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 |
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|---|---|
| Segment |
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| 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 love the thousands of templates it has for presentations, documents for us to edit, the varied elements it has, the ease of use and the easy design.Besides the fact that I can share with one or more people, so we can work together.
The files are messy, loose in the folder, even if you make specific folders for each model, they are thrown on the home page, the best resources are for the premium.
Before to make presentations and posts I only used powerpoint where I had to keep looking for loose pictures, remove their background, and canva helps a lot in the elements, where everything is ready and in our hand to facilitate the project.
It's user friendly, creative and is always offering new templates and inspiration. We can always rely on this platform.
Team function is difficult to understand.
Canva allows us to develop ads for clients for paid ad campaigns without distrusting budgets and outsourcing.
Easy to use and allows fast creation of graphics without an internal team.
Wish there was more optiosn for animation or better ways to implement other tools
With no internal graphic designer, canva allows for easy and fast creative solutions
Easy-to-use platform that provides various types of resources that on other platforms require a lot of knowledge. Completely intuitive adjustments and usability, in addition to the possibility of being easily guided through the various tools available such as movement, color editing in images and a varied catalog of elements that enrich artistic projects
The limitation of several resources to the modality that requires payment or subscription. I believe that some features such as choosing the type of movement should be released. Still, the impossibility of choosing the format, size of the files to be created or when they are ready, hinders usability.
Creation of projects that present a more authentic characteristic and the possibility of creating designs that really call the attention of the target audience, in addition to saving time by allowing the choice of a model that can be customized with personal ideas.
We've always used Adobe InDesign for designing almost everything, but since we found Canva, we've switched to doing everything on there almost exclusively. There are so many templates and things at our disposal, and it's web browser based which means it can be accessed from everywhere.
I wish there was a way that "Teams" had a different portal for every person, because if I'm making something, sometimes it's hard for me to find it in the recent projects, because everyone's are all stacked in the same place.
It's saving us time, and time is money. If we now have templates all made up for all the advertisements and events that we do, it's easy to make a copy and input new information and that saves us an incredible amount of time.
When I introduced Canva to my team, I was concerned they wouldn't find it user-friendly or intuitive. Three months later, they built some of the most beautiful and immersive projects I've ever seen. From creating your branding to presentation templates and product ideas, Canva is a collaborative tool that will help your team members explore their soft skills while learning about their industry and developing self-management skills. I'm proud to use this software that brings my team together to look forward to innovation.
Although we use Canva For Business at work, the one thing my team and I dislike about Canva is that we can't hide non-premium things, such as media, fonts etc., on our personal, free accounts. It would be nice to filter accordingly for people starting out a business who are yet to subscribe to a premium version of the software.
Canva allowed my team and I to build our department's brand and position ourselves as industry experts. Now, our templates stand out whenever other people in the company see our color pallet or font. My team members have improved their creativity skills as they can assist our management in creating presentations and project timelines, taking ownership of their OKRs and leading themselves to achieve them. If you look at it through the right lenses, multiple hard and soft skills can be developed or improved through Canva.
The convenience and usability of the software are excellent, with multiple easy-to-use templates.
The latest version has now moved to hiding there feature behind the pro version, making it not a service I would recommend to those not willing to purchase the pro version
Easy marketing and ad design creation, resulting in amazing work each time.
I love how easy it is to use and navigate Canva. It has so many options for creative uses from stickers and videos to marketing materials and customer retention creations. I've been able to use if for many things at work and for personal art projects.
There isn't a lot to dislike about Canva, especially if you give yourself the time to watch the how-to tutorials on navigating the program and designing creations. It sometimes lags when I've created videos, but that seems to be the only problem I've had since I started using it. There is a plethora of design options that can become somewhat cumbersome when you're trying to design in a hurry.
Canva has helped me design a seamless and professional-looking front desk marketing video highlighting the several projects my company has completed. I have created a Christmas card email video and made a beautiful newsletter without being a graphic designer.
I can access it on any device from my phone to my PC. It offers a wide range of features and doesn't charge exoberent amounts of money. I also love the ability to edit photos.
Sometimes the spacing doesn't show up correctly when I save. I use it to make small animations sometimes too but they limit the amount of frames. Also the picture frame selection is small.
It solves a lot or my graphical design issues but having a lot of of good features so I don't have to use several different programs. From photo editing to creating presentations.
The best platform to create, innovate, resize, schedule and download design posters, banners, business ppts, proposals, id cards, logos, and whatnot. I use canva for each and every bit of design, even for the letter heads.
We are not able to edit any existing design/picture in canva. Also, we cannot upload specific formats on canva (like .ai, cdr & few audio files as well), which makes the user shift to other editing tools like illustrator, photoshop or coreldraw.
Canva is a one-stop solution to cater to all the design needs of people & brands, be it creating a design from scratch to having millions of templates available, canva knows how to cater to its clients. Canva has templates for almost all the categories/types of design/purposes one creates the design for and not just templates but unlimited animations, relatable audios, and graphics. And now, canva has introduced "canva Magic" feature which is almost like a genie, you name it, you get it. Type the kind of image you want, and you get the image ready in seconds. This is almost a revolution in the design industry. Really appreciate Canva for this feature. Also, the UX is so simple and easy to operate, unlike photoshop, you can be a good designer with the help of canva.
Canva is the easiest, fastest and most handy design tool available. It is insane that it is this powerful and it's free. They stack superpowers on superpowers and keep delivering them for free.
Well... honestly, what's not to like about Canva? I can do almost anything I want with Canva is incredible... but I cannot do some of the more complex designs without paying for the upgraded options. But that's not a serious bummer.
Canva solves all my fast design needs. From social media assets, squares, posts, to long form content, resumes, posters and more. Canva is my on the fly, in a hurry design tool. It saves me TIME and ORGANIZES all my content visually... and makes me look GOOD.
Canva is the best designing tool, I have ever used. Its pre-design templates help us to make wonderful designs. It is an excellent creator tool that everybody needs for their business.
some templates have watermark is the only dislikes.
I need some designs for my business which is created by canva helped me a lot.
Canva is simple to use and has a lot of already-made templates to help with inspiration! I also really like the elements that you can add in from Canva's library!
I really can't say I have any real complaints here. I think Canva is awesome & packed with content to help users craft professional-looking designs!
Canva is helping us dish out social media content, literature sheets, content for emails & headers/banners for our website. This allows us to craft content that looks sharp & professional to our network of customers!
Canva is excellent and easy to learn. It makes you feel like you are a graphic designer!
There is nothing that I dislike about canva, and this is a beautiful platform!
We make facebook ads using canva and its easy to use and great quality pictures!
Canva continues to impress me with every update. AI generations, endless photos, graphics, design templates, document presentations, you name it you can create beautiful work with Canva.
Sometimes it feels annoying that I can't simply Ctrl+P to print and have to download with specs each time, but I get it and appreciate it for what it is! It's very quick and simple to do so, just the only thing that comes to mind when I try to think of the downsides to Canva.
You can eliminate multiple softwares to transition to this web-based/app-based, which is safe and secure with constant automatic backups.