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Canva

Canva

Starting at $12.95 per month
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Overview

What is Canva?

Canva is a popular, simple online graphic design tool. Users can import images, use templates to design banners and logos, or pay to use Canva's premium stock images/paid templates (elements starting at $1).

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Canva is a versatile design tool that has been widely adopted by individuals and businesses for various use cases. Users have found Canva …
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Honest Canva Review

9 out of 10
March 30, 2023
With Canva, we can create high-quality designs with minimal effort and time. Moreover, Canva offers a collaborative feature that enables …
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I'm Not Happy with the Service

1 out of 10
March 15, 2023
Was looking for a way to easily create social media posts for LinkedIn. In my experience Canva is impressive for creating graphics, but …
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Canva - For Everyone

9 out of 10
August 25, 2022
Canva is an excellent online graphic design tool for those who don't have any experience with graphic design. You can design anything like …
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Awards

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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Pro

$12.95

Cloud
per month

Enterprise

$30.00

Cloud
Per Month Per User

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.canva.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Canva & Flourish Demo

YouTube

How to Use Canva in 2022 Beginner Friendly Guide + Live Demo

YouTube

Designing Blog Elements in Canva | The Journey

YouTube

Canva Demo - How Canva Works

YouTube

CANVA DEMO PARTY

YouTube

Full Demo of Kittl - Design Like A Pro...Thousands of Examples FREE No Graphic Experience Needed.

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Canva?

Canva is a popular, simple online graphic design tool. Users can import images, use templates to design banners and logos, or pay to use Canva's premium stock images/paid templates (elements starting at $1).

Canva Videos

Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives
Introducing Canva

Canva Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(1459)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Canva is a versatile design tool that has been widely adopted by individuals and businesses for various use cases. Users have found Canva helpful in creating social media graphics, resumes, infographics, eBooks, and more. The platform offers limitless built-in templates and media options, making it easy for users to create cohesive and professional external marketing materials.

One of the key use cases of Canva is its ability to help businesses solidify their brand and expand their outreach. Sole proprietors and small businesses use Canva to create images for social media posts, e-mail headers, e-book designs, and PowerPoint slides. It is also used across different departments, including sales, executive offices, and marketing teams, to create content for announcements, event invitations, and community engagement opportunities.

Canva enables businesses to create high-quality designs without outsourcing, reducing costs for lean marketing teams. It is recommended to clients who don't have in-house graphic design capabilities. For example, restaurants use Canva to design menus, event posters, and print marketing materials. Businesses also rely on Canva to create marketing materials such as business Instagram and Facebook posts, logos, banners, and business cards.

Another prominent use case of Canva is in the creation of visual content for ministries and book projects. It allows users to present and promote their content in fun, vibrant, and high-quality visual formats. Canva is used to design blog banners, Amazon A+ banners, web banners, and social media images for book projects.

In addition to these use cases, Canva finds its application in designing ad mockups, graphs, infographics, handouts, flyers, social media visuals, email banners, and more. Its drag-and-drop editor along with various graphics options makes it easy for non-designers within an organization to create innovative presentations or promotional materials.

Overall, Canva's wide range of features and user-friendly interface make it a valuable tool for individuals and businesses alike, helping them create professional-looking designs without the need for extensive design skills or outsourcing.

Users commonly recommend upgrading to the pro option of Canva for social media managers and teams looking to ensure consistent branding across the Internet. Canva Pro is considered a cost-effective alternative to Adobe products, especially for smaller businesses with a lower budget. It is also suggested to try Canva for free to create custom designs and stay on brand. Canva is seen as an ideal tool for basic design work, logo creation, and creating social media graphics and web designs. Users suggest utilizing Canva to quickly generate images for digital campaigns and regain control over branding. Canva is recommended as the ultimate solution for companies without a graphic design department or individuals who want to create images quickly without relying on Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. For teams and companies that are not design-heavy, Canva Pro is recognized as an inexpensive and user-friendly option. Canva for Work is suggested for centralizing brand guidelines and creating social media posts or graphics. Users recommend accessing the tutorials provided by Canva for learning how to effectively use the platform and advise checking the license agreement for $1.00 stock photos before usage. While Canva cannot replace more advanced design software like Photoshop, it is still considered a valuable tool for those with basic graphic design skills. Lastly, users recommend ensuring that the team knows the appropriate colors and fonts to use and uploading logos in PNG format for easy integration.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(101-125 of 173)
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Matt Graf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is a really awesome tool for making graphic design projects (like flyers) super easily and conveniently. It really is amazing how easy they have made it to create things like flyers. I'm convinced that anyone at all could do it, even those who would not consider themselves to be tech savvy.
  • Easy to use
  • Designs are clean and professional looking
  • There are plenty of free template options
  • I would always like to see more free options
  • Nothing else comes to mind
Canva is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to make things like flyers but doesn't have the expertise, skills, or time to make them from scratch on their own. It makes doing these simple graphic design projects so easy and user friendly. I would highly recommend it for anyone at all.
Rachel Green | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is an easy-to-use design web-based design software. Canva is used by our marketing team internally to create designs for a variety of mediums: handouts, flyers, social media, email banners, infographics, case studies, etc. Canva's simple-to-use and friendly functionality allow our entire team to contribute to design (following brand guidelines) easily.
  • Canva is easy to use for beginners or people with little design experience. Other tools such as Adobe Illustrator can be overwhelming to the beginner designer, but Canva is easy to learn.
  • With a paid version of Canva, you can set up branding colors and font for your profile, helping everyone that interacts with and designs in the tool create collateral that aligns with your brand.
  • Canva offers a variety of free and paid images (illustrations and photography) that your team can use, if you do not want to create a piece entirely from scratch, saving you time.
  • Canva does not allow you to underline text. That might not seem like a huge issue, but it is a tedious task to manually underline text with drawn lines.
  • Canva had a security breach, and all of their users had to change their login information and passwords. Security breaches are never encouraging, and I'm glad our team downgraded from the paid version so that our payment information is no longer attached to our account.
  • Canva should allow you to save your favorite illustrations or photos in a folder so you don't have to search terms and scroll for them every time.
Canva is well suited for a designer with little experience that is looking to create something quickly without sacrificing quality. For larger design projects (Press Releases, Infographics, Case Studies) and anything that is website/blog based I recommend having an experienced designer use Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop to create those designs following brand guidelines.
Shawn Strasburg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Canva to create social media images and thumbnails for our clients. Canva is extremely easy to use with a drag and drop editor options to create anything from graphics to PowerPoint presentations. Canva includes shapes, charts, images and other graphics that will aid in making your presentation or graphic above the competition.
  • Social media templates.
  • Correct sizing for Pinterest graphics.
  • Overlaying text on photos.
  • Charts and graphics are customizable.
  • I don't have any suggestions for improvement. I truly love using Canva.
Are you in dire need of some social media graphics for a client? Canva is the best design service that takes the headache out of designing. All you need to do is choose from one of the available templates or make a custom-sized canvas to fit your clients needs. Next use the supplied background and font layouts bring your vision to life. These layouts are packed full of different fonts and flyer templates, depends if you want a complete template or just a nice background to start Canva has you covered.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is used almost every day to create email campaigns, social media posts, online ads, and to keep our branding formats listed for the entire team. Canva is used by the entire Design Team and Marketing Team. The business problem it addresses is keeping our digital materials standardized, and a way to quickly and easily design any marketing material and keep track of them. Canva provides so many templates and designs to help guide the creative process of creating our own materials, and we mostly use Canva as a starting point for our creatives and love having the ability to customize.
  • Easily create and customize any marketing campaign
  • Access to tons of fonts, images, and resources to guide your creativity.
  • Project history and brand asset tracking so your team stays up to date and can reference previously used designs.
  • Ability to create your own custom templates to use over and over.
  • They offer a design school/easy training so you can create better creatives.
  • Selecting multiple objects at once to move or copy tend to cause glitches and are difficult to process altogether.
  • There is no collaborative way to work with other members of your team on one project. It would be nice to see comments and edits from other members in an effort to design together.
  • Some icons, images and templates can be overpriced.
Canva is perfect for the solo-preneur or graphic design beginner. There are so many designs, images and guides to help you get started and it really takes little customization to make a design your own or spark that creativity. Canva is perfect for designing email marketing and you could spend a few hours creating multiple sales emails and templates so all you have to do is send them when the time comes. Canva can also be used to help aid in website design. If you need icons, graphics, or pages designed, you can customize it in Canva and paste the entire graphic on the site so you don't have to use very much coding on your site. Canva is perfect for those 5-minute posts you need to throw together for keeping your business relevant on social media.
Oral Tosun | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I run a small online 3D printing service. Canva is used by only me. It solves my start-up's social media campaign design problems. Canva is an easy online tool to use. You can create leaflets, posters, business cards, banners, and other cool things with Canva. It is then very easy to share them online social media platforms. Or you could save them on your device. Canva has ready stencils or designs which are useful for projects.
  • Quick to produce social media content
  • You can use it on the cloud. No need for downloading software.
  • Canva has the ability to create content for different social media platforms. For example, you could create posts just fit for Instagram in square format.
  • You could write an e-book with Canva.
  • Canva's mobile app has more design restrictions than the browser app. It is a little bit hard to use on mobile devices.
  • Templates section could be broadened to other new business areas, like 3D printing.
  • Direct social media sharing options within Canva are limited to Facebook and Twitter. There should be other media options such as Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
Canva is ideal for all kinds of businesses. But it fits perfectly for a new start-up company. I love that it's free. Of course, Canva has paid areas but for a first-time user, there's no need to pay. Canva has a developing interface. There have been a number of feature additions to it within the last year. Canva has limited photo editing tools, though. Thus, you might need another software to edit your photos.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is used by our division to support our marketing and communications needs, including creating visuals for social media platforms, flyers, digital signage, brochures, pamphlets, and more. It is used throughout our division by various departments due to its ease of use and ability to create professional documents with little design experience.
  • Interface is intuitive and easy to learn.
  • Templates provide excellent starting point for those who are not professional designers.
  • Library of stock icons, images, and shapes is robust.
  • Language regarding licenses is somewhat confusing.
  • Great for beginners to graphic design.
  • Perfect to use for time-sensitive projects.
  • Exporting options are easy to navigate.
  • Projects can be ordered to be printed directly on the platform.
Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Canva in multiple ways:
  • To create good looking social media posts.
  • Proofs or ideas for branded stationary/business cards.
  • Attractive poster formats.
Typically, Canva is used by myself and others in my organization that aren't graphically talented. We can either use these products directly (which we often do for the social media posts) or send them to the graphics department to make a production-level version. This way, we can take some jobs off the plates of the graphics department and keep all departments more agile.

This helps our business in allowing us to have a shorter production lead time and more agile, independent departments. Our social media posts can go from idea to production in a few minutes while retaining an attractive and professional appearance. Our Graphics Department doesn't get bogged down trying to create a new product or translate the vision of one of the non-design staffers.
  • Social media posts: The gallery of social media posts are great. We usually use the templates to show off reviews and testimonials, sale alerts, or new products.
  • Business Stationary: The gallery has plenty of great templates to create business stationary such as letterhead, internal memos, and business cards.
  • Design ideas: If you need something that looks professional but you aren't a great designer, Canva offers a wide selection of templates and ideas for you to piece together something that looks great. You can then use this as the production item, or send this off to a graphic designer to create and polish.
  • Quick and easy editing: The design editor is pretty simple with a point and click interface. You don't need to be familiar with Photoshop, InDesign, or other programs, Canva makes editing pretty easy.
  • Perhaps it is a function of a higher pay-tier, but the ability to export the finished product into a different filetype would be helpful. Currently, it exports into .jpg, .png, and .pdf. Being able to use .doc, .eps, or .indd would be advantageous.
  • Though Canva features a great font selection, it would a nice to be able to upload a font for use in the product.
Canva is great for quick, easy, and attractive pieces. This is best used by those that have a good eye for what looks good, but not the technical skills in Photoshop or Indesign to create the finished product. This is great for jobs on the go, quick social media shares or document creation.

For larger applications that require the use of a lot of brand-specific assets, use a proper design program and someone trained to use it. Canva does not replace a graphic design department or agency.
Savannah Rezabek | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Canva for a lot of our images for organic and paid efforts, particularly for social media. We've used it some for printed media like eBooks and data sheets as well. We've found it does best for the more simple images because a lot of the functionality like bolding, linking words and etc is not incredibly easy for longer form content. The free images and such are good, and so are the premium ones. It's a bit annoying that things are shown to be $1 but then actually cost $11, though. We wish that it was a bit easier to make long-form content as well.
  • Social Media Images.
  • Free stock images.
  • Easy and quick design for beginners.
  • Longer form content -- Canva hard to use and clunky.
  • A better folder system -- we don't want to have to see all designs.
  • A better system for searching for images and such.
Canva is great for quick images, particularly more simple images. It's awesome for social media. I wouldn't use it if you want really effect heavy images with layering and custom designs -- in that case you're going to need an Adobe or similar product. It does some things like filters and gradients, or vignettes, but it's not a full and robust design tool for super professional looking white papers and such. It is, however, great for small teams with little to no design experience, or teams that have a designer and want to easily add text or what have you.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Canva to generate all of our social media graphics and images. Currently there are three of us who need access to the designs, and we're all able to use designs out of a shared folder so that we can keep everything in the same place. As far as I know, it's the market leader (and it certainly was the pioneer) in the "visual design for amateurs" category.
  • allows just about anyone to create just about any kind of social media image asset
  • size templates take the guesswork out of dimensions
  • drag and drop interface makes it simple enough for anyone to figure out
  • they continue to innovate the product despite many "me-too" products
  • they struggle do differentiate in the market that they essentially created
  • image editing options still somewhat limited compared to more robust traditional editors
  • no help with design -- it's still too easy to create something hideous
You still need to have a basic eye for design. It takes the tech aspect out of it. If you have an idea of what makes a graphic look good, you can create it fairly easily in Canva. However, non-designers beware. "Easy to use" does NOT equal "easy to make something that looks good."
March 16, 2019

Canva for Design

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is being used by the Digital Learning Department to create banners, icons, badges, flyers, etc. There are also some teachers who are using Canva with students for student-created work.
  • Variety of templates
  • Ease of use
  • Easy to download and share
  • Organization options
  • Free features vs paid features
Canva is great for student-created projects: posters, flyers, etc. Canva also works great for LMS customization options. Using Canva, our department has created flyers, menus, handouts, badges, and more. I am not a huge fan of Canva for presentations though.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my company, various departments need picture editing tools for creating newsletters, posters, cards etc. Canva is helping them to do so. In my department, I use this software for creating informative templates which I use in my newsletters. Sometimes I use it to create beautiful greeting cards and e-cards during festivals.
  • Its web interface is very intuitive. It helps users to navigate very easily.
  • They have a wide variety of pre-made templates in various categories.
  • They provide results in JPEG, PNG and PDF format as well.
  • Its mobile app is not as intuitive as its web application. It also hangs sometimes.
  • Sometimes I find it difficult to match the canvas size with the size of my uploaded image. It doesn't fit, even after stretching it.
  • Some of the pre-made templates are very expensive.
This application is very good at editing pictures for creating beautiful newsletters, posters, greeting cards, flyers etc. Canva provides various fonts and color pallets to design a template as per users' requirements. During festivals, I use this software to design greeting cards for my colleagues in my company. After designing them on this App I print them on premium paper sheets in high resolution. Everyone likes these greetings, and have said they looked like professionally designed greetings.
Josephine Stafford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Canva to create custom Pinterest graphics, to create marketing materials and online educational packets. I also use it to design email headers, thank you cards, and other promotional materials. It is much better than having ot buy and pay for Adobe Illustrator and much quicker to use than any other program.
  • Assortment of designs
  • Perfect quality for printing
  • Fast turn around time for orders
  • Color codes are easy to implement
  • Uploading images is easy
  • Duplicating designs is easy to do
  • Sometimes my design gets saved weird, so that when I hit undo it reverts to a version that is too far back
  • I wish the resize document feature was free
  • Deleting images is a pain, I wish there was a bulk editor for photos
  • Finding free designs, graphics or elements is difficult
Canva is perfect for small business owners and for people looking to create fun designs. It's better than paying for a premade design on Minted or Zazzle and the print quality is equal. You have more flexibility with Canva. I also use it for personal things like showers or Christmas present projects, easy to use and easy to print!
Elizabeth Pampalone | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As the sole owner/employee, I have used Canva for mockups, social posts, ebooks etc. It is a quick alternative to Indesign or Photoshop (though those items are still needed).
  • Social posts.
  • Social profile images and banners.
  • ebooks.
  • Adding transparency while editing.
  • No eraser for uploaded images.
  • Simple shapes with height and width options.
I recommend Canva to all small business clients. It saves them time and money on simple graphic design items. Canva is not really suited for graphic designers as they need more control than Canva can offer at this time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well, it definitely helps with the content creation side, in terms of easy access and seamless user interface. Canva is easily used by all our team and staff without us having to do the 5-hour crash course PhotoShop might have.
  • Quick and easy templates already pre-made to alter to the needs of the user.
  • Folders and logos organization is key once you begin to scale your business.
  • A vast amount of features and a way to download almost anything you need.
  • Easy to use editing tools across any post or project. (Great for collaboration).
  • Canva is VERY slow when too many people are using it, so that’s a big one.
  • At times Canva will crash during particular edits on a piece of content.
  • GIFs I think Canva should definitely allow us to make GIFs!
Well, so many business owners are not graphic designers, therefore, they really suck at making anything look good (creative wise). Canva really makes an effort in their premade templates to help those businesses who don’t know a thing about graphics design and may need a simple logo, post or whatever. I don’t really have anything against it, maybe perhaps a free trial to the paid version would be great.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is used mainly by our online marketing folks. We use it to create social media headers (LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook), thumbnails for video content, blog post headers, one-page overviews (PDF) and other graphics. The main reason we use this software is that a non-designer type of person can quickly jump in, find a template which introduces a really nice color schema, font family and graphics that work for our project. We have also uploaded our official color palette so these colors are incorporated when we initiate a new design.
  • Canva allows us to create very professional art for our online presence in many ways.
  • Canva also outputs the graphics in the way we need: .png and .jpg for online articles and social media and .pdf for print or collateral material.
  • It has almost no learning curve. Sign up and try a project with it, it's super easy to get into.
  • You are able to start with a free level that gives you a lot of features. We used the free one for quite some time to make sure it was the proper tool for us and then we went "PRO".
  • We'd like to be able to tag and classify our past graphics in folders in an easier way. For some reason, we aren't able to use the drag and drop function while using FireFox. This maybe a cache or cookie issue on our side which we are looking into.
This is great for online content. If you produce youtube videos, blog posts, or really any social media posts, the quality of the thumbnail or social media header is crucial. Also, if you need to output a social media header in many formats - this is the perfect tool. In most cases, you can choose the social media app you are creating for and Canva will automatically set the size in pixels so you can get started right away. We used to have templates of each social media app and this would change. We now let Canva do this for us now.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is being used by my marketing department to help offset the time and money it would cost to involve our creative department for smaller graphic design needs. This includes images for blogs, presentation designs, posters, flyers and generally the bulk of all our internal needs. By using this affordable tool, we can move fast on our own without including other departments.
  • Quickly design without Adobe experience.
  • Use smart, creative templates to speed up the process.
  • Choose from a variety of images and fonts.
  • Unless you purchase Canva for Work, it is limited on free images.
  • Would be nice to create transparent backgrounds in the free version.
  • Not the easiest to layer images on top of images.
For the price (especially the free version), there is no design platform that I have encountered that can rival the ease and professional look of Canva. It is perfect for small teams looking to make a big impact, but it may be too cookie cutter for bigger teams that are looking for a unique design that can't be found anywhere else.
Robert Foreman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is used for all of our marketing images, business cards, and forms. The marketing images are used for print, online marketing, Wordpress posts/pages, and email campaigns. With Canva, we do not need to employ or contract a graphics designer. It can be accessed online and it is very easy to use.
  • Creating images
  • Creating marketing pieces
  • Creating digital business cards
Designing images for marketing pieces, like flyers and posters
Designing graphics for websites and email campaigns
Designing digital business cards
Designing business forms and resumes
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Canva is primarily used within the Communications Department of our organization to create graphics for flyers and social media. It's really helped bridge the gap of making content for our social media while also not having anyone in the office who technically does that job (we have no graphic designers on staff). Canva has helped us come up with quality content by allowing collaboration on the wording and design of templates through the software options, so it allows a lot of teamwork throughout the department.
  • Ease of use.
  • Variety of options (photos, shapes, lines, etc).
  • Options for downloading.
  • Possibility of collaboration.
  • Pre-made templates.
  • Paid elements of Canva intermixed with free elements.
  • Structure of the application sometimes inhibits creativity.
  • Use of "teams" makes finding your designs difficult sometimes.
Canva is an excellent software for beginner graphics. Due to the lack of complication, it's really easy for people who have never done graphics before to jump right into Canva and start creating designs. However, for individuals more experienced in the graphics abilities, it would definitely be frustrating. The application is very structured, and this lack of freedom may be irritating to someone who got their degree performing this type of work. In addition, in very professional environments, these designs can have an element of being "Canva-esque" and therefore may want to be avoided (essentially, people know you didn't spend money to create the design).
Sarah Roscoe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Canva as a way to create professional looking marketing materials. We are using the non-profit version which Canva kindly provides to non-profits.
  • Easy to use
  • Tons of templates
  • Unlimited options for creativity
  • It would be nice if there were different file size options or a file size reducer
Canva is great for making social media materials and website/email banners. It is a simple and easy to use product.
Abigail Nwaocha | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Canva to make PDF presentations, social media images, flyers, and e-book covers for an Architecture company in Kenya.
I needed a way to make marketing assets fast, and while Photoshop and Adobe Spark were both good options, Canva was not only the easiest to use and share with others, but the mobile app helped me make designs from my phone or tablet.
  • PDF Presentations: It is unbelievably difficult to make a decent powerpoint presentation on a phone or tablet. Canva's mobile app and the different presentation templates have helped me prepare presentations for a meeting and speaking events
  • eBook Covers/ebooks: I had to convert several blog posts into a downloadable pdf ebook for visitors as a lead generating asset, and while I usually used Indesign (or MS WORD) and Photoshop to create the ebook and ebook cover, I decided to check out Canva's ebook cover template and discovered that I could create a simple yet stylish ebook cover, and if I added other pages I could paste the content of the blog post and create the book in Canva.
  • Social Media Images: 80% of the time when I use Canva it's to make social media images, cover/header images for Facebook and Twitter. The Instagram story template also works for branded WhatsApps statuses.
  • I really dislike how sometimes my work isn't automatically saved for some reason, and I'm prompted to reload the design and the past second's work is just gone. I've not experienced this on their android app, but it happens to me at least once every two weeks on the online/desktop site.
  • The Undo/Redo option is glitchy sometimes, and after I accidentally or otherwise delete an element when I try to undo it, sometimes it doesn't come back. Even worse, if I click undo twice I might end up losing a lot of my design progress which the redo option for some reason cannot restore.
Not everyone is great with making designs on Photoshop-- Canva can be used to make almost any design, be it a presentation, flyer, logo (their logo design options are painfully limited but it's a good start), social media images, infographics etc. The best part about Canva is that not only does it work for businesses of all sizes, or personal projects, but it's very easy to use and the interface is friendly.
Daniel Choi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is used for creating social media marketing material for small campaigns. The problem is that there are very few free programs that allow startups to create good flyer-like ads for social media. This is being used in the marketing department of the company and they love the product so far. There are a lot of customizations even with the free version.
  • Canva is very user-friendly because it took me about 2 minutes to figure it out.
  • Canva does not have a long setup process which is good for someone who wants to test it out.
  • There are limitations for the free version and the bill can add up if you want to used the paid options.
  • Canva needs to have more functionality in terms of editing portions like selecting unusual shapes of an image to crop.
Canva is well suited for beginner marketing personnel with a limited budget. Canva is not suited for a large corporation that has money to hire graphic designers. Photoshop and Illustrator should be used instead.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our marketing department uses Canva to create content for our newsletters, blog, and events. Canva allows our marketing team to quickly produce original content and get marketing materials out to our fundraisers in a timely manner. Without Canva, our organization would need to hire more designers or outsource some of our marketing efforts to a third party.
  • Canva has many different saved templates for a whole host of uses including newsletters, presentations, banners, and brochures.
  • Canva's drag and drop design tool helps novices create and develop content for our organization.
  • Canva has a useful feature that allows any created content to be ready for print.
  • Canva is easy to pick up and start using, but it takes a while to understand all of its features.
  • Canva is meant to be used for novice designers, not professional graphic designers. For professional graphic designers, its features and capabilities may seem too basic.
  • The charts and graph functions are a bit limited as users cannot input own data and there are not many options for customization.
Canva is a wonderful software for making quick, professional-looking designs. The software allows even beginner designers to start creating with little to no training. The drag and drop design features are intuitive and easy to learn. However, for projects that require more complex and customized designs, Canva is not the best fit.
Desirée zambrano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Canva to design the images of the different products we produce, and the presentations for these products--from enhancing the look of the product, to designing the label, even to posts on Instagram or other websites. It's used just in our department, since we're in charge of the promotion and marketing of these products.
  • It's very easy to use, so if you want to get beautiful results but find other design tools too complicated, Canva is perfect. You can design almost anything on Canva in a few easy steps
  • You can get beautiful designs using the free version
  • It allows you to upload images of your preference
  • It has a lot of different resources for different types of content
  • While its monthly subscription isn't overly expensive, some of the content is overpriced (images, icons, and such.)
  • Getting the design size right can be very time-consuming.
  • A lot of paid template options appear, and finding the free templates takes some searching.
If you're starting to work on Digital Marketing but are not an expert in Photoshop, Canva is the perfect choice. You get beautiful results without too much hassle. If you need to do an amazing design but are short on time, Canva can help you with that. Canva is a perfect tool to use for people who have few design skills, but if you're looking to get super professional results, Canva is not for you.
Jason Glogau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Canva myself for smaller design projects, mostly for social media applications. We're a small team, so efficiencies are key. I'm able to quickly create graphics that don't require elaborate work in InDesign from our expert designers. It is also a great tool for cropping images to the right dimensions for social media, and laying in our logo for branding purposes.
  • Canva's templates can be a huge time saver for creating graphics. I especially find these helpful when creating motivational quotes or holiday-themed images for social media.
  • Canva offers several export options, so whether you need a PNG or a PDF, for digital or for print, you've got it available.
  • Included with Canva is a library of stock photos and graphics that are free to use, and additional images that can be purchased. It's a mixed bag, but it's nice to have some assets easily available.
  • Canva allows you to save your brand's colors for easy application on future projects!
  • Canva has a lot of preset sizes for different applications, but I think they could do a better job of implementing all the proper social media sizes (though who can keep up with them?!)
  • A lot of features require a paid plan. Perfectly fine, but may not always fit for all users. This is hardly a criticism, but just something to be aware of based upon your needs.
Canva is an incredible tool for anyone who needs to create graphics, but don't need elaborate work done in the Adobe Creative Suite. Social media graphics, posters, blog images, etc. -- great application, especially if you aren't a graphic designer by day!

I don't think I'd use Canva for making multi-page brochures/booklets and really high-end products, but it wouldn't surprise me if Canva could handle that, too.
October 18, 2018

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Adam Montgomery | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Canva is being used by our marketing department. Our marketing department uses Canva to create our weekly newsletter, promotional flyers, and company proposals. Canva allows our marketing team to develop marketing materials quickly and with a professional design. Because of its ease of use, our marketing team is able to push out content at a much faster pace.
  • Canva is very intuitive and easy to use.
  • Canva offers a wide range of pre-loaded design templates that can easily be customized to fit your organization or provide inspiration for your own designs.
  • Canva does not require any graphic design skills or knowledge of design programs.
  • For graphic designers, Canva cannot replace Photoshop or InDesign. In fact, most graphic designers would probably find Canva too basic.
  • Now that our team has used the program so much, I can always tell when materials have been designed in Canva. They seem to have a pretty similar look and design.
  • It would be nice if more design templates were constantly being uploaded.
Canva is perfect for those who want to create infographics, charts, marketing materials, etc but do not have any experience with graphic design. The program is designed to help create materials and content quickly. For that purpose, it does a great job, but the program cannot replace a true graphic designer. When my team really needs a truly professional designed item, we will turn to our graphic designer first.
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