TL;DR
- A visual design tool taking the world by storm – offering affordable options to entrepreneurs just starting out! 😁
- Create social media posts, promotional videos, newsletters, and much more!
- With 11 creative makers to choose from, you can make cohesive brand content all in one place, in no time at all! 😎
- Rated 5 stars out of thousands of reviews ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Trusted by Hubspot, Colliers, Reddit, and many more!
Canva is a popular app being used all over the world to create and design visual materials.
It can be used by entrepreneurs, businesses, or individuals wanting to unleash their creativity.
With Canva taking the world by storm recently, we want to review it to help you decide if it’s the right tool for you.
Today we’ll be looking into the pros and cons of Canva, as well as comparing it to another popular tool from market leaders Adobe.
Will it match up? Let’s find out together! 👯♂️
What Is Canva?
Before we dive into the review, however, we’re going to first need to know what Canva actually is.
Canva is an app that focuses on graphic design and assisting its users through creating visual materials. 🤩
Canva seems to be mostly used for creating things such as social media graphics, presentations, videos, posters, slides, and other visual tools that need to be professionally made.
To help you with this, Canva offers a number of templates to start you on your journey.
You can customize these to your exact wants and needs. You’ll also have access to Canva’s royalty-free image library.
Say goodbye to hours wasted looking for free-to-use pictures! 👋👋👋
Some compare Canva to the likes of Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, as they are all visual tools that can be used for graphic design purposes.
However, the main difference between Canva and Adobe is that Canva is designed for beginners.
While Photoshop and Illustrator are complex programs with little to no tutorial given, Canva is designed to be much easier to learn. 😎
This does mean that there are fewer features on Canva than these professional alternatives, but the price point reflects this.
Canva still offers more than enough beginners for the majority of people.
Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to be incredibly popular with over 75 million active users!
These users span 190 countries and have created more than 7 billion designs through Canva. Can you believe that? 😲🤩
Making Graphics Has Never Been So Easy
Canva is optimized for PC, Mac, Chromebook, or even iOS and Android.
Canva takes you through a series of steps to help you create your visual piece (didn’t we tell you it was easy to use? 😏) including templates, elements, and a drag-and-drop editor.
You also have access to editing the typeface and colors of a template, as well as creating custom templates if you’d prefer.
It really is as simple as picking a template, dropping your desired content into it, and making some finalizations to bring your idea to life.
Nope, we’re not joking – that’s how simple Canva is to use. 😍
Canva Features
There are plenty of features offered by Canva, and they all enhance the usage of the tool to make it even better.
Let’s take a look at these features – you’ll be a pro at working with Canva before you even start your free trial! 😆
Templates
Oh, how we love a great range of templates. And Canva doesn’t disappoint!
The templates page on Canva offers you a wide range of projects to choose from, such as posters, presentations, reports, social media stories, menus, proposals, YouTube thumbnails, and so much more!
You can also search for the template you want from the top search bar.
With thousands of templates to choose from, you might be here quite a while! 😂
There is also an option to condense the template search with the help of the button suggestions at the top of the page.
These are tags that the creators of the templates might have put their designs down as.
For example, if you wanted a green theme running through your visual design elements, choosing the green tag would remove any templates that didn’t fit your desires.
Now you have a much shorter list of templates to look through that are all green! 🍀🍃🌵🌴
(Well, could you call 267,102 templates a short list? 🤔)
Editing Templates
Now that you have chosen your template, you can edit it to meet your exact needs.
You’ll be taken to a drag-and-drop editor once you choose your template, with a number of adjustment options down the left side of your page.
This includes templates, so you can change the template without having to go back out of the editor, elements, text, and more.
The elements are really where you’re going to find most of your design needs, where you can add shapes, graphics, stickers, photos, audio, charts, and much more.
There is also the option to add your own text and images to the template.
You can add as many or as few elements as you want to customize your design.
You could even delete all of the pre-made elements if you wanted to! 🤗
To add text, you can either rewrite over existing copy by clicking on it on the template or add your own from the sidebar on the left of your screen.
Canva’s interface is extremely easy to use and almost anyone would be able to use it, no matter how much experience you have with graphic design tools.
The learning curve is almost a straight line here! 🤣
Uploading Your Own Assets Into Canva
If you don’t like the elements that Canva already has in place for you to use, don’t panic.
You can also add in your own elements collected from elsewhere. These include photos, videos, templates, fonts, and more.
All you need to do is click uploads, drop in whatever you want to add to your template, and see it come to life.
We found this feature so helpful as we didn’t have to be tied down to Canva’s elements.
Since half of the elements that Canva shows you are locked for the premium version anyway, adding in your own elements gives you more freedom to create your piece exactly the way you want it. 🥳🥳
Editing Your Photos
Canva offers you the opportunity to edit photos added to your template in an equally as simple way as building the design.
Thank you, Canva! 😘
Here you’ll be able to edit your photos through presets, as well as adjust the brightness, contrast, and saturation yourself.
The pre-made filters are just like that of Instagram, so if you have any experience with that app, then this shouldn’t be new territory for you. 📷
Canva also offers a background remover tool, which is super helpful for anyone needing to clean up their images.
This is a great tool for graphic design projects such as YouTube thumbnails where you want only one thing to be the focus of the design.
The photo editing tools in Canva are, again, super simple to use and watered down to the basics.
If you wanted some more extensive editing, then you’d need to use one of the more professional tools.
However, we find Canva to be more than sufficient for our needs.
In a rare instance, we might use Photoshop to enhance our editing before uploading the image into Canva to continue our design process.
We find that this is a great way to use tools together to create a super-tool! 😁🦸♀️
What About Editing Videos?
Yes, you can edit videos in Canva as well.
Video creation with this tool is very similar to editing static photos, although you can put more than one image together to create your video.
There are templates for your usage that help you make your videos.
Canva does offer premade videos for you to use, which are all professionally shot and edited so that you don’t have to worry about paying any external sources extra to do this.
You can also record a video through the tool there and then if you’d prefer.
Once you have your videos in place, you can drag and drop them in place, trim them to seamlessly transition them all together, and edit the final cut.
You can even add royalty-free audio to the background of your video from Canva’s music library. 🎼
There are over 25,000 pieces of music to choose from, so you might be here for a while! 😋😋
Again, the video editing software on Canva isn’t as extensive as you’d find on one of the more professional editors from Adobe, but it is more than suitable for people not familiar with video editing.
We appreciated the stock videos and music on offer to us, as this saved us a lot of time and money! 🤑
Chart Graphics
Canva is better known for creating graphics for social media and websites, but did you know that it can also help you create useful graphs and chart graphics? 📈📈
There are 25 templates for this in Canva, including the likes of bar charts, histograms, and pie charts.
Anything you need to create for your projects, Canva has you covered!
The chart builder is incredibly easy to use – much easier than we were expecting it to be!
Simply drop your data into the interface and watch as Canva turns your data into your graph.
Your graphs can then be exported into a number of different formats, such as code snippets to embed on your website.
Thanks to all of the templates that you can choose from for your graphs, presenting data has never been easier.
This is an excellent feature from Canva and one that we really enjoyed. 😎 Again, it’s beginner friendly, and one of the standout features of the interface.
Exporting Options
Once you’re finished with your visual element design, you’ll need to export it to use on social media or on your website.
Canva accommodates a number of exporting options, including:
- PNG
- JPG
- SVG
- GIF
- MP4
Now, if we were to compare this to a professional tool such as Adobe Illustrator, this number of exporting outputs would be much shorter.
This is one of the drawbacks of Canva, as you might not be able to find the specific output you require. 🤔
However, Canva is a tool designed for beginners, and this list of outputs is fine for this demographic.
You’ll most likely be using your final designs on social media sites, to which these outputs cater perfectly.
There might be some people who miss the additional exporting options that Photoshop offers, but there are workarounds for these issues.
If you’re wanting to create and export quickly, Canva’s offerings are more than sufficient.
Resize Your Designs As If By Magic ✨🔮
The magic resize tool offered by Canva is one that allows you to repurpose your designs for different platforms.
We can’t even explain how much of a perfect tool this is!
Say you want to make one design to keep the same over Facebook, YouTube, and your blog website.
However, since these sites all have different uploading requirements, your design might look different on each one.
That’s where the magic resize tool comes into play! 🤗 Simply choose your existing design and resize it to whatever you need it to be next.
Is Canva Worth The Price?
One thing that we (and I’m sure the rest of Canva’s users!) love about this tool is that there is a free version.
There are also paid versions, but the free version is awesome for anyone who wants to test the waters before jumping into the free trial. 🥳
Canva Free
The free version of Canva is surprisingly full of features.
Too many tools block off important tools for their free versions, but Canva gives you a taste of everything you need to know about its features – all for $0 a month! 🤑
You have access to the editor, over 250,000 templates, more than 100 design types to choose from, and more.
You can use the free graphics and images, as well as invite others to join your workspace for collaborations. 😎
We recommend anyone looking to test Canva out use the free version first.
You might not even need the paid versions if you’re just looking to create visual elements. 😲
Canva Pro
Canva Pro unlocked all of the premium features that Canva Free goes without.
You’ll have access to over 100 million stock photos and videos, as well as audio.
Plus unlimited features and even more templates than the free version offers.
This is the plan for you if you want to resize your images to keep up with brand consistency and remove backgrounds from images.
You can schedule social media content for up to eight platforms, and you’ll have access to 24/7 customer support. 😍
The free version of Canva shows you all of the features of Canva Pro, but they are locked.
If you feel as though you cannot live without these features, then this is the plan for you.
At just $10.99 a month, it is super affordable as well! 😆😆😆
Canva Teams
Canva Teams is designed for at least two people who want to share one account to collaborate on.
You’ll get everything that Canva Pro offers, as well as team reports and insights, more storage space, and brand controls.
This plan is for $12.99 a month for the first five people in your team, although more people can be added to the account.
Subsequent team members may get a lower monthly subscription fee, meaning that you can swap around the bill and get everyone a discount on their share of the account. 🤑
Canva Teams is excellent for any business that needs multiple people working on its branding.
This is a unique tool that many of the professional alternatives don’t offer, so make the most of it!
What We Loved About Canva
If you didn’t catch the hints, we really like Canva! But what did we love the most about it, you ask? 🥰
Amazing Value For Money 🤑
Canva’s free version offers a great array of tools that beginners will find extremely useful – some won’t even need to upgrade to the premium version at all! However, even Canva Pro only requires a small charge each month.
This will be one of the cheaper design tools for visual elements on the market. You’re getting an amazing number of features for a low price – we can’t believe how cheap it is!
Beginner Friendly Interface 🤗
Canva is insanely easy to use – anyone could make a design within minutes using the tool.
You don’t need to have a degree in graphic design to use it, and everything comes with handy hints to make your usage even easier.
Again, we couldn’t believe how easy it was to use.
We created a dozen visual elements within a few hours thanks to the magic resize tool! 😍😍
What We Didn’t Like About Canva
Now, what didn’t we like about Canva? Not much, really!
There is nothing glaringly bad about this tool, but here is something that we think might annoy some people.
It Doesn’t Offer As Much As Professional Tools 😕
Okay, so Canva isn’t like Photoshop or Illustrator.
It doesn’t offer as many exporting options or editing tools, and you can’t separate the layers as you can with Adobe products.
There aren’t many integration options to collaborate with other tools, and some professional graphic designers might call Canva basic. 😒
With that being said, Canva never claims to be like these professional tools and is geared more towards beginners who want quick and good-looking content.
Comparison: Canva Vs. Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is another tool used to create visual elements, just like Canva.
With it being created by one of the leading graphic design companies, Adobe, you might consider Adobe Spark to be the better option – but is this correct? 🤔
Firstly, Canva offers many more templates than Adobe Spark does.
While Canva offers 420,000 ready-to-use templates, Adobe Spark only offers 41,000.
While it’s still a lot of templates to choose from, it is nowhere near as many as Canva. 😜
Both Adobe Spark and Canva offer free versions of their tool. However, there is one distinct difference between these free versions.
Adobe Spark uses a watermark over the designs 😠, while Canva does not.
This means that Canva is better suited for designers who want to see the entire image rather than an annoying watermark!
Finally, Canva offers plenty of stock videos and audio. While Adobe Spark does offer stock images, it fails to provide these other vital aspects.
Adobe Spark is a good tool for people who are fans of Adobe and want to test out the products.
However, we find Canva to be the much better option among these two tools.
It’s better value for money and offers more to the user. No brainer! 🤩🤩🤩
Our Verdict
Overall, Canva is a great tool to have in your corner. There are plenty of features that come with it, yet it is still super simple to use.
While it might not be the best for a professional graphic designer, it will most likely suit entrepreneurs who want to create cohesive visual elements to enhance their social media presence. 😋👌👌
Canva may have limited exporting options, but this is the only major drawback.
You’ll have access to thousands of templates, amazing features like magic resize and background removal, and all for a cheap monthly fee compared to similar tools.
If you want a tool to do most of the heavy lifting for you, without paying the premium prices that Adobe requires, Canva is an excellent choice.
And with the free version being so generously full of features, what’s the harm in taking it for a test drive? 😎