Companies Using SmugMug

SmugMug is the hosted platform where I'd tell a sales team to read the count most carefully. Our October 2026 crawl finds it on 2,909 domains, 1,381 of them matched to a company. A domain counts when a page loads scripts from smugmug.com, carries SmugMug's footer or script object, or answers with SmugMug's CDN header. That catches every SmugMug page, including the ones SmugMug serves when an account is gone. When I opened 150 random domains from the live set, 128 served a working SmugMug site, 11 showed SmugMug's page-not-found screen, 7 still pointed at SmugMug with nothing behind them, and 4 had moved or stopped answering.

What the count includes

Three things sit inside 2,909. Photographers' own domains are the biggest part. About 350 smugmug.com sites (352 in an October check) are listed as domains of their own. And a large group are organisations' photo subdomains: 523 of the 2,548 custom domains run SmugMug only on something like photos.example.edu. Many more SmugMug accounts publish only on smugmug.com and never show up, and the Direct plan has no custom domain at all, so this is a floor on customers even before the lapsed accounts are taken out.

Sales signal: dedupe by root domain and drop the rows that show SmugMug's not-found page before you size the list. Expect roughly one row in seven to fall out.

Growth that's mostly ours

The chart reads 2,124 in June, 2,220 in July, 2,544 in August, 2,886 in September and 2,909 in October. That's our side more than SmugMug's: the set of domains we crawl turns over every month, with dead sites dropping out and new ones coming in, and our detection widened over the summer. Recorded churn is tiny, 57 domains since March 2026, 11 of which still run SmugMug on another hostname. The sample says the real lapse rate is higher, because an expired account still returns a SmugMug page and so still counts.

"A dead SmugMug account still answers with a SmugMug page, so it keeps counting. That's why the churn figure is low and the sample is the better guide." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: SmugMug's base is steady, not growing fast. Size it as about 2,500 working sites and pitch against what they already pay for.

Photographers, and the institutions behind them

87.87% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees, and photography is the industry on 51.75%. The rest is what makes SmugMug different. 6.93% of matched companies were founded before 1960, against 1.5% on Zenfolio's profile, and those are universities, schools and newspapers. Marshall University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Freed-Hardeman University run photo sites on subdomains. NISC, a technology cooperative, keeps its photos on photos.nisc.coop. Newspapers sell reader prints through SmugMug: the Albany Times Union, and a group of CNHI dailies, including The Herald Bulletin, the Enid News, the Record-Eagle and The Salem News, that share one SmugMug template and count as one buyer. SmugMug doesn't publish a customer list we could check these against, so the names come from our crawl alone.

Sales signal: two different buyers. For photographers, sell what a selling site lacks. For institutions, the buyer is the communications, athletics or photo desk that owns the subdomain, not the web team.

A more American base

The United States has 904 matched companies, the United Kingdom 95, Canada 46, Australia 20 and Germany 19. That's one British company for every ten or so American ones, where Zenfolio's profile shows one for every six. The Netherlands and India have 16 each and Norway 14.

Sales signal: an American service for photographers, schools or local newspapers will find more of its market here than a European one will.

SmugMug and Zenfolio

Our crawl shows no switching corridor between the two, so compare their shape. Zenfolio is a photographer's whole site: only 130 of its 3,300 custom domains run it on a subdomain alone. SmugMug is that about a fifth of the time, 523 of 2,548. On price the two pull different ways. SmugMug's plans page lists no card processing fees on sales, and Zenfolio charges a 7% commerce fee per order, while SmugMug starts higher, at $20 a month billed annually against Zenfolio's $9 paid monthly.

"If you sell to schools, universities or local papers, SmugMug's list is the one to open. Zenfolio's is almost all photographers." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: for a photographer weighing the two, fees on sales decide it. For an institution, unlimited storage on every SmugMug plan is the draw.

The stack is SmugMug's own

Percentages are of the 2,899 live SmugMug domains in our crawl. Amazon CloudFront (93.58%) is SmugMug's delivery network. SmugMug's page code loads Snowplow (56.61%) from cdn.smugmug.com and carries Google Analytics settings in the same block (58.68%), so neither says much about the owner. Owner choices show up where SmugMug sits beside another site: WordPress on 9.62%, Statcounter on 6.45%, Elementor on 1.83% and Divi on 1.17%. Payment tags are rare, PayPal on 0.93% and Stripe on 0.83%, because SmugMug runs checkout itself.

Sales signal: on the subdomain sites, the main site's stack is the better clue to the organisation's tools. Look up the root domain, not the photo site.

What it costs

SmugMug's plans page (checked 14 October 2026) lists Direct at $20, Portfolio at $23.50 and Pro at $37 a month, billed annually, plus a quoted Enterprise plan for studios, teams and institutions. Every plan has unlimited photo storage and a 14-day trial; RAW storage costs $10 a month for up to 1TB. The company calls itself 100% family-owned, and Flickr agreed to join it in April 2018.

Key takeaways

1. 2,909 domains, a floor on customers, and about 85% of a 150-domain sample were working sites.

2. 523 of 2,548 custom domains run SmugMug only on a photo subdomain.

3. 87.87% of matched companies are tiny, but 6.93% were founded before 1960.

4. One British company per ten American ones.

5. Snowplow, Google Analytics and CloudFront on these sites are SmugMug's, not the owners'.

How to use this list

Split the list into photographers and institutions first; they buy differently. For the full list of 2,909 SmugMug domains with company data, explore TechnologyChecker.io, and set it beside the Zenfolio profile.