A Small Business Owner's Thoughts on Canva - An honest review
June 28, 2018
A Small Business Owner's Thoughts on Canva - An honest review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Canva
We use Canva for quick on the fly designs, when we need to test a new idea or draw inspiration. We have found that while it is not a full-fledged design tool, everyone from professionals to beginners can use it and it is cost effective. It is mainly used by our marketing department and allows us to effectively design consistent branding images for our various platforms including print and online media.
- The ability to save designs online automatically and share those designs with other team members is invaluable to us
- The drag and drop functionality is very useful for quickly adding images or elements to a design that are not already available in the Canva platform
- The mobile apps for various platforms allow us to see designs on the go and edit or change any designs
- The branding option is great because we can use our own custom font and colors for different designs. Being able to duplicate and add our branding to different designs is a lifesaver
- There are more templates and search functionality on the mobile apps than on the website. This is rather odd and makes the product a bit confusing to use. We sometimes have to find a design idea on the app then save it and use it on the web app. Would be easier if the ability to find designs was just baked into both web and mobile apps.
- While it is a versatile design tool, Canva does not allow you to import just any fonts. Our team has had to find other workarounds to use the library of fonts we have as they cannot be imported into Canva, despite the functionality being advertised.
- Being unable to import or export vectors or design files lets Canva down. As a tool that can be used by almost anyone, it needs some advanced features for professional designers. If we could export designs with layers or import them it would really make our workflow much easier.
- Canva has allowed us to increase our productivity by 30%, we are now able to turn around designs and marketing campaigns in a shorter time as we can quickly access designs and ideas across the team in Canva.
- Customers love the design language approach we have taken and we are in the process of adding more users to our Canva accounts. We have been able to find a uniform design language that everyone agrees with and is used for all our marketing and communication. This in itself has helped us position our brand better in the marketplace.
- Our initial goal with Canva was to have an alternative tool to Adobe's suite and Canva has been that for us, albeit with some adjustments. We have been able to save a significant amount of money on the monthly costs, $13 a month per user vs almost $55 a month for other tools
Photoshop is an advanced image and vector tool that has a massive learning curve. It is not for everyone but once you get the hang of it, it is very versatile for designing all kinds of graphics whether for social media or print campaigns. When used hand in hand with the Adobe CC suite, it works almost like Magic. However, considering the monthly cost and learning curve, it just did not feel like the right fit for our team. We wanted to be able to have all our designs saved online and accessible to anyone on the team whenever they needed them, so Canva won us over.