Few small business owners are adept at making their own ads, social media posts, presentations, and other visual materials. When you don’t have the resources to hire a designer, you need tools that make it easy to turn out great results yourself—or with a team of collaborators. Canva is an all-in-one solution for small businesses in need of professional-looking slide decks, beautiful reports, animated Instagram posts, Facebook ads, and other branded assets. The app has templates galore, an image library, and free workshops for learning best practices. Canva lets you build an eye-popping variety and number of creations. Most important of all, Canva doesn’t require you to know anything about design. That’s what makes it so valuable and an Editors’ Choice winner among collaboration apps.
How Much Does Canva Cost?
Canva offers three basic plan types: Free, Pro ($12.99 per month for up to five people), and Enterprise (custom pricing). It has two additional plans for nonprofit institutions and verified teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade; both of these plans are free but require you to submit an application.
Free account holders are limited to making two folders and hosting 5GB of data. You can collaborate with others in the Free plan, but you miss out on several features, such as the ability to create custom templates with your brand’s logos and fonts, as well as the option to publish your work directly to social media accounts.
For the Pro plan, you get a discount if you pay annually rather than monthly. If you need more than five people in your account, each additional user costs $7 per month. You can get a 30-day free trial of the Pro plan, but that requires you to provide payment information.
The Pro account includes unlimited folders, 100GB of storage space, custom templates, and the ability to publish directly to social media. This plan comes with 100 Brand Kits for saving custom sets of logos, colors, and fonts for brand consistency. You also get access to more templates, stock photos, and design tools.
Enterprise accounts come with everything in the Pro tier, plus additional administration features, workflows that help teams manage the approval process for designs, 500 Brand Kits, unlimited storage, and more.
How Do Canva’s Prices Compare?
Canva’s prices are lower than a few of its competitors’. Visme, the closest competitor I’ve tested, charges much more and gives you less. For example, Visme’s Business account costs $49 per person per month and only gives you 3GB of storage. All the plans that cost less than the Business account aren’t worth it because of their many restrictions. Head-to-head, Canva is a better deal.
Genial.ly, which we have not yet reviewed, is another competitor that charges nearly $40 per month for its individual-only Master plan. Team accounts for five people costs $950 per year. Similar to Visme, Genial.ly offers a less expensive option, but it’s so restrictive that it’s not worth the cost.
Desygner, another app we have not yet reviewed, is more competitive with Canva. It charges $9.95 per month for a Pro+ plan, which includes access for six people. Desygner’s Business plan costs $19.95 per person per month.
Prezi, which is somewhat of a competitor to Canva, sells nearly a dozen different tiers of service, ranging from $36–$708 per year. If you’re just buying a license for yourself and not a whole team, you can expect to pay between about $3 and $7 per month. For additional business features, expect to pay between $14 and $18 per month. Prezi is an Editors’ Choice winner for its innovative presentation-building capabilities. Canva and Prezi overlap a little, but Prezi doesn’t include social media post scheduling or design tools for creating marketing and advertising content.
Getting Started With Canva
Canva is available as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, a web app, and a mobile app for Android and Apple devices. You can sign up for an account with an email address and password or by authenticating via Google or Facebook on any platform.
For people who are new to Canva and making branded content, the website offers some excellent videos, articles, and even full courses to help you learn how to create the best possible materials. For example, some videos teach you how to use the app, while the courses cover topics such as the basics of graphic design and how to master making social media content, branding, and more. From time to time, Canva also offers free, live, webinar-style classes on specific topics, such as Designing for Accessibility and Storytelling With Data.
Canva’s interface is clear and easy to navigate. One aspect of the desktop app that I especially love is the ability to keep multiple tabs of your work open while they are being edited. This feature comes in handy when you realize you need to make a quick change to a file before sharing it with someone or scheduling it to appear in a campaign.
Templates, Tools, and Use Cases
What can you make with Canva? The app gives you templates and tools to make all kinds of visual materials for your business, from marketing and advertising graphics to printed flyers and reports.
Potential creations fall into several broad categories: presentations, social media content, videos, print products, marketing, and others. Within those categories, you’ll find templates for specific kinds of materials, such as infographics, logos, mobile-first presentations, Instagram stories, YouTube thumbnail images, TikTok videos, a status image and text for WhatsApp, and more.
A Print Product category contains templates and tools for designing physical goods, such as custom paper invitations, mugs, business cards, hooded sweatshirts, stickers, yard signs, and letterheads. Canva even lets you order the physical goods directly from its site.
Canva provides not only templates for making your own content, but also a library of stock photos and images. In other words, you can search for images to use in your creations without having to go to a webpage, search there, download the files, and then upload them to Canva.
In addition to all its branded content templates, Canva has templates for collaborative brainstorming and team building. Those activities are more commonly associated with whiteboard apps, such as Miro, Mural, and Lucidspark, but you can certainly do them in Canva as well.
A Resize tool, found at the very top of the editor interface, helps you quickly change the dimensions of anything you create in Canva. You can type in a custom size or select from a list of options that are written in layman’s terms: Facebook Post, Instagram Post, Instagram Story, Logo, and so forth. When you hover over one of these preset options, you see the exact dimensions in pixels, too.
Brand Consistency
Regardless of whether you have a design team to create and manage visual assets for your brand, consistency is key. To make it easy, Canva has Brand Kits. A Brand Kit is a set of guidelines or rules for your visual branding, including color palettes, logos, and fonts. This feature is not available to Free account holders.
In Canva, you create Brand Kits by uploading your logo; entering the colors used in your brand’s color palette or selecting a premade color palette (which you can further customize); and uploading or selecting font styles to use for headings, subheadings, and body text. You can create multiple Brand Kits, which can be for different products and brands or ones that you use for different campaigns. Everything you save to your Brand Kit is easily accessible from the Canva editor.
Say you are ready to export your work. You can export to the following file formats: GIF, JPG, MP4 Video, PDF Standard, PDF Print, PNG, and SVG. Again, Canva helpfully provides a few words in everyday language about what each of these export options means. A JPG is a “small file size image,” for example, whereas a PNG is a “high quality image.” If you’re not a design expert, this context helps.
Collaboration Capabilities
Canva lets you coedit and cocreate files in real time. When you are collaborating, you always have the option to give people editing access or view-only access. If you give someone access to edit files, they must create a free Canva account before they can start working on the project.
During coediting sessions, you don’t see each person’s cursor as it moves around the file, but you do see evidence of their activity as soon as they select an element or add a new one. Elements get a colored frame around them that shows the person’s name. Whether you collaborate in real time or asynchronously, everyone can leave comments on the file and reply to comments.
Canva does not have any built-in audio or video calling features, let alone screen sharing capabilities. It doesn’t integrate with video conferencing tools, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, either. While I don’t see web conferencing integration as a strictly necessary feature, some teams may want to be able to talk to one another while reviewing and making changes to a file. Video calling, audio calling, and screen sharing are all increasingly common features in collaborative whiteboard apps.
Content Planner
I like that Canva has a Content Planner, a team calendar where you can schedule social media posts to run in advance. The interface is incredibly simple to use: You click a plus sign, select one of your creations, choose the social media channel where you want it to appear, and schedule it to run. It’s helpful to be able to see and schedule the content from one interface. Another benefit to this one-calendar approach is that every team member can see what is scheduled for when in a given place. When scheduling posts from the Content Planner, you can choose Instagram Business, Facebook Page, Twitter, Facebook Group, Pinterest, LinkedIn Profile, LinkedIn Page, Slack, or Tumblr as the destination.
Canva makes it seamless to jump back into the editor to adjust an asset before scheduling it if you see something you need to change. Remember, the Canva desktop app lets you keep multiple tabs with in-progress works open at a time.
Lots of App Integrations
In addition to authorizing connectivity with social media sites to automatically schedule posts, you can integrate Canva with other apps. For example, you can connect Canva with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box to pull files from those cloud storage sites. Another integration lets you import images to Canva that you’ve posted to Facebook. You can also pull content from Brandfolder, Bitmoji, Flickr, Giphy, and other sites.
Other app integration options—and there are a lot of them—are focused on connecting Canva to the rest of your business operations. Some of these options include posting Canva creations to Slack, Mailchimp, and other communication apps.
Accessibility Features
Canva offers strong language accessibility options in the account Settings section. Once you choose your preferred language from the dozens of options, all of the interface text converts to the selected language. More importantly, you can use the correct character sets when adding text and selecting fonts to use in your content.
The only other visible accessibility feature in Canva is the option to require a modifier key for using single-key shortcuts. This option lives in the Settings section, too.
An Excellent Small Business Tool
Canva is one of the best tools that small businesses and entrepreneurs can use to create, manage, and share branded content. The app takes extra steps to make sure that people who don’t have a background in design understand what they’re doing. The collaboration options could be a little more robust, but they are more than adequate. Canva easily earns our Editors’ Choice award because of its ease of use and value.
While Canva is best for designing and deploying marketing content, you can use it as a collaborative whiteboard app. However, if you’re looking for a dedicated whiteboard app, Miro is our Editors’ Choice winner for the category.
