Looka is an AI logo generator that produces logos and basic colour palettes from £20–£65. The Brand Protocol is an AI brand builder that produces a complete brand identity system — strategy, visual identity, voice, design tokens, and launch-ready assets — from £49. They share a price bracket but solve fundamentally different problems.
Version 1.0 — Published April 2026
Two tools, two completely different jobs
Looka is one of the most popular AI logo generators on the market. It's polished, it's fast, and it does one thing well: it generates logo options based on your name, industry, and style preferences.
The Brand Protocol does something else entirely. It runs a five-stage protocol — Discovery, Strategy, Identity, System, Launch — that produces a complete brand identity. The logo is one deliverable among many. The strategy, voice documentation, and code-ready system are the parts that actually make a brand function.
Comparing them is a bit like comparing a headshot photographer to a documentary crew. Both involve cameras. The output is not the same.
What Looka actually delivers
Looka's process starts with a quiz. You enter your business name, pick some logo styles you like, choose colours and icons, and the AI generates dozens of options. The editor lets you tweak fonts, layouts, and colour combinations. The result is genuinely decent for the price.
The basic logo package costs around £20 for PNG files. The premium package runs to about £65 and unlocks vector formats (SVG, EPS) plus colour variations. A brand kit subscription — roughly £96 per year — adds social media templates, business cards, and ongoing editing access.
That's the ceiling. Looka doesn't offer brand strategy. There's no positioning work. No audience mapping. No tone of voice documentation. No messaging framework. No design tokens. The "brand kit" is a set of templates populated with your logo and colours, not a strategic system.
What The Brand Protocol delivers
The Brand Protocol starts where Looka stops. Before any visual work begins, the protocol maps your positioning: who you're for, what you stand for, where you sit in the competitive landscape, and what your brand needs to communicate.
The Self-Serve track (from £49) guides you through all five stages. The output includes: brand positioning and strategy, a complete visual identity (logo, colour system, typography), tone of voice and messaging guidelines, a design system with code-ready tokens, and production files for launch — social templates, OG images, favicons.
The Refined track (from £499) runs the same protocol, then hands the output to the Human Now design team — the studio behind work for BMW, Ferrari, Rolex, and M&S — for human finishing and refinement.
The comparison
| Capability | Looka | The Brand Protocol |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning strategy | No | Yes — Discovery + Strategy stages |
| Logo design | Yes | Yes |
| Colour system | Basic (auto-generated from logo) | Strategic (derived from positioning) |
| Typography | Suggested pairings | Full type hierarchy with rationale |
| Brand voice | No | Yes — attributes, examples, do/don'ts |
| Brand guidelines | Basic style guide PDF | Full guidelines with usage rules |
| Design tokens | No | Yes — code-ready values |
| Production assets | Logo files + mockups | Logo + social + OG images + favicons |
| Price | £20–£96/yr | From £49 |
The price gap between the two categories is negligible. Looka's premium tier costs £65. The Brand Protocol's self-serve tier starts at £49. The scope gap is a category difference.
Price vs total cost
If you use Looka and then need brand strategy, you're hiring a consultant (£3,000–£10,000). If you need voice guidelines, you're hiring a copywriter (£1,000–£3,000). If you need design tokens, you're hiring a developer (£500–£2,000). The total cost of assembling Looka's output into a working brand system exceeds what the Refined track costs outright. The full cost of brand identity isn't just about the sticker price — it's about what you'd need to pay separately to fill the gaps.
Who should use Looka
Looka is a solid choice if you need a logo fast, you already have a clear brand strategy, and you're comfortable assembling the rest yourself. It works well for side projects, MVPs that need basic visual credibility, and businesses where the brand plays a secondary role to the product.
Who should use The Brand Protocol
The Brand Protocol fits founders and businesses that need a brand, not just a logo. If you're launching something and you need to answer "what does this stand for?" before "what does this look like?", the protocol approach produces the right output.
It's built for startups building a brand identity from scratch — people who've never defined their positioning, never documented their voice, and don't have the budget for an agency to do it.
The real question
The decision isn't which tool has better logos. Looka's logos are perfectly fine. The decision is whether you need a logo or a brand.
If you need a mark to put on a business card, Looka does the job. If you need a system that tells your team, your freelancers, your investors, and your customers who you are and how you show up — that's a different problem. And it requires a different tool.