Personalised children's books compared

Avatar builder.

You design the character yourself from menus — hair style, hair colour, eye colour, glasses, freckles — and a hand-drawn character is assembled to match. Hooray Heroes is the biggest, with three million books personalised and around fifty titles, all written and illustrated by people. Their books are unusual in that you get around fifteen short stories rather than one, which suits a bedtime routine better than a single arc. WonderWraps, Librio and MiCuento work the same way. The advantage is that a human drew it and it will look right. The limit is that it looks like the child you described, not the child you have — and at £53.98 it's the most expensive book on this page by fifteen pounds.

Photo likeness.

You upload a photograph and the character is drawn from it, so it actually looks like them. That's what we do, along with Magical Children's Book and MyOwnChildbook. It's much newer and much rougher, and it's the only one where your child can recognise themselves rather than a reasonable approximation.

Best for trying before you buy — MyOwnChildbook and Wonderbly.

Both show you the finished book and only charge if you order the print. We don't, and neither does Magical. If you don't want to spend anything before you've seen it, that's a real point against us.

Best hand-drawn book — Wonderbly.

Drawn by people over thirteen years with a publisher behind them. If you want an illustrator's book rather than one built from your own photograph, that's a different thing and they do it beautifully.

Most illustration styles — Magical Children's Book.

Ten to our three. Watercolour, 3D, claymation, comic book, gouache, soft anime, collage. If picking a look matters, they have the range.

Best track record among the photo-likeness services — Magical Children's Book.

213,062 books and 4.8 out of 5 from 1,552 reviews. We have twenty-two reviews. That gap is real and it takes years, not weeks.

Best for sending abroad — MyOwnChildbook, Wonderbly and Hooray Heroes.

All ship worldwide. We're UK only.

Best for a bedtime routine — Hooray Heroes.

Their books hold around fifteen short stories rather than one long one, which is a genuinely different thing and works better for a child who wants one story a night. Ours is a single arc. If you want a collection, they've built one and we haven't.

Fastest — MyLittleStories.

About ten minutes. Magical take fourteen to thirty; MyOwnChildbook around an hour. Minutes rather than hours, though all three are quick enough that it probably shouldn't decide it.

Best for a book about something that actually happened — MyLittleStories.

None of the others has a real-life pathway. Their books are adventures. Ours can be the day at the beach, or the week before the new baby arrives, or the first morning at school.

Most ways to build a story — MyLittleStories.

Three pathways rather than one. A themed adventure, a real-life story you write page by page, or one of the big moments. And if none of the themes fits, you can describe your own and we'll write it. The real-life route in particular has no equivalent anywhere we've looked — you decide what happens on every page.

Best for a child who makes things up — MyLittleStories.

Your child describes a character, we draw it, it goes in the book. And it's still there next time. As far as I can find, nobody else does this at all.

Best for privacy — MyLittleStories.

We delete the original photo once the character is drawn. Magical told us they keep photos for as long as your account exists. MyOwnChildbook's guide says photos are deleted after generation; their support team told us 30 days by default, deleted earlier on request. Wonderbly don't use a photo at all, so the question doesn't arise.

(All answers dated 3 September 2026, quoted from what each company told us or publishes.)

Best British option — MyLittleStories.

Both of the other photo-likeness services are Dutch companies. Wonderbly is London-based and now part of Penguin Random House. We're a Manchester company printing in the UK, which matters to some people and not to others — but nobody else in the photo-likeness half of this list can say it.