Canva Reviews & Product Details
Canva is an easy to use graphic design and video editing platform that lets users create, design, and publish original artwork using a simple drag-and-drop editor. The platform comes with thousands of design templates and layouts for numerous projects, including social media posts, presentations, videos, posters, flyers and more.
Canva is also often used as Photo Editing of choice in Marketing and Ecommerce tech stacks.
| Capabilities |
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
| Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
Canva Pros and Cons
- Simplicity: Canva is delightful to use. You can search for stock images and videos in seconds, drag and drop elements into place, and experiment with a huge range of filters and effects.
- Free plan: If you’re not sure how many visual assets you need yet, you can start with the free plan and work your way up.
- Versatile: You can create a lot of different kinds of graphics easily with Canva, including logos, Facebook posts, email marketing templates, and landing pages.
- Convenient easy-to-use environment for beginners
- Thousands of templates, icons, photos, fonts and other assets
- You don’t get the full control with Canva that you get with more advanced marketing tools. There aren’t as many layers as possible and advanced features to explore.
- Can be a little slow as a browser-based product.
- Very limited editing options
- No layering or re-adjustment options
Are you a non-designer looking for graphic design software? If you need to create designs for your business, Canva is one of the top rated tools to choose. In this post, we’ll explore Canva’s pricing, features, and alternatives.
What is Canva
Canva is an online graphic design tool used by 55 million monthly active users to create visual content for offline and online marketing. Over 9,400 Capterra reviewers have given Canva an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.
Canva offers hundreds of thousands of templates and elements you can use to create designs for personal or business use. Customize your visual content with your brand kit and media from your own library.
How Much is Canva
Canva offers three pricing plans. The Free plan includes the following.
- Over 250,000 free templates.
- Over 100+ design types including business cards, presentations, and social media posts.
- Free photos, logos, fonts, photos and graphics.
- Share, collaborate, and comment on designs with a team.
- Save your designs with 5GB of cloud storage.
- Share designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
The Pro plan starts at $12.99 per month (or $119.99 per year) for up to five people. It includes everything from the Free plan plus the following.
- Over 100 million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics
- Over 610,000 premium and free templates with new designs daily
- Up to 100 Brand Kits with your companies colors, logos, and fonts
- Access to Background Remover and Magic Resize.
- Create templates from your own designs.
- Save your designs with 100GB of cloud storage.
- Schedule your social media designs on up to 8 platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
The Enterprise plan starts at $150 for five people. It includes everything from the Pro plan plus the following.
- Use brand controls to manage your team’s access to apps, graphics, colors, logos, fonts, and uploads.
- Get approval on your designs with built-in workflows.
- Control what your team can edit and stay on-brand with template locking
- Save your designs with unlimited storage.
- Log in with single-sign on (SSO) and have access to 24/7 Enterprise-level support.
How to Use Canva
To get started on Canva, you will need to create an account using your email address, Google, Facebook, or Apple. You will then choose your account type between student, teacher, small business, large company, non-profit, or personal. Templates and additional resources will be recommended based on your chosen account type.
You can choose to start a free trial of Canva Pro or begin with the free version to see if it’s the right graphic design tool.
Designing with Canva
For your first design, Canva will suggest different post types to choose. Based on the type of account you set up, you will see template categories like social media posts, documents, presentations, marketing, events, ads, launch your business, build your online brand, etc.
Begin by choosing the type of post you want to create or searching for something more specific. Search by social network name, for example, to see a list of templates by post type on each network.
Templates
Next, you will be able to choose a template. Templates come ready to go, with customizable photos, text, and additional elements.
You can start your design by choosing a template, searching for a template, or working with a blank template.
Canva has a lot to choose from, so start with a specific search. If you’re in the horticulture business, you’ll find plenty of templates for a variety of post types just by searching for plants.
You may not find the perfect template, and that’s ok. Remember there are plenty of ways to customize any template. So choose the best fit and move on to Elements.
Elements
Inside the Canva designer, the Elements tab gives you access to lines and shapes, graphics, photos, videos, audio, charts, photo frames, and photo grids. You can use the search box on the Elements tab to search everything on Canva.
Again, Canva has a large library of elements to choose from, so be specific in your search query. You may also want to search in the following tabs to see various elements separately in the search results.
Photos
The Photos tab allows you to choose from millions of free, paid, and Pro-only stock photos.
You can replace photos on your templates to create a new look or to match a particular template to your industry.
Alternatively, you can use photos from another stock photography site or your own photos. Simply upload them in the Uploads tab.
Once you choose a photo, you can use Canva’s photo editing features to add filters, adjust the photo’s settings (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.), crop, animate, and change the transparency.
Canva Pro subscribers have access to the Background Remover. This will remove backgrounds from stock photos in the Canva library as well as photos you upload to the Uploads tab.
Text
The Text tab allows you to add headings, normal text, and fancy graphical text to your design.
When you click on the text on a template, you’ll see options to adjust the font, font size, color, format, spacing, text effects (like shadows), and change the transparency.
Canva Pro subscribers can set brand fonts via the Brand Kit or the Styles tab. Enterprise-level controls will ensure that your team keeps visual content on brand.
Audio
Creating an animated image or video? Search for audio elements to add to capture user’s attention in social news feeds.
Alternatively, if you want to use audio from another stock site or your own audio tracks, you can upload them in the Uploads tab.
Video
Want to create video content? Choose from thousands of free and Pro-only stock video clips. You’ll find videos that range from a few seconds to two minutes long.
Similar to photos and audio, if you want to use videos from another stock site or your own videos, you can upload them in the Uploads tab.
Once you choose a video, you can use Canva’s video editing features to trim the video, flip it, and change the transparency.
Backgrounds
In the Background tab, you’ll find free photos specifically geared to act as backgrounds on your designs. Change out the background on a template to give it a more custom feel.
Styles
The Styles tab allows you to change the look and feel of your template quickly with different color palettes and font combinations. If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you can upload your brand’s custom colors and fonts to keep designs on brand.
Logos
If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you’ll have a Logos tab. Here, you can upload variations of your brand logo to use throughout your designs.
You can also create logos with Canva. Note that you can’t trademark logos with stock content in them.
Publishing with Canva
Free users of Canva can download their designs or share their designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Pro subscribers can use the Magic Resizer to create multiple post formats from one design. For example, you can start by designing an Instagram post. Canva’s Magic Resizer can resize it for posts on other networks, Stories, Reels, and other formats.
Canva Pro subscribers can also use Canva’s Content Planner to schedule updates to up to eight profiles/accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Teams
Canva Pro subscribers can work in teams to improve the visual content workflow. Designs can be created inside Canva and sent to the appropriate team members for approval. Teams can make comments, edits, revisions, and keep track via the version history.
Canva Print
If you create a design for offline marketing, Canva has a Print division to compete with companies like VistaPrint. They will print your designs on banners, wall art, mugs, t-shirts, business cards, stickers, invitations, cards, flyers, and more.
Canva Print is perfect for any business that wants customers to do some word of mouth marketing for them. Create designs people would want to stick on, wear, etc. Hand out business cards that people want to keep and share.
Canva Apps
Canva offers their own mobile app on the Apple and Google Play stores. Canva has earned a 4.9 out of five stars from over 3 million Apple users and a 4.7 out of five stars from over 188,000 Google users.
With that said, the mobile app doesn’t have all of the features you’ll find on the desktop browser version. Fortunately, you can access most of them via a mobile browser by going to the Canva website and bypassing the app.
In addition to mobile apps, Canva has apps and integrations that allow you to access elements from third parties. You can add maps from Google Maps, Emojis, photos from Google Drive and Dropbox, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Bitmojis, and other popular visual content elements.
Canva Pros and Cons
Review networks like TrustRadius allow people to leave specific pros and cons about their Canva experience. Amongst the over 500 reviews, here are some of the highlights from the pros and cons users have identified.
- An easy to learn and use interface
- It allows people with limited graphic design skills to create professional graphics
- Tons of templates so you never have to start from scratch
- Branding kits to keep teams matching the brand colors and fonts
- Ability to create visual content on the go
- Templates that cover a wide variety of uses and networks
- The ability to search for royalty free images, video, and audio without another service
- Missing advanced photo editing features like blurring or erasing a specific area
- Seemingly basic elements (graphics, shapes, etc.) and features are Pro-only
- Elements that fall outside of the design area are tricky to retrieve
- Newer features (like Canva presentations) need work
- The UI can be cluttered
- Users of Adobe tools may find Canva features limited
- Would like the ability to work with vectors, especially on logos
- No analytics when sharing designs
- Expensive enterprise pricing
- The artboard could be larger
- Everyone has access to templates/elements, meaning your graphics may not be as unique
Canva Alternatives
If Canva doesn’t sound like the right fit for you, you may be interested in trying the following Canva alternatives.
Adobe
Adobe has a suite of tools for beginner to advanced level graphic designers, photo editors, and video makers. One tool, Adobe Spark, is a Canva-like tool that makes it easy to create social graphics and videos. They offer a free plan and paid plans with premium features starting at $9.99 per month.
Those with graphic design skills may prefer tools like Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing ($9.99 – $20.99 per month), Adobe Illustrator for vector graphics ($20.99 per month), or Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing ($20.99 per month).
Alternatively, you can get access to all Adobe tools for your visual content needs for $52.99 per month.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is a Canva alternative that boasts better photo editing features and no hidden fees for premium templates or elements. With that said, PicMonkey does not offer a free plan. Their pricing starts at $7.99 per month for basic features.
Crello
Crello is a free graphic design tool that is similar to Canva. It includes thousands of templates and features like the photo background remover and brand kits. The app on the Apple store has an average rating of 4.7 stars from over 600 users.
Piktochart
Piktochart is a graphic design tool that focuses on infographics, presentations, and reports. Their goal is to help you turn data-heavy content into a compelling visual story. They offer a free forever plan plus pricing for premium features starting at $24.17 per month.
GoDaddy Studio
If you are a GoDaddy customer, you can access their free tool, GoDaddy Studio. This tool gives you access to thousands of customizable templates.
Similar to Canva, no design skill is necessary to create professional graphics. The app on the Apple store has an average rating of 4.8 stars from over 94,000 users.
Canva FAQ
Q: Is Canva for free?
Yes, Canva does have a free plan that you can choose to create professional designs.
Q: Does Canva have a watermark?
No, Canva does not place a watermark on your finalized images. You will only see a watermark on copyrighted stock elements in the Canva library unless you purchase the media or a Canva Pro or Enterprise subscription.
If you see a watermark on a previous design, it is because you had a Pro subscription and used a Pro-only template or element.
Q: Can I use Canva for free for my business?
Yes, all free elements included in the Canva free subscription can be used for commercial and non-commercial use.
Q: What is Canva good for?
Non-designers can use Canva to design a wide variety of visual content for online and offline marketing. They include social media graphics, presentations, business cards, reports, infographics, and much more.
Q: Is Canva better than Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator?
Canva markets itself as an easy to use design tool for non-designers. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are geared towards intermediate to advanced level photo editors and graphic designers.
Q: Is Canva good for making videos?
Yes, Canva offers an easy to use video tool for visual content creators who aren’t video experts.
Q: Is it worth paying for Canva?
Definitely, when you consider the number of Pro-only templates and elements. You can always start with the free version or cancel after the 30-day free trial if you’re unsure about the platform.
Q: Can I trademark a logo created in Canva?
Yes, unless it has any stock elements in it.
Q: Can I sell content created in Canva?
Yes, if it doesn’t include unaltered Canva media. You can read more about licensing, trademarks, and commercial usage of Canva content here.
Useful Canva Resources
Canva offers several free resources for designers.
- If you need to do simple edits, Canva has a free photo editor.
- Canva’s Color Wheel allows you to preview what colors go well together.
- The Palette Generator will generate a set of colors from an image you upload.
- The color meanings and symbolism guide can help you find the right meaningful color palette for your brand.
- The design size guide gives the current best sizes for graphics on social media, video, presentations, and more.
Additional Resources
If you want to five even deeper into graphic design, Adobe offers some insightful free guides as well. There are tips for various design types (tattoos, backgrounds, newsletters, logos, etc.) and use of graphic design principles, colors, and symbols.
Canva Review: Conclusion
Overall, Canva is an excellent solution for creators who need visual content. If you’re an experienced graphic designer, you will find their platform lacking in customization and other features – particularly vectors. But if you don’t have a lot of design experience, you’ll find Canva easier to use than advanced graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for most projects.
I'm still learning the ins and outs of canva, but I like how incredibly intuitive it is to use. I'm not a terribly design-savvy person, but canva makes it easy to design great materials!
I only use it every couple weeks, and I seem to have to re-learn how to use it each time. But that could just be me being forgetful.
- Lots of options for templates and sizes - I love the font suggestions. The pairs of fonts work really nicely, and most of them are fonts I've never heard of nor would ever decide to use. But when I see them in templates, they pique my interest and eye.
I love that Canva is so reasonably priced while not really scrimping on functionality! This is great for small organizations and non-profits!
I can't say that I've found anything that I don't like just yet -- maybe that it does not have as wide a variety of funky fonts as I occasionally like to use.
I am a one-person marcom department for a school. While I have some experience with Adobe products, Canva makes it really easy to quickly design eye-catching materials for social media, our website, flyers, etc. I love that I can upload our logo and other branding elements to create a palette that is consistent with our style guide.
I love that you can choose to customize or use a template with any size documents.
I wish there were more font choices for designs. Maybe a few more script fonts to use? I haven't used their iPad app in a while, but last time I used it, it wasn't user friendly.
I manage lots of small business social media accounts and Canva saves me so much time with design. I use it with all my web clients!
This product helps me makes my work looks like I have a degree in design! The preformatted templates and easy to resize features make this product so easy to use.
I wish there was a search feature that allowed users to seatch templates for keywords.
We did not want to hire an outside agency to design print materials and social media content. This product allows us to do that in-house.
Canva makes design work easy. I can create 10+ beautifully designed images/advertisements/cover photos/etc in no time. It is so simple a child could use it. Canva has tons of free templates, images, shapes, and graphics to choose from and also many to buy for $1 or so. It also allows you to upload your own images and graphics, which is great for the majority of us that share a lot of original content. Canva is packed with great fonts and allows you to upload your own as well. Canva stores all of your designs and auto saves every few seconds so you never lose your work! The free version allows up to 2 folders to separate your work in to and will store your custom brand colors so you don't have find them on a CMYK scale constantly. Almost everything you do on Canva can be done for free, but they do offer a paid version which mostly just allows multiple people within a company to view/work on designs from separate accounts and extra folders and such. This has been one of the most helpful tools in my jobs and my school work.
The features are not as advanced as those of the Adobe design programs, but that is to be expected of a free online design program so I can't complain. This is definitely not a replacement for a graphic designer, but it can you pretty far.
Using Canva is much simpler and faster than using professional design software. It is almost impossible to make an ugly design. If I can't think of something, there are always templates that match my needs
Easy to use, it's free for the most part. The pics you DO decide to purchase are only a dollar at most. Definitely the most user-friendly in it's industry.
Nothing yet, but i haven't implemented it with other functions/software, so if it's easily compatible with other apps, that'd be a big plus.
Social media Posts, Blog Headers, Pictures, Collages, even flyers! It's a one-stop shop for all things visual and creative that is needed when marketing a company. It's beneficial because you don't really have to know the first thing about design, you just go on there and it's user-friendly so just play with it until you get the hang of it.
I love that you can choose from so many templates to get you started. Once you choose the template of your choice then you are allowed multiple options from text to shapes and so much more. The free option allows you to do so much without paying a dime for it. You can also make various documents for various events.
I wish that on the free version you were allowed to rotate your document. I would also like the ability to rotate a group of text and objects, instead of having to do each item separately.
It is much simpler than using a word doc. It provides plenty of freedom to the customer to move, turn, resize and so much more.
The ease of use. It's so sleek and clean with tons of design options!
Some clunky process to get things laid out right.
Cheaper to design things myself than outsource.
It is easy to use. It has a lot of great in-program pictures and things that you can use on marketing pieces. For someone without a graphic design background, it is easy to use and creates great pieces of marketing.
Not a whole lot honestly. It is a great program.
Making our marketing professional looking. Easy/fast design for turnaround.
Canva is lovely. I like to use it for simple and quick works, the interface is simple and userfriendly, the disposition of the tools is intuitive and it offers you a lot of templates, images, illustrations, and fonts that you can use in your projects. The exporting settings are great since you can export the files in jpg or png (and this, depending on the work you're doing, are two great formats).
You can't use videos or gifs in it, and this can be a problem, especially if you're using it for social media.
Canva gives us a lot of help saving time and creating professional looking infographics and social media graphics. Some clients projects require a lot of graphic work and for the simple parts we use Canva avaoiding the professional software that can appear slow and too much complicated for simple projects. So thanks to canva we can have a professiona result but ina quarter of the time and with half of the efforts.
Before Canva I was doing all of my marketing with different color fonts and word docs. I can't believe how much I got done with the design features offered with Canva. Everything I do looks super professional now, from social media to business flyers. I'm in love!
Absolutely nothing. I love everything that Canva has to offer.
There isn't one things I do design wise that I don't use Canva for.
Variety of templates available for use online
Limited editing and inability to share drafts for others to edit
Positive - Professional, finished templates. Negative - Paper sizing when it's time to send drafts to professional printer
I love the ease of use as well as all of the resources offered. The templates are one of my most used items at the least for inspiration. I love all the customization that is allowed such as document sizes, adding hex colors, uploading fonts, company colors/logos & fonts. It is also incredibly convenient to be able to download in multiple formats, zip folders or easily share a link for a teammate to edit.
I wish that more of the business/pro features were available, such as images, graphics, uploading of fonts, downloading as a transparent background, etc. - but who doesn't wish that. I think one of the issues I struggle with most is, creating a piece of content, saving it and then downloading only to see the downloaded content does not match the design I made. I have also used tools before with even more features, such as inserting images into text, ungrouping pre-made graphics, animated images, and additional folders for organization.
Canva has been a great tool for beginner content creators. We have varied experience levels at our company, but no matter your comfort level with creating content - Canva is useful. Anyone can grab inspiration from a curated template or use it as the base of a design for their property's events.
I absolutely love Canva! It is feature rich with loads of templates to choose from. It's very easy to use, yet the end products look very professional! It's great for beginners as well!
I absolutely love Canva! I have no negative comments about using it/designing on this platform.
When it comes to creating digital/print marketing material, Canva has all of my needs sorted in terms of designing! The end result is beautiful designs from scratch or from their wide selection of templates available.
I love the easy to use interface, and the professional-looking templates. It's easy for a social media manager to quickly create Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn graphics that are consistent with their brand and professional-looking.
There's not much to dislike, but sometimes the site or designs load rather slowly. However since the site is so easy and simple to use, it's something that I put up with willingly.
The business problem we are solving is the need to quickly create social media posts and infographics for clients that match their brand identity and are professional looking. With Canva, we can design a graphic in under 20 minutes, whereas it would have taken hours with the Adobe Creative Suite.
Canva is so user friendly and intuitive. I love designing things on here. It always looks great even though I'm not a graphic designer
Lots of things aren't free, and I don't like how it always opens multiple windows.
Quickly designing things I need
The interface is friendly for anyone and the free resources such as images and text. I love the fact that the templates are high resolution and modern giving my flyers, instagram posts, Facebook cover pages etc. and presentations an extremely professional look. I also have the option to create my own project using custom dimensions. What's also great about Canva is that I can access the my projects on different devices.
There is very little to dislike about Canva but I wished the mobile application had all the resources like text and shapes that the web application has.
Professional digital content generating tools for social media. Professional presentations Easily developed high quality artwork for print.
Allows me to whip up something last minute, keeps my logos and pictures uploaded so I can apply them to anything. Great presets for those who are not design savvy and still very useful for those who are. I just used it today, in and out and inspiring templates are always at the ready if you are drawing a blank!
Limited options and tools, but it fulfills my purposes fine.
Visual media for bloggers Social media banners Social media posting Brand cohesiveness Pinterest ads Adding titles and banners to photos or posters
Its super easy to use and is amazing for someone who loves designing new things!
Im limited to how many fonts I can upload of my own, and I wish they had a few different layouts.
We use it at my job all the time for promotion layouts.
Easy to create designs, gives me inspiration on projects when I have no idea what to put together. Nice fonts and image gallery.
Sometimes the website & mobile app tend to freeze... Also, few glitches a week is a normal practice - it won't save my designs and I have to reload a page.
Direct marketing projects, social media designs. It's perfect for simple graphic design