Canva Review: Details, Pro-Cons, Pricing & Features

Are you seeking for graphic design software as a non-designer? Canva is a top-rated service to use if you need to generate designs for your business. We’ll look at Canva’s cost, features, and alternatives in this post.

What is Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform with 55 million monthly active users that allows users to generate visual material for offline and online marketing. Canva has received a 4.7 out of 5 star rating from over 9,400 Capterra reviewers.

Canva has tens of thousands of templates and components to choose from when creating designs for personal or professional usage. Use your brand kit and material from your own library to personalize your visual content.

How much Does Canva Cost?

Canva has three different price options. The following features are included in the free plan.

There are around 250,000 free templates available.
There are over 100 different design kinds to choose from, such as business cards, presentations, and social media postings.
Pictures, logos, typefaces, photos, and graphics are all available for free.
With a team, you can share, contribute, and comment on designs.
With 5GB of cloud storage, you can save your ideas.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr are just a few of the venues where you may share your creations.

For up to five individuals, the Pro plan starts at $12.99 per month (or $119.99 per year). Everything from the Free plan is included, as well as the following.

There are over 100 million premium stock pictures, videos, audio files, and graphics available.
There are over 610,000 paid and free templates available, with new designs added every day.
With your company’s colors, logos, and fonts, you may create up to 100 Brand Kits.
Background Remover and Magic Resize are also available.
Make your own templates with your own ideas.
With 100GB of cloud storage, you can save your ideas.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr are just a few of the social media channels where you may schedule your designs.

The Enterprise package starts at $150 per person for a group of five. Everything from the Pro plan is included, as well as the following.

Manage your team’s access to applications, images, colors, logos, fonts, and files with brand controls.
Built-in processes let you get approval for your ideas.
With template locking, you can control what your team may alter and stay on brand.
With limitless storage, you may save all of your creations.
With single-sign on (SSO), you’ll have access to Enterprise-level assistance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

How to Use Canva?

You’ll need to register an account on Canva with your email address, Google, Facebook, or Apple to get started. After that, you’ll select your account type: student, teacher, small business, large business, non-profit, or personal. Based on the account type you select, templates and other resources will be suggested.

You may start a free Canva Pro trial or use the free version to discover whether it’s the appropriate graphic design tool for you.

Designing with Canva

Canva will provide many post kinds for you to pick from while creating your first design. You’ll find template categories like social media posts, papers, presentations, marketing, events, adverts, start your business, establish your online brand, and so on, depending on the sort of account you create.

Begin by deciding on the sort of article you want to write or doing a more precise search. For example, you may search by social network name to get a list of templates organized by post type on each network.

Templates

After that, you’ll be able to select a template. The templates are ready to use, with editable images, text, and other features.

Choose a template, search for a template, or start with a blank template to begin your design.

Canva provides a lot of options, so start by searching for something particular. If you work in the horticulture industry, simply Googling for plants will yield a plethora of templates for a range of post categories.

It’s fine if you don’t locate the ideal template. Remember that every template may be customized in a variety of ways. So pick the greatest match and go on to the next step, Elements.

Elements

The Elements tab in the Canva designer allows you to work with lines and forms, graphics, pictures, videos, music, charts, photo frames, and photo grids. To search everything on Canva, utilize the search box on the Elements tab.

Be particular in your search term because Canva offers a wide collection of components to pick from. You could also choose to search in the following tabs to see different aspects in the search results independently.

Photos

You may pick from millions of free, premium, and Pro-only stock photographs under the Photos page.
You may change the photographs on your templates to give them a fresh look or to make them more relevant to your business.
You may also use photographs from another stock photography website or your own images. Simply drag and drop them into the Uploads section.
You may use Canva’s picture editing capabilities to apply filters, tweak the photo’s parameters (brightness, contrast, saturation, and so on), crop, animation, and change the transparency once you’ve chosen a photo.
The Background Remover is available to Canva Pro subscribers. Backgrounds will be removed from stock photographs in the Canva library, as well as photos you upload to the Uploads page.

Text

You can add headers, regular text, and fancy graphical text to your design using the Text tab.

When you hover your mouse over the text in a template, you’ll notice choices to modify the font, font size, color, format, spacing, text effects (such as shadows), and transparency.

Subscribers to Canva Pro get access to the Brand Kit and the Styles page, where they may customize their brand typefaces. Controls at the enterprise level will guarantee that your team stays on brand with their visual material.

Audio

Do you want to make an animated picture or video? Look for audio components to include in social news feeds to grab users’ attention.

You may also upload music from another stock source or your own files to the Uploads page if you wish to utilize them.

Video

Do you want to make video content? Thousands of free and Pro-only stock video clips are available. There are videos ranging in length from a few seconds to two minutes.

If you wish to use movies from another stock source or your own films, you may upload them under the Uploads page, just like photographs and audio.

After you’ve chosen a video, you can clip, flip, and modify the transparency using Canva’s video editing tools.

Backgrounds

You’ll discover free photographs targeted exclusively for use as backdrops for your projects under the Background page. To give a template a more personalized feel, change the background.

Styles

You may instantly modify the appearance and feel of your design by using multiple color palettes and font combinations under the Styles tab. You may submit your business’s own colors and fonts to maintain designs on brand if you have a Canva Pro membership.

You’ll find a Logos tab if you have a Canva Pro membership. You may utilize versions of your brand logo in your designs by uploading them here.

Canva may also be used to make logos. It’s worth noting that you can’t trademark logos that contain stock material.

Canva is a great tool for publishing.

Canva users may download or publish their creations on a variety of sites, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr, for free.

Subscribers to Canva Pro get access to the Magic Resizer, which allows them to produce various post formats from a single design. For instance, you may begin by creating an Instagram post. The Magic Resizer in Canva can resize it for social media posts, Stories, Reels, and other forms.

Pros and Cons of Canva

People may express specific praises and drawbacks about their Canva experience on review sites like TrustRadius. Here are some of the highlights from the over 500 reviews, based on the advantages and concerns that customers have recognized.

✔️ Pros:

An easy-to-understand and operate interface
It enables users with little or no graphic design experience to generate professional visuals.
There are several templates available, so you will never have to start from scratch.
Branding kits help teams stay consistent with the brand’s colors and typefaces.
Possibility of creating graphic material on the fly
Templates for a wide range of applications and networks
The ability to look for royalty-free photos, video, and music without having to use another service

❌ Cons:

Advanced picture editing options such as blurring or deleting a specific region are missing.
Basic components and features (graphics, forms, etc.) are Pro-only.
It’s difficult to recover elements that aren’t in the design area.
Newer features (such as Canva presentations) require improvement.
It’s possible that the user interface will be crowded.
Canva functionalities may be limited for Adobe tool users.
I’d like to be able to deal with vectors, especially when it comes to logos.
When it comes to sharing designs, there are no metrics.
Enterprise price is too expensive.
The artboard may be a little bigger.
Because everyone has access to themes and elements, your artwork may not be as distinctive.

Conclusion of the Canva Review

Overall, Canva is a fantastic tool for designers that need to create visual material. If you’re a professional graphic designer, you’ll see that their platform lacks customization and other tools, especially vectors. For most tasks, however, Canva will be easier to use than professional graphic design programs like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator if you don’t have much design experience.