Adobe PhotoShop vs Canva

Adobe Photoshop and Canva are both graphic editing software. Adobe Photoshop is the market incumbent, while Canva is a new, more niche offering. Both products are rare among enterprises, but Canva is more concentrated in the small business market due to its robust free package and focus on user-accessibility. 

Adobe Photoshop is positioned as the legacy market incumbent, with advanced features for a range of more intensive editing uses. Canva specializes as an online entry-level editing software particularly well suited for social posts and graphics. 

Features

Both Adobe Photoshop and Canva offer basic graphic editing features, including graphic creation and editing existing content. However, they each provide features tailored to their specializations. 

Adobe Photoshop has invested more heavily in powerful and advanced editing capabilities. This allows Photoshop to provide deeper functionality for most editing and graphic design needs. The range and depth of its capabilities makes Photoshop ideal for frequent or power users. Broadly speaking, Photoshop has set the baseline on which editing software is compared to. 

In contrast, Canva differentiates by being more accessible for more casual or inexperienced users. Canva provides a free version that is fairly sufficient for many basic tasks, and includes a range of prebuilt templates for common use cases, such as social media graphics. It is designed to be extremely user friendly and accessible to users, regardless of prior experience or skill level. 

Limitations

While both Adobe Photoshop and Canva offer strong features, they also have some limitations worth considering. 

Adobe Photoshop’s power also entails greater complexity. The more advanced features and interface often requires a steeper learning curve to become proficient and work efficiently within the tool. Additionally, Photoshop has no free version. This requires more up front investment in the application than freemium products. 

In contrast, Canva is more limited in its functionality. Many of the better or larger graphics and images are paywalled, placing a ceiling on what can be done with the free version of Canva. There are also more limited account management features within the software. The lack of these features is most pertinent to freelancers or contractors, who may manage graphics for multiple clients within the software. 

Pricing

Adobe Photoshop is sold individually for $20.99/month. It can also be bundled with Adobe Lightroom for $9.99/month. 

Canva has 3 pricing tiers. The free version provides 8,000+ templates, 100+ design types, and many free images and graphics. The Pro version additionally offers a Brand Kit for white labeling, more free templates, premium images, and custom templates. The Enterprise version includes multiple Brand Kits, team management, workflows, and additional security features and support.