Readz

What Readz is

Readz is a digital publishing platform for designers. Its homepage calls it a platform that "makes it easy for designers to create interactive publications and marketing collateral in the cloud," with magazines, newsletters, reports, ebooks and microsites as the typical output, built "with unique, responsive layouts" and published instantly with "no coding required."

It is closer to a design tool than to a template-based site builder. The audience is a designer or marketing team that wants layout freedom and interactive pages for content marketing, not a business owner assembling a small brochure site. The company says it builds its own web content on Readz, and the footer of its pages carries the line "Created on READZ" to make the point. A typical project is a digital annual report, an industry report, a brand magazine or a campaign microsite that has to look designed rather than templated and still read well on a phone.

What you build and how

The product has 2 named tools. The Design Studio is where you create interactive experiences, and the Flipbook Publisher is the option for adding a flipbook, a page-turning version of a document. The homepage lists what the work looks like: magazines, industry reports, newsletters, ebooks, annual reports and brochures. A microsite is also on the list of things you can design and publish, which is what puts Readz among website builders: a microsite built in the Design Studio is a small standalone site, published to the web like any other.

The editor is positioned as a design environment. The company says that "at its core, Readz is a design tool," one that feels like a design tool, looks like one and acts like one. It describes a designer-oriented interface with styling panels, indexes and animation settings, and says every aspect of the content can be designed and adapted: "It is you who controls the design, not our programming team." The homepage promises that you can "Break the mold imposed by restrictive developer frameworks and color-inside-the-line themes" and design as you wish without coding knowledge.

Layouts are built either from scratch or from a library of pre-made blocks and pages. Typography is open: the homepage says you can use your own fonts, whether Adobe, Google or custom fonts. Responsive behavior is a central claim. The company argues that content has to be treated differently on mobile than on desktop, with shorter line lengths and columns reflowed, and it presents Readz output as fully responsive rather than a shrunken desktop view.

Interactivity is where most of the design work goes. The company lists basic interactive elements that come with ready-made animation options: image sliders, content sliders, popups, lightboxes, forms and pre-made navigation. The image slider alone offers transitions, multiple slides and more. On top of those, you can add animations and effects to any content, such as hide and show, expand and collapse, movement along the X and Y axis, scaling, fading in and out, bouncing, rotating, sliding in and out, and zoom. Each interactive element can be set to perform on desktop, on mobile, or on both, so a designer can keep a heavy effect off small screens.

For the reader of a published piece, the experience is an interactive page. The homepage says you can grow your audience with calls to action and forms and review the results in an analytics dashboard. It lists integrations with popular tools including Google Analytics, Tag Manager and Marketo, "and many more." That combination makes a Readz report or microsite a lead generation asset as well as a design piece.

Publishing is described as a single step. The homepage says you publish your content to a content delivery network with the click of a button, and that the company takes care of the infrastructure so you can focus on business results. Another page says publishing takes seconds, not minutes, and that HTTPS and HTTP/2 are implemented on all Readz publications. On speed, the company says it keeps adding optimizations, and it reports that one of its own pages loaded in 0.997 seconds in a GTmetrix test, with an A grade for its content pages. That is the company's own measurement, and it links to public test tools so readers can check pages themselves.

Migration is an offered service. The company says content, images and videos can be moved over from a competing interactive content platform without disruption to traffic and audiences, and that its team will do the heavy lifting.

Beyond the editor, the homepage names "product support to creative services," so the company positions human help as part of the offer. The menu points to product documentation, product training, a knowledge base, an FAQ and examples, and other pages mention help guides, core concepts, an academy and customer projects. There are dedicated pages on Security and Web Accessibility, and a services overview.

What the pages state about plans, pricing and trust

The menu lists 3 plans: Readz Studio, Flipbook Publisher and Enterprise. The homepage itself calls for visitors to "request a demo" and "Talk to a publishing expert." A summary table on the company's site gives one figure: Readz at "150 USD monthly." The company describes its model as "straightforward and fair," says the base license is already a complete solution to which you can add features and functionality for specific needs, and calls its contracts "Transparent, no lock-in." The same page invites you to "Get a demo, start a free trial."

For trust, the homepage says "Some of the world's best organizations use Readz to create and deliver their stories" under a "you're in good company" heading. The company also stresses friendly support and account management, and a phone line and contact page sit in the footer.

Who it suits and who it does not

Readz suits designers and marketing teams who produce interactive reports, magazines, newsletters and campaign microsites and want to control layout, fonts and animation instead of choosing a theme. A content marketing team that publishes a quarterly report or a yearly annual report gets a repeatable tool with forms, calls to action and analytics built in. Teams that care about how a published page performs on a phone are the audience the company speaks to most directly, and a team moving from another interactive content platform gets a migration service.

It fits less well for a general business website. The pages describe publications and microsites, not a store, a blog engine, bookings or a database. The designer-oriented interface assumes comfort with design tools, so a non-designer may find the freedom more work than a template. The 150 USD monthly figure gives a starting point for budgeting, while add-ons and the Enterprise plan are sized in a demo, and the free trial is the way to test the Design Studio first.