards is an experience you shape in their interactivity studio, publish to a hub, secure with access controls, wire into a CRM and measure. Team includes three users and fifty experiences, Business includes three users and two hundred, Enterprise is unlimited on both. Support is tiered as Silver, Gold and Diamond, and Enterprise comes with a dedicated account manager, a guaranteed SLA, two hours of personalised training, premium templates and custom integration development. That is the profile of software that a team adopts, not software you use once.

Flipbooks AI is narrower on purpose and it is quicker to say what it is not. There is no template gallery, no in tool page editor, no custom domains, no team seats, no API, no reader analytics, no lead capture and no e-commerce. The design work already happened wherever you made the PDF. You upload the finished file, pick a page turn effect, set a password if the document is private, add your logo and brand colours if you are paying, and share the link. Four of those gaps are things RELAYTO's own plan table fills, and if any one of them is on your requirements list, take RELAYTO and do not look back, because we will not grow into it for you.

What the money buys here is the reading experience and the speed of getting there. Every paid plan removes the corner mark, unlocks brand colours and opens the page turn effects the free plan does not carry. Plus adds the embed code and its allowed domain list. Ultra adds background music and a separate password for each reader. Around that sit the operational things this comparison kept turning up: prices printed as figures on a page, one set of numbers wherever you check from, no seat count to manage, no onboarding package to buy and no inactivity rule deciding whether a quiet flipbook stays online. Pick by the document and by who is asking for it. A finished PDF that needs to be read points here. A content programme that needs to be run, measured and reported on points there.

Who Should Choose Which

Choose Flipbooks AI if

• Your PDF is finished and you want it online, branded and readable in a couple of minutes
• You want a free plan that does not expire rather than a trial you have to qualify for
• You want to see the price before you buy, and pay the same whatever the size of your team
• You want background music or a separate password for each reader, at $228 a year

Choose RELAYTO if

• You need reader analytics, a CRM integration or Google Analytics on your documents
• You want your content published on your own domain, or fully white labelled at Enterprise
• You want content hubs, an interactivity studio and live widgets inside the pages
• You need SAML single sign on, multi factor authentication or a choice of data residency

How to Switch from RELAYTO to Flipbooks AI

There is no import step, because a flipbook is always built from a source document. If you still have the PDF you uploaded, the move takes about as long as one upload, but a RELAYTO experience usually holds work that never existed in that PDF, so the list of what to rebuild matters more here than in most switches.

1. Get the source PDF back first. RELAYTO builds an experience from a document you gave it, so find the original export rather than anything reconstructed from the published version. The original keeps the text sharp and the internal links working, and it is your archive whatever you decide, since no hosted copy on any platform is a substitute for the file.
2. Write down everything that lives in the experience and not in the file. Widgets, web embeds, forms, calendars, the content hub a document sits inside and its access setting were all configured in RELAYTO and none of them travel with the PDF. Note which page each one belongs to before you stop paying, because that list is the honest measure of whether Flipbooks AI is enough for this document.
3. Export your analytics before the retention window closes. Team keeps 90 days of data and Business keeps two years, so anything older than that is already gone and everything else disappears with the account. Download the reports and push whatever the CRM needs into Salesforce, HubSpot or Marketo now, because Flipbooks AI has no analytics and no way to import reporting history.
4. Upload the PDF to Flipbooks AI and set it up. Drop the file on the create page, pick a page turn effect, add a password if the document is private, and set your own logo and brand colours if you are on a paid plan. Preview it before publishing, and remember the free plan keeps three flipbooks live at a time with the magazine effect only.
5. Repoint every link, then retire the old experience. Embeds, QR codes, email signatures, campaign links and anything published on your own domain still point at the RELAYTO URL, and a custom domain is the hardest of those to unwind, so plan it first. Keep the old experience live while you swap everything over, and recreate any embedding restriction as the allowed domain list on Plus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is RELAYTO free, and what does the free tier include?

RELAYTO has no permanently free plan. What their pricing page offered when checked in August 2026 is a free 30 day trial of the Team plan for qualified use cases, with paid pilots available on the Business and Enterprise tiers instead. Thirty days is longer than most trials in this category, but it ends. The Flipbooks AI free plan does not: it keeps three flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage, with the magazine page turn effect, no page cap, no ads, and a small Flipbooks AI mark in the corner of the viewer.

How much does RELAYTO cost?

This could not be confirmed. Their pricing page describes Team, Business and Enterprise in detail, but when checked in August 2026 the plan prices showed a starting from $0 a month placeholder rather than figures, and Enterprise is a contact us tier by design. Third party listings quote numbers that disagree with each other, so none are repeated here. The add on prices did render: $50 a month per extra user on Team and $70 on Business, $60 a month per ten extra experiences on Team and $100 on Business, and a $2,000 standard onboarding package. Check their current pricing page, which changes.

Does RELAYTO turn a PDF into a flipbook like Flipbooks AI does?

Yes, and this is the one comparison on our site where the overlap is genuine rather than adjacent. RELAYTO's plan pages list PDF to interactive flipbooks, slides and microsites on all three tiers, so the conversion is real and available from their entry plan. The difference is what surrounds it. On RELAYTO the converted document becomes an experience you then shape, secure, hub, integrate and measure. On Flipbooks AI it becomes a flipbook you share by link, and that is the whole product.

Can I password protect a document on RELAYTO?

Yes. Their Team tier lists standard content security with four settings: Public, Password Protected, Private and Unlisted, and Business adds advanced audience access controls and premium content hub security on top. Having Private and Unlisted as separate options is more granular than anything Flipbooks AI offers. We allow one shared password on every plan including free, and Ultra at $228 a year gives each reader a separate password instead of one code that gets passed around.

Does RELAYTO show reader analytics that Flipbooks AI does not?

Yes, and it is the largest gap in this comparison. RELAYTO lists lightweight analytics with 90 day data retention on Team, content hub analytics with two year retention on Business, custom retention on Enterprise, plus Google Analytics and Tag Manager, and Salesforce, HubSpot and Marketo integrations so reader behaviour reaches the CRM. Flipbooks AI has no reader analytics, no lead capture forms and no integrations at any price. If you need to know who opened a document and how far they read, we do not do that at all.

Can I use my own domain or remove RELAYTO's branding?

Partly, and it depends which you mean. The Team tier gives a branded subdomain such as companyname.relayto.com, so the vendor name stays in the address. Business lets you connect your own domain and adds business branding customisation. Full white labelling, which their page describes as removing all RELAYTO mentions, is Enterprise only. Flipbooks AI removes the corner mark or swaps in your logo on every paid plan from $59 a year, but it has no custom domain feature at any price, so on addresses they win and on the mark itself we are cheaper.

How many people can work on the account?

RELAYTO includes three users on both Team and Business, and unlimited users on Enterprise. Extra users are charged as an add on at $50 a month on Team and $70 a month on Business, checked in August 2026. Flipbooks AI has no team seats at all, which is either a saving or a missing feature depending on how you work: one account holder pays one price and nothing changes as your team grows, but there is also no way to give a colleague their own login to the same flipbooks.

Will my flipbook end up in a public directory or in Google?

Not from us. Flipbooks AI shares by link only, never lists a flipbook in a public directory and never submits one to a search engine. RELAYTO offers Public, Password Protected, Private and Unlisted as content settings, so publishing openly there is a deliberate choice you make rather than a default. What is true of any link on either platform is that the URL itself is reachable, so a link pasted somewhere public can be found and crawled. On our side a password gates the reader interface rather than the file behind it, which is worth knowing before you rely on it.

Can I import my existing RELAYTO experiences into Flipbooks AI?

No. Flipbooks AI generates a flipbook from a source document, so switching means uploading the same PDF again, which takes about a minute. Anything you built inside RELAYTO will not come with it: widgets and web embeds, forms, the content hub a document belonged to, its access settings and your analytics history all live in their account rather than in the file. Export the reports you need before you close it, and repoint your links before retiring the old experience.

Is RELAYTO a good tool?

Yes, and it is the strongest product in this set of comparisons. It genuinely converts PDFs, which most of our adjacent competitors do not, and then adds an interactivity studio, more than a thousand widgets and web embeds, content hubs, an AI content copilot, analytics with real retention windows, CRM and Google Analytics integrations, custom domains, and SAML single sign on with multi factor authentication and regional data residency at Enterprise. Flipbooks AI does one narrow thing that RELAYTO also does, and does not attempt the rest. If a team is going to run a content programme, RELAYTO is built for that and we are not.