Canva Review – Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software

Are you searching for a new tool to create graphic designs? You would like to see a Canva review?

Canva has been a popular online graphic design tool with more than 30 million users and a valuation of $6 billion. When it was launched, Canva was what I found. It was a big hit, so I went to check it out. It was not something I liked back then.

Before Canva came about, I used Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, PicMonkey, and PicMonkey to design. They were easy to learn and I found PicMonkey easier to use than PicMonkey. Canva was a difficult program to learn and didn’t offer all the features that I needed. It was ignored by me. It was something I ignored. Canva introduced many new features that made it more user-friendly and supported to do more.

I will discuss in depth, share my thoughts about it, the people it is best suited for, and show you how to create an image using it. Let’s get started.

What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design app that allows you to design visual materials without needing extensive graphic design experience. Typically,  the tool can be used to create simple slides, social media graphics, presentations, posters, and other visual assets. It also offers a variety of templates that can be customized and free royalty-free images to assist users in their design tasks.

Canva’s learning curve, unlike traditional graphic design tools such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, is very gentle. Canva’s feature set is far simpler than those of the ‘pro’ solutions, but it is also much cheaper.

Launched in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, a technology entrepreneur, Canva  is now a highly popular tool for creating designs and boasts over 75,000,000 active users monthly in 190 countries.

Who should use Canva ?

Canva is ideal for small businesses, entrepreneurs online, and marketers who need to quickly design things.

Photoshop is a great tool for creating complex visuals. It can be difficult to master the hundreds of features and become familiar with the software. Also, it is best to have some design experience.

Photoshop is a powerful software. It is possible to spend more on a computer that is better.

Photoshop is not the best software to design multi-page documents for digital and print. You need another tool, such as InDesign. You will spend more time and money because it’s a more advanced tool.

But with Canva, you can do all that with one drag-and-drop tool. It’s also easier to use and free.

Pros and Cons of Canva

These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Canva.

The pros

• Canva offers a wide range of layouts to help you create consistent graphics for your websites, blogs, and social media channels.
• You can instantly create a collection with related graphics that have the same theme or family. This will help you keep your website professional and consistent. You can create images that are sized to fit different social media channels, such as Pinterest, Facebook Banners, posts, Twitter and Instagram.
• You can access a variety of tools in the free version.
• You can choose from a variety of templates and then customize them as you wish.
• It is simple to modify and customize the pre-set designs. You can alter the text size, color, and position. It is easy to create a duplicate design using Canva . However, the design will look different than the other templates.
• This software is a great tool to help the brand stay consistent across all images and marketing designs.
• You can reuse designs from past projects by making small changes. It will look completely different.
• Canva makes it easy to maintain consistency across designs.
• There are many vectors and images that you can download for free.
• The maintains the highest standard in online graphic creation for beginners with basic to intermediate skills.
• You can increase the left margin using Canva. This allows you to see more of the images and other items that you search for in desktop version.
• You will find a variety of graphic templates that can be organized into different categories by clicking on the “Find Templates” menu option.
• The Apps icon is located at the lower left. Here you will find a huge selection of amazing tools for creating animations and gifs, transparent backgrounds, image scaling, stock photo libraries, and more. You will need to pay a subscription for this.
• For 30 days, you can try the paid version free of charge.

The cons

• The formats you can output your visuals to are quite limited, with the lack of an ‘export to PSD’ option being a particular concern.
• Canva is an online tool for graphic design. You won’t be allowed to use any of your designs if you don’t have internet access.
• There is no easy way to backup your projects.
• There is no telephone support.
• There are very few apps or integrations available.
• While the free version is generally very useful, it doesn’t allow you to export images with transparent backgrounds.

Features of Canva

These are some of the most important features.

Photo effects to improve photos

Canva offers many effects that can be used to enhance photos. You can apply effects to photos provided by Canva and photos you upload.

These can be seen at the top of your editor after you choose a photo.

These will let you flip photos, crop them, add filters and adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, blur, etc.

There’s also an effects tab that lets you add effects such as Duotone, Background Remover, Liquify, and more.

While most effects can be accessed with the free plan (except Background Remover), some features require a subscription plan.

Access to photos, videos, and templates

With the PRO plan, you can access 75+ millions photos and videos as well as 420,000+ templates. Only a fraction are available with the free plan.

Click the Templates tab in the editor to access the templates. Canva automatically finds templates based upon the design type that you have selected.

Scroll through the templates or search by color or language.

Click the Photos tab to find photos. You can also use the filters to select photos. The Upload tab allows you to upload photos.

The More tab is another place where you can find photos.

Photos and videos can be accessed directly from Pixabay and Facebook.

You can also find videos on the Video tab.

Access to icons, shapes and stickers

Canva offers an Elements tab that allows you to search for icons, shapes and stickers as well as charts, grids, graphs, gradients and other information.

These images can be added to and adjusted for color, transparency, size, and other parameters.

Organizing work and collaborating in Canva

It is easy to organize your Canva work. You can create folders to house your designs using a simple folder structure.

These folders can then be shared with others in the team, who can edit any design they have. It works the same way as Dropbox or other sharing services. Simply enter your email address in the settings to share a folder.

Building a website with Canva

You can also create visual assets using Canva.

However, the platform can only create very basic websites — you can make a one-page ‘brochure site’ with Canva but that’s it. The Canva websites you can create look professional and on-brand. However, you don’t have to include ecommerce or complex navigation structures.

You can make a basic online presence using Canva but it does not offer the same professional features as Squarespace and Shopify.

While the site designer may be suitable for some users, it might not suit all. If you just need a simple resume site with copy and some pictures, it will work fine.

When you’ve created your site, you can either publish it to a free Canva site address (yoursitename.my.canva.site), purchase a new domain for it through Canva or map it to a domain you already own.

Making products with Canva

Another great thing about Canva is that you can actually make physical products with the platform.

You can do this by going to the ‘Print products section. Here you will find a variety of items, from business cards to hoodies and postcards.

However, in many cases I would consider Canva’s product manufacturing feature a ‘nice-to-have’ feature.

The first is that all products are very expensive. This means you cannot make it, mark it up and then sell it to someone else. For example, a tee-shirt costs around $25.

The second limitation is that you cannot order more than 50 items at once. I tested the feature and found that any item I attempted to make was limited to 50 copies. If you are looking to mass-produce items, this makes it unsuitable.

Editing your projects

After you have created your video or design in Canva, you can export it to many formats, including:

• PNG
• JPG
• PDF (low-res, print quality).
• SVG
• MP4
• GIF

This is a significant drawback of Canva.

You can export your content to almost any format if you have a professional video or graphics editing program. Canva limits your options.

Ensuring brand consistency with Canva

offers a variety of tools and content for creating marketing materials. These include templates, graphics, stock photos, videos, and more. You could theoretically use all of these tools to create your assets without having to resort to any other.

To create your entire brand identity, you could use Canva. You can create a logo using Canva and define a color palette. The platform also allows you to choose fonts from the many options available.

In fact, Canva offers suggested brand identities — color palettes as well as typefaces.

In practice, however, many businesses will need to set up Canva so they can create designs that are consistent with their brand.

gives you the ability to create a “brand kit”.

This allows you to:

• Add a logo to your brand.
• Define a color palette.
• Upload your font.

Apps and Integrations

Like many other SaaS products, Canva offers a variety of integrations and apps that enhance functionality and make it more compatible with other services. These can be found in the ‘app directory’, as shown below.

These apps are generally used to add special effects to images or to retouch them.

You can import videos or images from other apps to Canva. You can connect your Google Photos account with Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, and Google Photos to bring in content that you can use in your designs.

However, I could not find any Canva apps for top website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. These services could all benefit from integration with Canva because they are so useful for creating web graphics and blog banners.

You might also consider creating your own apps if the available apps are not enough. A developer’s platform Canva gives you access to the API and allows you to create your own content extensions that allow you to integrate Canva tools in different ways. This will require you to have the necessary development skills.

Compare direct purchase price and group buy Canva price at Tool Youtube

Price from the official website

There are three versions of Canva to consider:

• Canva free trial
• Canva Pro : $12.99 / month ( up to 5 people )
• Canva Enterprise : $30 / month ( minimum 25 people )

If you pay on an annual basis, discounts of around 17% to 25% apply, depending on the number of user accounts you need.

Subject to a vetting process, additional discounts are provided to educational organizations; and non-profits can use Canva for free.

Price of group buy Canva at Tool Youtube

We sell group buy Canva Pro shared account with 3 offers that you can choose :

• Monthly : $5
• Annual : $9
• Onetime : $20

Conclusion of Canva Review

Overall, Canva is a really solid, easy-to-use app that is packed with features that make designing visual assets simple. Whilst not always a substitute for a professional graphic design tool or video editing application, it is considerably easier to use than such tools, and in many contexts will do the job just as well as them (and more cheaply, too).

The main downsides of Canva are the fact that it’s output formats are limited; there’s no way to back up projects; and support is email-only. Of those three flaws, the output formats issue is the most significant, as it limits your ability to start a design in Canva and have it finished off by a professional designer in another app. But given how cheap Canva is, it’s hard to feel too annoyed by these omissions.

Canva Alternatives

Visme

What is Visme ?

Canva and Visme are web-based design tools that let you create impressive visual assets without needing a lot of graphic design experience.

Both solutions can be used to create social media graphics, infographics, charts, simple videos, presentations, slides, posters and other marketing material — and a wide range of templates and royalty free images is provided to help make this process easy.

Pricing

Price from the official website

There are four Visme plans available:

• Basic — $0 per month
• Personal — $29 per month
• Business — $59 per month
• Enterprise — negotiable pricing

Price of group buy Visme Business

• Annual : $85

VistaCreat

What is VistaCreat ?

VistaCreate is a graphic design platform where anyone can quickly create engaging projects for any industry or occasion —design skills optional. Available for free with a wide range of features that include fully integrated design library of 1 million royalty-free photos, videos, and graphics with no limits for downloads

Pricing

Price from the official website

• Starter : $0
• Pro : $10 / month

Price of group buy Crello

• Monthly : $5
• Annual : $15
• Onetime : $45