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Canva’s message is that it helps anyone, regardless of their artistic talent or skill at graphic design, to create visual content with easy drag-and-drop features on any device from anywhere in the world. This all-in-one app lets small businesses produce professional-looking social media images, slide decks, data visualizations, reports, animated Instagram posts, Facebook ads, and other branded assets. What’s more, large enterprises can use the tool to give their in-house communications departments oversight of all the content that employees generated to ensure it's on-brand. The app has templates galore, a robust image library, and free workshops for learning best practices. Most importantly, you don't need to know anything about design to use Canva. This combination of ease and offerings is what makes it so valuable, and an Editors' Choice winner among collaboration apps.
How Much Does Canva Cost?
Canva has three pricing tiers: Canva Free, Canva Pro ($12.99 per month or $119.99 per year for one person), and Canva for Teams ($14.99 per month or $149.90 per year for the first five people). If you have more than five people, each additional person costs $7 per month. Canva is 100% free for verified and registered schools, teachers, and not-for-profit organizations.
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Free account holders are limited to making two folders and hosting 5GB of data. You can collaborate with others in the Free plan, but you miss out on several features, such as the ability to create custom templates with your brand's logos and fonts, as well as the option to publish your work directly to social media accounts.
The Pro account includes unlimited folders, 100GB of storage space, custom templates, and the ability to publish directly to social media. This plan comes with 100 Brand Kits for saving custom sets of logos, colors, and fonts for brand consistency. You also get access to more templates, stock photos, and design tools. You can get a 30-day free trial of the Pro plan, but that requires you to provide payment information upfront.
How Do Canva’s Prices Compare?
Canva's prices are roughly competitive with its competitors, though it depends on what tier of service you need.
Adobe Express, which is Adobe’s similar web app, costs less, however. Express is, like Canva, aimed at non-designers who need to create content. The Free plan comes with 2GB of storage, and access to a subset of templates, images, and fonts. The Premium plan for Express costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, although it's included at no additional cost if you already have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription ($54.99 per month for a huge suite of apps). Added to the paid plan is 100GB of storage and Adobe’s complete premium assets, capabilities, and tools.
As of this writing, Canva is better than Adobe Express in its variety and usefulness of templates and ingredients, like live mind maps, and complex data visuals, and a scrolling website builder that’s less constrained.
Visme, a close if not well-known competitor, has paid accounts starting at $147 per year, and Business accounts start at $297 per year, so it costs more than Canva.
Prezi is not quite a direct competitor to Canva, but it's similar in that it helps people at any skill level create compelling visual business products, mostly talking-head videos and presentations. Prezi has nearly a dozen different tiers of service, ranging from $36–$708 per year. If you're just buying a license for yourself and not a whole team, you can expect to pay between about $3 and $7 per month. For additional business features, expect to pay between $14 and $18 per month.
While Prezi is an Editors' Choice winner for its innovative presentation-building capabilities, it doesn't include social media post scheduling or design tools for creating marketing and advertising content, as Canva does.
What’s New in Canva?
In September, Canva revealed its new Visual Worksuite, an ecosystem with six apps: Docs, Websites, Whiteboards, Video, Print, and Presentations. Some of these apps or their features were available in the past, but Docs is all new (and currently in beta).
All apps are multi-device (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS) and offer real-time, seamless team collaboration made easier by each team member’s cursor being color-coded with matching name tags, comments, and highlighter. It’s the same type of collaboration experience you get when co-editing in Google Docs, which should set your expectations of how it should work.
Canva Docs (Currently in Beta)
Canva Docs is essentially a supercharged page layout and word-processing document builder. It lets you communicate your ideas with your own text, images, and video. You can also populate documents with assets dragged and dropped from Canva’s expansive searchable library of editable ingredients, including fonts, palettes, effects, still images, videos, animations, and sound.
I spend a fair amount of time converting and optimizing graphics for use in a variety of digital and physical creations. So, I was excited to learn about Canva’s Docs to Decks, a responsive resizer that can turn your Canva doc into a presentation deck with minimal headache. This inter-compatibility echoes the seamless convenience experience of Adobe’s Creative Cloud landscape, and even uses many of the same key commands.
When summarizing data, pie charts and bar graphs often fall short of giving us what we need to visualize the most important takeaways easily. There are advanced apps and services that can create masterful, complex visuals, but most require you to do some coding. Canva recently acquired the UK data visualization and storytelling company Flourish, and I'm delighted about it. With Flourish, you can create outstanding animated or interactive images that do a better job of visually expressing data.
Another convenient feature of Canva Docs is Canva Embeds, which lets you embed other Canva designs, Whiteboards, social media posts, or Presentations into a doc. The resulting graphic is still editable and interactive. Additionally, Canva Workspace and Docs behave responsively depending on what device is being used on either end.
With the cost of printing ever on the rise, interactive digital documents are replacing physical printed materials, like catalogs, brochures, and flyers. Digital replacements are easy to change or update as needed, and it's inexpensive to distribute them. For this use case, Canva feels like an easy solution.
Canva Websites
Canva Websites is a no-code, drag-and-drop website builder that lets you create a single, responsive, scrolling web page, meaning you can link from section to section within that single page but can't have more than one page. Choose from an array of designer-built templates, customize them, and when you’re ready to launch, you can do so with a free Canva domain. You also have the option to transfer the page in a couple of clicks to a domain that you already own, or buy a custom domain through Canva. Canva guides you through the process.
If you fancy learning about your audience engagement on the page you built, you can deploy Canva Insights (for Canva Pro), which presents basic analytics.
Canva Whiteboards
Canva's Whiteboards lets you share big ideas and brainstorm solutions with up to 50 folks. Digital whiteboards have become popular tools in remote work and hybrid work for supporting both synchronous and asynchronous ways to share ideas and information. While Miro is PCMag's Editors' Choice winner in the whiteboard category, many teams prefer to use a whiteboard that's already built into another product, as in the case with Canva—and Microsoft Whiteboard.
With Canvas' Whiteboard, you can get an infinite canvas. You can start with a clean slate, or if you need a framework to get going, drag and drop a focused template like a mind map, flowchart, essay planner, and sticky notes board, among other templates, each with tips on how to use the template efficiently. You can even drop more than one template onto a single whiteboard, then stay on task with an integrated timer.
Canva does not have any built-in audio or video calling features, let alone screen-sharing capabilities, though Miro does. It doesn't integrate with video conferencing tools, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, either (Mural does, which scores highly in PCMag's rankings). While I don't see web conferencing integration as a strictly necessary feature, some teams may want to be able to talk to one another while reviewing and making changes to a file.
Canva Video
YouTube contributors will be pleased with Canva’s thousands of YouTube video templates for intros, outros, banners, and thumbnails. Creating your channel is easier now with Canva’s signature drag-and-drop editing tools for adding typographic effects and finessing the video timeline and clip transitions.
Coming soon will be the ability to turn any Canva design into a video with an editable timeline slider.
A one-click background remover (in Canva Pro) is a new feature that does what it promises. It’s like having a green screen where you have control over what’s behind your subject.
Canva Print
Canva Print lets you integrate your designs onto a variety of merchandise that’s perfect for marketing campaigns, events, and even personalized gifts. You can choose from a range of items, including stationery, clothing, cards, and invitations, among others.
One drawback is that there are limited options for individual items. For example, sweatshirts come in black, navy, and charcoal, and circle stickers come in only one diameter. Canva does, however, offer a Happiness Guarantee, that says, “If you are not happy with your order, contact us and we’ll fix it, reprint it, or refund it!” That’s worth a lot to me, even if there are only three sweatshirt colors.
Free delivery of all your custom-designed swag sounds great. What’s even better is that for every printed item ordered, Canva plants one tree. At this writing, Canva has put more than 2.4 million native tree species into the ground all around the world, with a commitment to plant five million more by year’s end.
Canva Presentations
The Presentations part of Worksuite helps you make pitch decks, games, financial reports, and other visual materials you would present to others.
The biggest idea in Presentations is Canva’s remote control, which for fellow control freaks means no more depending on someone else to be on the ball and move to the next slide when you're ready. Now multiple presenters can connect virtually to navigate and manage the slide presentation, in person or remotely.
It’s good to know that there’s no need to start from scratch if your decks are in another app, such as PowerPoint. A single click imports existing decks, and you end up with editable content that you can polish in Canva. Like the other apps in the Worksuite, Presentations lets you morph a presentation into a video, doc, or even a sweatshirt.
Social Media
Once you’ve laid out your social graphics, it’s wonderful to have the Content Planner, a team calendar where you can schedule social media posts in advance. The interface is incredibly simple to use. You click a plus sign, select one of your creations, choose the social media channels you want it to appear in, and schedule it to run. It's helpful to be able to see and schedule the content from one interface.
Another benefit to this one-calendar approach is that every team member can see what's scheduled for when in one place. When scheduling posts from the Content Planner, you can choose Instagram Business, Facebook Page, Twitter, Facebook Group, Pinterest, LinkedIn Profile, LinkedIn Page, Slack, or Tumblr as the destination.
Canva makes it seamless to jump back into the editor to adjust an asset before scheduling it if you see something you need to change. The Canva desktop app lets you keep multiple tabs open at a time with in-progress work, which means you don't have to save and quit out of your existing file to make a quick change to a social media post that's about to go out.
Canva Extras and Unexpected Gems for Professional Designers and Agencies
If you’re your company’s branding police, Canva for Teams can be your deputy. Nurturing a consistent brand experience is critical when working with your company’s visual identity system. It can be difficult to encourage compliance from non-design team members or those who simply aren’t interested. Half of that battle is solved if creative directors turn Canva into their branding regulator.
A perhaps-overlooked advantage of using Canva is its resource management. Whatever visuals and data you’ve imported, used, or saved, they're all right there in your dock. In other words, Canva stores assets you've used before so that you and your teammates can easily use them again.
Additionally, a professional designer can create perfectly branded templates and then decide which elements other team members can edit. The ability to lock areas of their choosing so they can’t be edited or changed gives designers a better handle on making sure everyone else uses Canva in the most effective way.
Similarly, agencies using Canva can design and hand off to clients a brand guidelines document, populated with appropriate branded templates and assets to accommodate any need.
From an administrative standpoint, in addition to custom templates, Canva for Teams (and Pro) allows for approval workflows, activity tracking, social media planning, and design insights.
From your dock on the Canva homepage you get plenty of add-ons in the Discover Apps section including a QR code generator, a frame generator for your image edges (think Polaroid, or film strip, etc.), and Smartmockups, which applies your images to products with realistic perspective.
Off-Label Uses of Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud Workflow
Canva exports files in your choice of PDF (vector), JPG, and PNG (RGB only for the free version). But if you have Illustrator and Photoshop, you can easily convert all those file types to CMYK for printing.
Despite mood boards having fallen out of fashion in the agency world, I still create them in Adobe Illustrator for certain projects where they’ll benefit the client. Even when using the handy presentation template I’ve made, it’s still a hassle to make a well-proportioned equispaced grid of vertical and horizontal images. However, I happily discovered you can set up a Canva Grid and drag and drop images and vectors right from Illustrator—or from the web, a screen-shot app (like my favorite, Monosnap), folders on your desktop, and other places. Note that Illustrator-made drop shadows and blending modes are not supported unless you export a separate file.
Professionals will be delighted to learn that they can import their own PDF into Canva and use a page-turning service to create interactive flipbooks, which usually requires a paid subscription to Issue or Flipstack, to name two options.
Canva App Integrations
Adding to everything mentioned so far, Canva offers integrations with dozens of third-party apps like Mailchimp, Flow, PaperSlack, Publer, Google Maps, and Typeform, not to mention a bevy of special effects apps like Prisma, Letter Mosaic, Liquify, Face Retouch, and Smart Mockup.
Canva does have some annoying quirks, like the lack of a spell-checker. While you can often find a workaround, such as relying on text that you've spell-checked in a third-party app, for a tool as powerful as Canva, the expectation is you shouldn't have to.
Democratizing Design
We've been hearing the words "democratizing design" quite often lately from makers of apps like Adobe Express, Visme, and Canva. Although those words describe a range of design philosophies, here I'm referring to platforms that enable plumbers, bakers, high school students and their teachers, writers, veterinarians—anyone—to access easy-to-use tools to create reasonably sound content for a spectrum of uses.
Yet design is a way of thinking, of connecting dots in ways most others don’t. Good design is clever. It engineers intended reactions and considers behavioral science as it synthesizes a meaningful, aesthetic marriage between form and function. And a good tool is a helpful facilitator.
Canva is indeed a helpful facilitator, and one with enough built-in, template-driven guardrails and tips to scaffold the novices among us. It also has enough technical prowess to arouse professional designers’ full attention if they’re willing to bypass the template business and examine the mechanics behind what Canva can do. It's an excellent platform on which to create a wide spectrum of engaging business graphics, and earns our Editors' Choice award because of its ease of use, unique offerings, and value.
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