Canva Review, Pricing & Features

What is Canva?

Canva is a design software used by a wide range of businesses to create ready-made presentations, social media posts, and videos. Over 30 million users have used Canva for their design needs. Its standout points are its user-friendliness and content planner.

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Table of Contents

• What is Canva?
• Canva Review Summary
• Canva Pricing & Cost
• Canva Features
  • Designs
  • Tool Kit
  • Collaboration
  • Cloud Storage
  • Exporting
• Canva Integrations
• Canva Customer Service
• Canva Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Canva Right For You?

Canva Review Summary

Canva was founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adam. Since then, over 1,500 full time employees have served 30 million users from Canva’s Sydney, Australia headquarters.

Canva’s features are tailored more for marketers and small businesses with basic design experience. Its strongest features are its user-friendly presentation, photo and video creation, as well as its content planner.

Canva’s pricing starts at $12.99 per month for up to 5 users. Its pricing falls in the middle of its closest alternatives, Visme and Adobe Spark. Canva also offers a free plan.

Overall, Canva is a robust design software built for marketers, bloggers, and other small business owners in need of ready-made and highly shareable content. Canva makes creating presentations, videos, and social media posts very simple to do. In doing so, however, Canva loses much of the flexibility more advanced alternatives like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator offer.

Canva Pricing & Cost

Canva pricing starts at $12.99 per month for up to 5 users. Monthly prices increase with more users. It is one of the most affordable solutions on the market today. Canva also provides a free plan with 5 GB of cloud storage.

Here are Canva’s pricing options for its Pro plan based on how many users you have:

Canva Features

Let’s discuss the major features that Canva offers and how they can help your design needs. Product screenshots are included to add context and demonstrate the user interface.

Designs

Canva’s specialty designs are its presentations, social media posts, and videos. Canva comes with over 250,000 templates for these types of designs. This variety of design types and templates means that your business can easily create quality content for marketing, presentation, or general graphic design purposes.

Design Types and Templates

Canva, like Visme and PicMonkey, is built primarily for ready-made content creation. Contrast this with prototyping software such as Figma and Sketch, which are best suited for wireframes and live prototypes.

Here is a list of the types of designs you can create in Canva, as well as the featured templates of each design type:

Once you’ve selected your design type and template size, you’re presented with a multitude of design templates to choose and build from. You can also start from a blank canvas. We recommend small businesses select from Canva’s wide range of templates to streamline content creation.

Tool Kit

Canva’s tool kit is built specifically for basic and quick content creation. Canva’s tool kit is slightly less robust than Visme’s. You also lack the flexibility of advanced solutions such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. These tools are best suited for advanced graphic designers.

User Interface

Canva’s user interface is simple and very limited in regards to customization. An example of an uncustomized user interface is seen below.

You can add four additional tweaks to modify your interface to your liking. These include:

Tool Types

Canva offers a comprehensive number of tool types to choose from. Each tool is designed to make content creation easy to understand and effective to do.

Canva offers the same tools for its variety of design types. You can access the following tools when editing content in Canva:

Elements, such as graphics, photos, videos, and audio, are the most commonly used tools to choose from. An example of selecting graphics is seen above.

Canva’s “magic recommendations” is one of its most helpful features. These are graphics that are similar to the template style you’ve selected. This means that if you want to select a template to build from, you do not have to spend time sifting through Canva’s multitude of graphics to find similar designs.

Another standout tool in Canva is its graph creator. As you can see above, graphs can be edited by inputting your preferred percentages. Contrast this with more advanced tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, which have more flexibility in regards to design but lack ready-made graphics and chart creation.

Photo Editing

Photo editing in Canva is limited when compared to Adobe Photoshop. However, it is more comprehensive than prototyping software such as Figma and Sketch.

You can make very basic adjustments to your images. This includes:

Although Canva’s photo editing is not as robust as alternatives, we feel it does well in accommodating designers looking to make quick coloring edits. In addition to these sliders, Canva provides a number of filters to apply and further edit. This further streamlines your photo editing workflow.

Collaboration

Canva’s collaboration is intuitive and easy to set up. Canva features real time editing that can be leveraged by anyone with a web browser.

Projects can be edited by team members at any time. Collaboration in Canva is very similar to document management software solutions such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Commenting in Canva is also flexible. You can pin exact areas of a project you want to comment on. This provides more context for both you and your team members.

Cloud Storage

Canva is fully cloud-based unlike Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This means that you do not need to save your own projects on your device. We recommend Canva if you feel you and your team will be handling a vast amount of projects and files.

Canva’s free plan comes with 5 GB of storage, while paid plans come with 100 GB.

Version control is decent in Canva. However, it is only available with paid plans. You can access and restore up to 15 versions of your file. You also cannot name various versions and input specific changes. This makes restoring larger files harder in Canva.

Exporting

Canva comes with a number of additional exporting and sharing options that are very convenient for marketers and content creators.

You can export your file as the following in Canva’s free plan:

Canva also comes with a content planner which is ideal for marketers. This planner integrates with a number of social media platforms to schedule posts on specific days. This is an invaluable tool for bloggers and small businesses who run both content creation and marketing strategies.

Here are the social media platforms you can automate posts on with Canva:

Canva Integrations

Canva integrates primarily with document management and collaboration software. Here are some popular integrations Canva supports:

Canva Customer Service

Canva’s customer support team is less accommodating for free users and only available through email. Responses can take up to a week.

Canva’s secondary resources include a blog and courses. Canva’s courses are effective ways to learn about Canva itself, as well as graphic design basics and social media tips.

Canva Alternatives & Competitors

Canva has a number of competitors. Its most comparable alternatives are Visme and Adobe Spark.

Here’s a full list of Canva competitors:

Is Canva Right For You?

Overall, Canva is a robust design software built for marketers, bloggers, and other small business owners in need of ready-made and highly shareable content. Canva makes creating presentations, videos, and social media posts very simple to do. In doing so, however, Canva loses much of the flexibility more advanced alternatives like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator offer.

If you're interested, you can try Canva today.