What is Canva? Our Complete Review
Your web store can achieve many highs, increase your consumer base, and increase the total value of your store with a great and user-friendly design. To achieve this, you can hire a professional designer or try to make everything by yourself. Alternatively, you may utilize an online graphic design tool. Canva is a perfect example. This article will explore this platform and look at its attributes, costs, and other information. You may be asking yourself, “Why do I need to use Canva?” This answer is available here. Let’s get started.
For the purpose of experimentation, we’d like to point out that almost all of the visuals for this article were created in Canva to give you a taste of the tools available there.
Table of contents
Canva Summary
- Canva is a well-known online graphic design tool with different tools
- Canva is very user-friendly and easy to use
- Canva provides the ability to work with Team Access
- Canva offers three types of pricing with a comprehensive Free plan
- A Variety of Templates and Elements are Available on Canva
- Canva has a lot of useful integrations with other platforms
What is Canva?
With over 30 million users and a $6 billion valuation, Canva is most likely the most well-known online graphic design tool. Canva is a great tool for people who aren’t designers or don’t know how to design properly. This platform provides an unmatched selection of visual categories that makes it possible for just about anyone to bring their ideas from the page to the screen. Additionally, you gain access to the ability to design nearly anything, including business cards, Instagram posts, and even t-shirts.
Canva Plans & Pricing
Let’s begin our detailed review with the pricing. Three different plans with varying costs and features are offered by Canva.
- Canva Free
- Canva Pro – $12,99 per month
- Canva for Teams – $14,99 per month (for the first 5 people)
It should be remembered that the price of the Teams plan increases as your employee count grows. You will pay more for that plan as your team expands. Additionally, Canva is totally free for schools, teachers, and non-profit organizations that have been verified and registered.
The Free plan is a fantastic starting point. You can actually design and create a distinctive store look using it. With this plan, you get such functionality as
- A drag-&-Drop editor
- 250,000 free templates
- 100+ design types(presentation, posts, and more)
- The ability to invite others to work with
- 5GB of cloud storage
- 1+ million free photos, and graphics
- Wide range of printable products
The Pro version gives you access to extra special features, like increased cloud storage (up to 1TB), tools for creating beautiful logos, and resizing options. Additionally, you gain access to more design tools, templates, and stock images. The Pro plan is available for a 30-day free trial, but you must first supply payment information.
Everything in the Pro account is included in the Teams plan, with additional options for restricting who can alter templates and manage brand assets. This model is ideal for large businesses and teams of more significant than five persons.
Canva Features
Canva offers a ton of helpful design-related features. To go into great depth about each component would take a very long time. Therefore, we will briefly go through the platform’s functionality before going over its most notable features.
Canva: What you can create with it?
Let’s first see what Canva can help us make(it’s a long list):
- Logo maker
- Flyer maker
- Banner maker
- Poster maker
- Resume maker
- Invitation maker
- Business card maker
- Video intro maker
- Meme maker
- Collage maker
- Graph maker
- and more
You can also build a variety of products, such as presentations, PDF files, banners, social media posts, postcards, and much more, as we’ve already mentioned.
Canva Top Features
Drag-and-drop editor
One of the most convenient and user-friendly features that make Canva simple to use is the drag-and-drop editor. Working with photographs, movies, layouts, elements, and fonts is simple with this editor. Select the type of creation you want to make, and Canva will show you all the materials you need. By dragging and dropping them, you can add and edit them. Your images ought to be easy to make in a few minutes. If you have previously used the templates, you can probably create them in a matter of seconds.
Magic Resize
This feature is only available in Canva’s Pro plans. Magic Resize tool is another great feature, which applies to everything you’ve made in the software. Just add your dimensions, and it takes care of the rest.
Font Library
You may find dozens of typefaces in Canva’s font library under Text, including both single fonts and font pairs that range in complexity from simple to advanced. Canva will locate the specific font and fonts that go well with it if you search for a particular font. Select a pair, then enter your text. You can upload fonts if you have a Pro account, but only if you are licensed to use that particular font. You cannot upload any font you wish.
Animated pictures
You can animate images with Canva thanks to a fantastic feature. It’s also incredibly simple. Simply click the Animate button. This displays every effect available to you. Block, Breathe, Fade, Pan, and Rise are all free. Pro plans add additional items to this list. The potential for this feature is enormous, particularly for social media.
Brand Kit
To design and manage your brand assets, such as fonts, brand colors, and logos, use the Brand Kit. The ability to quickly access assets while designing is the key advantage. It helps you save time and keep the same aesthetic throughout all of your creations. However, Pro and Enterprise accounts are the only ones that offer this capability. With a Pro account, one Brand Kit can be created. You must upgrade to Enterprise in order to create more.
Unlimited Access to photos, videos, and templates
With Canva’s Pro version, you have access to what seems like an infinite number of images, graphics, videos, audio, and fonts; Canva claims there is more than 10 million total.
Scheduler & Planner
The content planner is another function that lets you schedule your plans. You may see every scheduled image right here. If there are any blank spaces in the calendar, click the plus sign to add a previous design or to start from scratch. You may also set up team plans for the coming weeks and months and collaborate on one content planner with your team. Direct publishing from the platform allows for set-and-forget publishing as well as pausing posts without having to refresh files.
Canva For Teams
Canva for Teams includes several teamwork-related capabilities in addition to all the features found in the standard edition. You can start by inviting your team to join Canva so that you can all start producing fantastic content. With it, you’ll have new possibilities. For instance, when several team members collaborate on the same design, your creative workflows are streamlined and anybody can provide comments, tag, share, and resolve revisions whenever they want, wherever they are, on any device.
Simply said, Canva offers great workspaces for the entirety of your team, complete with design features, and a place where you can easily create team projects in a single “digital room.”
Сanva Education
As a side point, we’d like to draw attention to the learning materials that this platform offers.
Canva is a platform with a strong focus on textbooks. You may integrate it with your LMS or connect it for free to your educational establishments. Additionally, this solution serves as a terrific clearinghouse for a wealth of knowledge, including webinars, courses, tutorials, and more. And nobody missed the blog. Numerous articles can be found here that will help you learn more about the platform’s design and how to use it.
Canva also has a distinctive Design School. With it, you may explore typography, design trends, color, and more while getting access to thousands of tutorials on how to design effectively.
Canva Integration
Canva’s integration system is also effective. We’d even say it’s really good. The answer provides you with a separate app page where you may complete everything. Everything goes quite smoothly in this instance. The application is simply clicked, the project you want to link it to is selected, and the process is complete. Most widely used integrations with
- Text to Image. I don’t need to comment on this.
- Frames. You will be able to add frames to your images.
- Trippy. Enhance your image with trippy, psychedelic effects
- Google Photos. To your project, you can add pictures from Google Photos.
- Duotone. You’ll be able to give your image a two-color palette.
- Shadows. Add shadows to your pictures.
Canva Alternatives
In theory, you can get in touch with a qualified designer at any moment to create a fantastic design for your shop. Or you could learn Figma or Photoshop and do everything yourself. But in this case, we’re considering alternative platforms. So let’s check a few alternatives on Canva.
Adobe Spark
With its outstanding feature set, Adobe Spark is a great substitute for Canva. Although it’s a component of the Adobe suite, you don’t need to buy Photoshop or InDesign to use it. In fact, one of the plans is totally free, and there are other premium plans available that are less expensive than Canva.
Visme
Because it specializes in complex drawings like infographics and marketing papers, Visme is a little more expensive than other Canva rivals. With the aid of collaboration tools, it’s fantastic for creating charts and widgets that can be shared inside your organization. These capabilities will be very helpful to people like social media marketers.
Snappa
Only blog visuals and social media outlets are covered by Snappa’s graphic design templates. There are no other business-related graphic templates, such as those for documents or business cards. Snappa is still a solid Canva substitute, though. The editor is uncomplicated and tidy. Icons, vectors, images, and a basic set of shapes are all part of the design. The vectors can be colored and are shown in all-black.
Canva Pros & Cons
Pros
- No prior design knowledge required
- Even with the free edition, you get competent content creation
- Excellent and comprehensive learning resources for any type of user
- Very simple to use and intuitive interface
- Canva offers templates for social media
- Canva is Budget-Friendly
- Team Access
- You can modify templates to make them more unique
Cons
- The photo editor is not the best
- Pictures and templates seem to be generic
Final Words
Canva is a top-notch online tool for graphic design. Everything from doing simple picture changes to designing graphics for social media to creating flyers and documents can be done with it. There are a ton of features on this platform for any taste. Additionally, the prices are pretty low when compared to the market. The free plan is also really comprehensive. For business owners and marketers, it provides an excellent design experience. We advise you to use Canva on your own to become familiar with all of the platform’s capabilities.
FAQ
What is Canva?
Canva is a free online graphic design tool. Use it to make logos, films, slideshows, posters, and more, in addition to social media posts.
What is the main purpose of Canva?
Canva is a graphic design tool that makes it simple to create unique graphics. It is user-friendly and simple to access using a phone or tablet. You can use it to create presentations, invitations, posters, brochures, business cards, and more in addition to spicing up your social media posts.
Is Canva free?
Yes, Canva is free to use. Additionally, the platform offers various pricing options.
What is the best thing about Canva?
It’s a difficult question. We believe this is the case because Canva’s features are very simple to use, even if you have no background in graphic design. The free plan has support and is quite functional.
Whom does Canva work best for?
Canva is most suited, in our opinion, for small business owners, internet business owners, and marketers who need to design things rapidly.