Crafted Call vs ArtCall for Art Galleries: An Honest 2026 Comparison

If you run a gallery, an arts nonprofit, or an arts council, you have probably looked at ArtCall.org. It is a lightweight, affordable call-for-entry and jury tool, and for a lot of organizations it does exactly what they need. The question is whether what you need is a tool for a single call or a platform for an ongoing program.

That is the honest one-line answer to this whole comparison. If you open one occasional call a year, ArtCall is a strong, low-commitment choice. If you run several calls a year and carry the best work through to exhibitions, Crafted Call is built for that rhythm and the costs and the workflows line up differently.

This guide lays out where each platform wins, with real numbers where we have them and clear "verify current pricing" flags where competitor figures change.

The core difference

ArtCall is a simple, pay-per-call tool. You open a call, pay a per-call fee, collect submissions, jury them, and close it out. There is no subscription hanging over you between calls, which is exactly the appeal for an organization that runs one or two shows a year. It handles the essentials well: customizable entry forms, multiple image uploads, an online jury with an anonymous option, mass email, and some useful post-event tools like check-in/check-out and QR-coded name tags.

Crafted Call is a full platform built for arts organizations running calls, juried submissions, and exhibitions, with a particular focus on organizations running recurring programs. The call is the front door, not the whole house. Behind it sit a deeper multi-round jury system, native exhibition management for everything that happens after the decision, and call templates for the calls you run year after year. It runs on AWS and takes payments directly through Stripe.

Put simply: ArtCall is organized around one-off calls, and Crafted Call is organized around an ongoing program. Neither framing is wrong. They are just aimed at different organizations.

Side-by-side

Factor	ArtCall	Crafted Call
Pricing model	Pay-per-call (roughly $79+ per call as of 2026, verify current)	Flat subscription: $0 to $99/month, plus a $45 activation on the free plan
Artist cost	Per-submission entry fee set by the organization	Free for artists; they pay only the org's submission fee where one is set
Recurring-program fit	Each call is a separate purchase and workspace	One subscription covers all calls; templates and series for annual recurrence
Blind jury depth	Anonymous jury option	Platform-enforced blind mode, admin-controlled reveal, audit trail
Multi-round jurying	Lighter; built around a single review pass	Triage, numeric, rubric, and ranking across multiple rounds
Juror experience	Online voting with history	Dedicated juror portals plus automated decision emails
Exhibitions after the decision	Post-event tools (check-in, name tags, sales)	Native exhibition management: shows from accepted works, artwork tracking, drop-off/pickup logistics, public exhibition pages
Best for	A single occasional or seasonal call	Organizations running several calls a year plus exhibitions

ArtCall's pricing is volume-tiered and starts at roughly $79 per call as of 2026; the exact tiers depend on how many entries you expect, and you should confirm current figures on ArtCall's own pricing page (linked in Sources). Direct payments on ArtCall run through standard PayPal-style processing. The figures above are what we could verify at the time of writing.

Cost over a year

The right answer here comes down to one number: how many calls do you run in a year?

The occasional one-off. Say you run a single juried show once a year. You open one call, you take submissions, you pick the work, you are done until next year. On ArtCall you pay one per-call fee (around $79+ as of 2026, verify current) plus whatever per-submission entry fee you pass to artists, and you pay nothing in between. That is genuinely hard to beat for simplicity, and for this scenario ArtCall wins. There is no subscription sitting idle for eleven months.

Several calls a year plus exhibitions. Now say you run four calls a year: a spring members' show, a summer open call, a fall juried exhibition, and a winter small-works show, and you mount exhibitions from the accepted work. On a pay-per-call model you pay a fresh base fee for each of the four, every year, and each call is its own island. On Crafted Call you pay one flat subscription. The Core plan is $19/month ($199/year) and Studio is $39/month ($399/year), with Gallery at $59/month ($599/year) and Premier at $99/month ($999/year). That one subscription covers all four calls, and the per-submission fee (from $0.79 down to $0.12 depending on tier) only applies when money actually flows through the platform.

For a recurring program, the flat subscription tends to come out cheaper, and the gap widens as you add calls. Just as important, you stop re-buying and re-building the same call four times a year.

Crafted Call also has a free $0/month plan with a $45 activation per call (three jurors, one round, 10MB uploads, five images per submission), which is a reasonable way to run a first call and see whether the platform fits before committing to a subscription.

Jurying depth

This is where the gap is widest, and it matters most to organizations whose reputation rests on a fair, defensible jury.

ArtCall gives you a competent online jury: jurors vote, there is a voting history, and you can run it anonymously. For a straightforward single-pass review, that is enough.

Crafted Call is built for jury processes that have stages and structure:

• Multiple rounds. Run a fast triage pass to cut the obvious no's, then a numeric or rubric round on the shortlist, then a ranking round to set the final order. Different scoring methods (triage, numeric, rubric, ranking) suit different rounds, and you can use them in sequence.
• Platform-enforced blind review. Artist identities are hidden from jurors during scoring, the reveal is controlled by an admin, and the platform keeps an audit trail of when identities were unmasked. That is the difference between "we tried to keep it anonymous" and being able to show exactly how blind the process was. Our blind jury review setup guide walks through how to configure it.
• Juror portals. Each juror gets a dedicated portal rather than a shared link, which keeps assignments, progress, and scoring organized across a panel.
• Automated decision emails. When a round closes, accept and decline communications go out automatically rather than as a manual mail merge.

If you are running a regional or national juried show with a real panel, multiple rounds, and an expectation of fairness you can defend, this depth is the reason to choose Crafted Call. Our guide on how to run a juried art show covers the full process.

After the decision: exhibitions and annual recurrence

Most call tools stop at the moment of acceptance. For a gallery, that is roughly halfway through the work.

Crafted Call carries straight into the exhibition. From the accepted pieces you can build a show, track each artwork, manage drop-off and pickup logistics, and publish a public exhibition page that does double duty as marketing for the accepted artists and the gallery. ArtCall includes some post-event tooling (check-in/check-out, name tags, QR codes, and sales handling), which is useful, but it is built to wrap up a call rather than to run an exhibition program as an ongoing surface.

The second differentiator is annual recurrence. Programs that run the same calls every year benefit from call templates and series: you clone last year's call with its settings, jury configuration, and fee structure intact, change the dates, and open it. On a pay-per-call tool, each year's call tends to start closer to scratch. For an organization with a standing calendar of shows, that compounding setup time is a real cost that flat-subscription, template-driven tooling removes.

When ArtCall is the better choice

We would rather you pick the right tool than the most expensive one, so here is the honest version.

Choose ArtCall if:

• You run a single occasional or seasonal call, not an ongoing program.
• You want the smallest possible commitment and no monthly subscription sitting idle between calls.
• You do not need multi-round jurying; a single anonymous review pass is plenty.
• You do not need native exhibition management; once the work is selected, your job is essentially done.

In that situation, ArtCall's pay-per-call simplicity and low per-call cost are exactly right, and adding a platform built for recurring programs would be paying for depth you will not use. ArtCall is a genuinely good product for that use case, and plenty of organizations are well served by it.

The bottom line

ArtCall and Crafted Call are not really competing for the same job. ArtCall is a lightweight, affordable, pay-per-call tool that shines for occasional and seasonal calls. Crafted Call is a platform for arts organizations running recurring programs, where a flat subscription, deep multi-round blind jurying, and native exhibitions after the decision all earn their keep.

If you open one call a year and never look at the platform in between, start with ArtCall. If you run several calls a year and carry the best work through to exhibitions, the math, the jury depth, and the post-decision workflows all favor Crafted Call.

Want to see how it lines up for your program? Compare the platforms side by side on our comparison page, check the full pricing breakdown, or start a call and try it on your next show. You can also read our related EntryThingy vs ArtCall comparison for another point of reference, or sign up and run your first call on the free plan.

Sources

• Pricing | ArtCall.org, ArtCall
• Online Art Call Submission & Jury Software | ArtCall.org, ArtCall
• FAQ | ArtCall.org, ArtCall