Is Viz Worth It? Everything You Need To Know About The Digital Manga HUB

Viz is one of the only true legal ways to read a ton of awesome manga online (in English, at least). However, Viz also has a monthly subscription fee. Is that fee worth the price? Is Viz legal, safe, and awesome? Let’s take a look.

The monthly Viz subscription is worth the price because Viz has a huge library full of diverse manga and the site is very easy to use on desktop and mobile devices. If you enjoy reading manga, Viz is one of the best legal and safe places to read it. Viz’s subscription cost is also quite low.

In my opinion, as a manga fan, a Viz subscription (Well, technically a Shonen Jump subscription) is 100% worth the $2 / month that it costs. I really don’t even think about the price because it’s so low. I understand the hesitation, though. If you subscribe to every cheap service out there, soon you’ll be paying $100+ in subscription fees every month while only using a small portion of the services.

With that being said, if you’re a manga fan and don’t mind reading your manga digitally, get Viz! It’s better than any free websites out there because you’ll be supporting the artists and you won’t have to worry about accidentally clicking onto a sketchy website or seeing an annoying ad while you read. It’s 100% worth the money even for someone like me, who doesn’t read manga digitally very often.

Viz manga is not free. Viz charges a small monthly subscription for users that want to read every chapter of a manga. Without paying the subscription fee, Viz only allows you to read the first and last three chapters of a manga series for free, but to read more a premium membership is required.

Viz doesn’t give you much in terms of free manga, which makes sense because the monthly fee is so little. Take a look at One Punch Man on Viz for example. If you take a look, you can see that Viz only offers Chapter 1 - 3 for free, as well as the last 3 chapters of the series. If you want to read the middle of the series, you’ll need a Viz / Shonen Jump subscription (They are the same thing, I’ll explain further down).

Fortunately, a subscription to Viz is only about $2.99 / month as of the time of this article. It’s been this cheap for years, though, so I don’t expect the price to rocket anytime soon.

A Viz manga subscription is so cheap because Viz makes its profits from physical manga and other related items. Viz decided to make their manga subscription service so cheap in order to cut down on manga piracy that has become rampant over the years. This way, artists can still be compensated for their work.

Beyond the altruistic reasons that we all know are only the icing on the cake, by charging such a low fee for their Shonen Jump subscription service, Viz is making its website and its app the place to go read manga. Why deal with piracy sites and annoying (likely lewd) advertisements, when you can just pay $2 / month and get your manga from an official, legal source?

The only downside to this strategy, for us fans, is that once Viz has us all in the palm of their hands, they’ll be able to raise that price however high they want. With that being said, the price has been very low for years at this point, so fingers crossed we can have many more years of awesome, cheap manga!

Viz’s manga subscription service is completely safe and legitimate. Viz publishes Shonen Jump, so when you create a Shonen Jump account with Viz and pay the subscription fee, you will be reading manga directly from the source. Viz is trustworthy, legal, and one of the best places to read manga digitally.

I have a Viz account, myself, so I can say that it is 100% safe. Viz is a legitimate company and one of the largest manga publishers in the world. If it wasn’t safe to purchase a Viz subscription, it would’ve been major news by now, so it’s safe to say that Viz is 100% safe!

Is Viz Trustworthy?

Viz is highly trustworthy as it is one of the biggest manga publishers in America and the world. Viz has not had any issues involving the law or illegitimate practices, so it is a trustworthy company. It is entirely safe and legal to create a Viz account and purchase a Shonen Jump subscription.

Viz is completely trustworthy and has millions of users. The Shonen Jump app (Viz’s subscription service) has been downloaded over 19 million times, so it’s safe to say if something was wrong with Viz or Shonen Jump, we would’ve heard about it by now.

I personally have had a subscription to Viz’s Shonen Jump service for about a year now and haven’t had any problems. I don’t use it every day, but occasionally I’ll just sit in my recliner and read some manga on my phone. I prefer physical manga, but reading on my phone has been growing on me lately (plus it’s much cheaper).

Is Viz Legal?

Viz is completely legal and it is legal to use Viz’s digital manga services. Viz has the right to show all of the manga that it offers with its Shonen Jump subscription. So it is completely legal to sign up for the subscription service and read the manga offered on Viz’s website and the Shonen Jump app.

Viz is one of the only real legal places to read a ton of good manga online. Viz is the American publisher for most, if not all, of the manga in its catalog, so it has every right to offer that manga through a subscription service. Therefore it’s not illegal for them to give us the manga, and it’s certainly not illegal for us to read the manga. If it was illegal to sign up and use Viz, I’d probably already be behind bars…

A Shonen Jump subscription is the exact same thing as a Viz membership. There is no such thing as a “Viz'' subscription. Instead, Viz offers a subscription service that allows subscribers to read Shonen Jump manga online. If you purchase a subscription from Viz, you are purchasing a Shonen Jump subscription.

Shonen Jump is a magazine / entity of its own, however, Shonen Jump does not publish its own magazines, manga, etc. Instead, they go through publishers. Viz is the American publisher of Shonen Jump, so if you’re reading a Shonen Jump manga in English (digital or physical), then it’s probably been published by Viz.

Now that we’ve covered that, it’ll make more sense when I say that a Shonen Jump and a Viz subscription are the exact same things. If you go to Viz’s site and try to sign up for an account, you will be redirected to the Shonen Jump membership page where you’ll create a Viz account and then purchase a membership / Shonen Jump subscription. After you pay for the subscription, you’ll be able to read manga on Viz’s website, or through the Viz or Shonen Jump app (Your choice).

A Viz membership is better than Manga Plus for reading manga because Viz lets you read every manga chapter as much as you want, while Manga Plus only lets you read each chapter one time for free. Viz also allows you to read manga in a browser, while Manga Plus requires you to download an app.

The one major upside of Manga Plus is that it is actually free. However, it’s extremely limited compared to the Viz app, which is only about $2 per month. Manga Plus lets you read every chapter for free, but if you tap into a chapter and close it, you won’t be able to access it anymore (unless you purchase a Viz membership and download its app).

If you really don’t want to spend the $2 and add another subscription service to your bill, I don’t blame you and you can use Manga Plus and have a great experience. However, the quality of life that the Viz / Shonen Jump membership offers is unparalleled, so Viz is better than Manga Plus for most manga fans.

That’s all I have to say about Viz! For now, at least. I hope that I helped you decide whether or not you should pick up a Viz membership. Personally, it’s well worth the $2 / month for me and I definitely get my money’s worth every month.