Adobe Express vs Canva (2026) — Which Should You Use?

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Adobe Express vs Canva — which is better? In this detailed comparison, I take an in-depth look at which of these leading graphic design tools is the best fit for your needs.

I’ve tested both platforms’ key features in detail — their templates, interfaces, effects, brand features and much more besides — and in this post, I share my findings in a clear, jargon-free way.

I’ll start my full comparison with a key question…

What are Adobe Express and Canva?

Canva and Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) are both user-friendly graphic design tools that aim to let you create professional visual designs without needing formal design skills (or, indeed, a designer!).

Both platforms can be used to create a wide range of assets — logos, banners, social media graphics, simple videos, email signatures, YouTube thumbnails, digital art etc. — and a large number of customizable templates and stock images are provided to help you make your designs really pop.

But unlike ‘traditional’ design software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator — desktop applications that you install on your computer — Canva and Adobe Express are primarily designed to be used online in a web browser.

That said, installable desktop and mobile apps are available for both platforms.

But there’s something very important to note about both tools: since all of the templates and visual elements in Canva and Adobe Express are hosted on the web, you’ll need to have an active Internet connection to use either platform properly (regardless of the device you’re on).

Now, Canva and Adobe Express give you three key things to help you create your designs:

In just a moment, I’ll dive into the key differences between how Canva and Adobe Express go about providing these features. But first, a quick look at pricing.

Pricing

There are five Adobe Express plans available:

As for Canva, it offers four main pricing plans:

In addition to the above plans (and subject to eligibility checks), educational and non-for-profit organizations can make use of two free versions of Canva — the ‘Canva for Education‘ and ‘Canva for Nonprofits‘ plans respectively.

Canva also offers a discount of up to 16% for ‘Canva Pro’ and ‘Canva Business’ plans if you pay for your subscription on an annual basis rather than purchasing a monthly plan.

There are some important differences in features to watch out for between both products’ plans, the main ones involving:

I’ll discuss these differences in more depth shortly. But for now, my key takeaways on pricing are as follows:

Of course, ‘cheaper’ doesn’t always equate to ‘better’ (or even ‘better value’), so it’s important to get a really good understanding of the quality of both platforms’ features.

Let’s do that now, starting with their interfaces and ease of use.

Interface / ease-of-use

Adobe Express and Canva both provide users with intuitive dashboards that provide easy access to templates, artwork creation tools and recent projects. I’d argue that Adobe’s is the ‘cleaner’ of the two interfaces however — it’s a bit less cluttered.

In both tools, you’ll find projects, brand tools and scheduling features conveniently placed in a left-hand side ‘sticky’ menu that remains in place as you navigate around the platform or scroll through content.

The Adobe Express dashboard also features a handy ‘quick actions’ tab, which gives you easy, ‘one-click’ access to commonly-performed design tasks such as image resizing, background removal, file combination and format conversions.

Both platforms provide a very straightforward ‘drag-and-drop’ editing experience: templates, photos and design elements can be applied or added from the left of the screen, while your design work takes place on the right.

And there’s a very similar range of design assets available from both tools, including:

(Both tools also let you upload your own photos / videos and let you drag and drop these elements into your designs.)

Both tools make it very easy to locate suitable assets for your designs. You can use Canva’s ‘Elements’ tab or Adobe Express’ search box to quickly find visuals or audio you’d like to add to your design.

In both platforms, search results are presented neatly, with templates, photos, videos, graphics, etc. all easily browsable by category.

One last thing to consider is the speed of the two interfaces.

In my testing I often found Adobe Express to be a bit slower than Canva when it came to loading templates and saving designs. This could get a bit annoying if you’re using the tool a lot.

To sum up, both these interfaces let you start designing really easily — so it will probably boil down to personal preference as to which one is ‘best’. If you prefer a more minimal look and feel, you’ll enjoy using Adobe’s clutter-free interface; if you need to quickly produce a lot of designs and don’t want to be delayed by page loading delays, then Canva’s interface is probably for you.

Templates

Because Canva and Adobe Express are tools aimed in large part at non-professional designers, both programs offer a wide range of templates to help you get your designs started.

With Canva, you get access to a lot more of them: 1.6+ million on its free plan, and 3.6+ million on its paid plans.

Adobe Express gives you 220,000+ templates on its free plan, and 350,000+ on its paid-for ones.

All in all, it’s fair to say that both tools give you access to a really wide range of professionally designed templates. But Canva’s bigger quantity of templates provides the user with considerably more choice when it comes to finding a starting point for a design.

As for the quality of the templates on offer from Canva and Adobe Express, both products score top marks here. All their templates are very professional in appearance, with a wide selection of styles available from each, ranging from the corporate to the eccentric.

With Canva, you get a range of templates that’s suitable for just about every use case imaginable. The Adobe Express template range is very usable too, but in my view is particularly strong when it comes to ‘funky’ design — lots of the templates provided use bold color combinations and eye-catching graphics.

The two platforms let you browse templates by design type — logos, Instagram posts, brochures, flyers, etc.

Now, a really great aspect of both Canva and Adobe Express is that regardless of the template you choose, you’re not restricted to using the default size of the design — both tools allow you to resize your design really easily.

Let’s dig into how they let you do that.

Resizing your design

When running a small business, you’ll often end up designing graphics for a wide range of media — social posts, websites, print etc. This means you’ll frequently need to apply the same design to different outputs.

For example, you might design an A3 poster for an event — but then need to resize it for use as an Instagram post or a Facebook banner.

Now, so long as you’re on a paid-for plan, both Adobe Express and Canva let you do this using their resize features — tools that let you automatically repurpose your design in just a couple of mouse clicks.

Both resize tools are excellent. You can use them to create custom sizes or apply preset options really easily, and both let you keep copies of your original work before resizing it.

Canva’s resize tool has an extra feature that you won’t find in the Adobe Express equivalent, though.

In addition to letting you resize your creations quickly, it allows you to automatically translate the text content of your design into multiple languages as you do so. This is done via a built-in AI translation feature, ‘Magic Switch’.

Adobe Express does have a translation feature too, but it’s not integrated with its resize tool — you have to create translated content separately. I found the process for doing this quite clunky — and you may find that this extra step slows down the repurposing process considerably when dealing with international content.

Now let’s take a look at the images you can insert into your Canva and Adobe Express projects.

Stock photography

One of the big benefits of using ‘all-in-one’ design tools like Canva or Adobe Express is the huge library of royalty-free photos you get access to as part of your subscription.

Depending on the image involved, stock photography companies like Getty or Shutterstock can charge anything from $10 to hundreds of dollars for a single picture — in some cases eclipsing the cost of a whole year’s subscription to Canva or Adobe Express (both of which give you access to vast image libraries anyway).

Adobe Express gives you access to 500,000 images on its free plan and 200+ million on paid plans.

When it comes to the number of stock images provided on its free plan, Canva is arguably more generous than Adobe Express — Canva Free gives you access to 4.7+ million stock photos, graphics, videos and audio files. However, the total number of assets available on its paid plans is smaller than Adobe Express’s offering — 141+ million (still a very sizeable number).

(How many of these Canva assets are actually photos is a bit unclear, but it’s safe to assume that it’s a lot!)

There is a catch with Adobe’s offering here, however: many of the images available in Adobe Express come from the ‘Adobe Stock’ library (a separate product) and this brings some significant limitations:

While Canva also has policies that can restrict use of stock imagery and graphics, they are nowhere near as strict as those of Adobe Express. And crucially, with Canva, you don’t have to mess around trying to work out what kind of license a chosen image has.

So in many ways, and despite its technically smaller offering, the more generous and flexible option when it comes to stock photos can actually be Canva.

Photo editing

Whether you use a stock photo or upload one of your own, Adobe Express and Canva give you a decent range of editing tools to enhance your images and integrate them into your designs.

You can easily make standard photo adjustments in both Adobe Express and Canva: changing contrast, brightness, color saturation and so on through slider controls in either platform is very straightforward.

Canva offers more controls here however, providing you with ‘vibrance’, ‘saturation’ and ‘vignette’ sliders (amongst quite a few others) that aren’t available in Adobe Express. It also provides a set of dedicated ‘color edit’ tools, that let you edit the hue, saturation and brightness of core colors in your image. These extra controls let you make more granular edits to your images than is possible with Adobe Express.

There are several ‘one-click’ filters available in both tools for applying color and distortion effects to your images too. Adobe Express offers considerably more of these, however — they originate from Photoshop, they’re very impactful, and I really liked them.

Unlike Adobe Express, however, Canva provides a dedicated image editing tool called the ‘modal photo editor’. This lets you make adjustments to your photos before you add the image to your Canva designs. It also features a handy ‘compare’ button so that you can quickly see the ‘before and after’ of your edits.

Both tools provide the ability to remove photo backgrounds — but only on their paid-for plans. And both perform background removal very well, allowing you to perform this task in a single click. You can also restore part of your background using both tools, although the process involved for doing this in both is quite fiddly.

Overall, it’s probably a draw when it comes to the image editing capabilities of Adobe Express and Canva. Adobe Express offers more in the way of one-click filters, but Canva gives you more granular control over color manipulation. Neither competes with Photoshop when it comes to sophistication of results — but both offer tools that let you make significant edits to images.

Layer controls

Until recently, Adobe Express had a bit of an edge over Canva when it came to accessing and managing the layers of your design.

This was because Canva didn’t provide a proper layer control panel to let you edit the stacking order of your artwork layers.

However, thanks to its relatively new ‘layers’ feature (available via the ‘position’ button at the top of the Canva editor), you can now easily access your artwork layers in Canva, just as you can in Adobe Express.

Storage space

Both Adobe Express and Canva provide built-in cloud storage for your projects and let you upload your own assets to it — making it easy for users to insert existing photos, videos and other media into new designs.

On their free plans, the two platforms are evenly matched, each offering a generous 5GB of storage — far more than you’ll find on many rival tools (Visme’s free plan, for example, only provides 500MB).

The main differences appear as you move up the pricing tiers. ‘Canva Pro’ gives you 100GB of storage, ‘Canva Business’ increases this to 500GB, and ‘Canva Enterprise’ offers 1TB per user. Adobe Express ‘Premium’ provides 100GB, while its ‘Teams’ and ‘Enterprise’ plans both give users 1TB each.

So, while the entry-level and top-tier plans are broadly comparable, Adobe Express offers more generous storage at the team level — giving you double the space available on Canva’s similarly positioned ‘Business plan’, for a monthly lower cost. That makes Adobe Express the stronger option if you’re working collaboratively and need plenty of room for large shared projects.

Creating videos with Canva and Adobe Express

Canva and Adobe Express don’t just let you make static artwork: you can create and edit basic videos with them too. Let’s take a look at how their video editing features compare.

Editing videos in Adobe Express

Until relatively recently, video editing hadn’t been the strongest aspect of Adobe Express. However, over the past year or so, the platform has considerably improved its capabilities here.

The new Adobe Express video editor provides 18 presets for making video content for the popular social content platforms — available formats include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories (once you pick a format, you can pick a starting point design for your video from a large range of templates).

Other recent improvements include the addition of video background removal, text animation tools, and the provision of an increased number of stock video clips.

While experimenting with the Adobe Express video editor for this review, I found it relatively easy to use — my only gripe being that Adobe’s ‘quick action’ video editing features didn’t seem to be available within the main video editing interface. These tools let you carry out a host of useful video editing manoeuvres — reverse your video, change its speed, crop the aspect ratio and add captions — but to use them, you have to exit the editor, go to the home page and then click the plus icon to access them.

Editing videos in Canva

With Canva, the integrated video editor — while still basic compared to dedicated video editing software — is by and large very usable for editing together simple videos, and arguably a bit stronger than the Adobe Express equivalent.

Canva puts 9 different transition types at your disposal (3 more than Adobe Express provides); it also makes it easier to record yourself for presentations and voiceovers.

Canva’s video editor comes bundled with a much larger set of video templates than Adobe Express, as can be seen in the table below:

Ultimately I’d argue that while there’s not a huge amount in it, the winner in the video editing department is currently Canva.

AI tools in Canva and Adobe Express

As is the case with most SaaS products, Canva and Adobe Express have seen a bunch of AI features added to their feature sets over the past couple of years.

Canva’s AI feature set is currently the more extensive though: its ‘Magic Studio’ boasts 20+ tools, including:

In terms of how good these tools are, it’s a mixed bag. During my tests I found some of them to be excellent — the Magic Resize and Magic Eraser tool, for example, really delivered, and quickly. The ‘Ask Canva’ was surprisingly useful too, as was Canva’s general AI help assistant (I’d go so far as to say that this is the first help chatbot that I’ve used whose answers I actually found useful!).

But I found the Magic Write tool to be rather mediocre (using a dedicated LLM chatbot to produce copy is easier and its output higher in quality), and the ‘Magic Animate’ tool didn’t really bowl me over either — it simply added slide-in effects to the elements on my design (which I could have easily done myself, and more elegantly!).

Of all the Canva AI tools, I was most interested in trying out the Magic Media feature, which generates images and videos based on prompts. And to be honest, I wasn’t madly impressed with it. The main reason for this was that although the images and videos produced were reasonably high in quality, it was tricky to get Canva to give them to me in a high resolution.

With images, it seems that the only way to do this is to create the video outside of a design using the ‘Canva AI’ option in the home page of your dashboard, and then to click a ‘boost resolution’ option after you generate them. This is hard to spot, confusing and makes the design process clunkier.

With the AI-generated videos, I couldn’t find a way to export full HD versions of anything produced — by default Canva seems to export them at 1366 x 768 pixels.

Another issue that I had with Canva’s image generator was the ‘uncanny valley’ artefacts that I sometimes encountered — particularly where images of hands were concerned.

As for Adobe Express, its AI feature set is currently more limited than Canva’s. There are seven main AI tools provided:

In terms of the quality of the output from these tools, as with the work produced by Canva’s equivalent features, I wasn’t always impressed.

For example, when I asked Adobe Express to generate me a template for a coffee shop advert, the results were decidedly dull, as you can see from my screenshot below:

Other tools I found more useful: Adobe Express’s background removal and object insertion features were very good.

When it came to AI-generated images, I found the quality of Adobe’s output to be considerably higher than Canva’s.

First, and most importantly, the images produced by the tool are output in a high-res format by default. And during my tests, I didn’t encounter as much ‘uncanny valley’ stuff from Adobe Express — as you can see from the image below, it handles AI hands quite well!

Second, you get a lot more control over how images are generated when using Adobe Express.

For example, you can ask Adobe Express to use a reference image when generating a new one — meaning that the results produced are more likely to align with your desired output type.

Adobe Express also lets you choose a model to use when generating your image. As you can see from my screenshot below, you can currently choose from Firefly, Gemini, Imagen, OpenAI or Flux. Depending on the model involved, you’ll end up using up some ‘AI credits’ (more on which shortly), but the process of switching models is very easy.

Now, to be fair, you can use different AI models in Canva too — but you have to install separate apps to do this, and sign up for the relevant services. A much fiddlier workflow is involved.

And finally, it’s worth pointing out that if you use Adobe Express’ default AI image generator — powered by Firefly Image 4 — you get output that Adobe describes as “commercially safe” to use. This is because the Firefly AI model has been trained on licensed content, Adobe Stock images, and public-domain material, rather than scraped copyrighted images.

As for AI video generation, this isn’t currently available in Adobe Express — so a clear win for Canva on this front.

Finally, it’s worth talking about how much you can use Adobe Express and Canva’s AI features.

Adobe Express is far more transparent here: with the exception of Firefly Pro plan subscribers, all paid plan users get 250 AI credits per month (Firefly Pro users get 4,000). These can be ‘spent’ on Adobe Express’ image generation feature, with different ‘charges’ being applied by the available AI image generation models available (a Nano Banana image costs 10 credits, for example, while an OpenAI one costs 60). The quotas are fairly easy to understand.

Canva just states that you get ‘higher AI usage’ on its premium plans, but doesn’t specify what the limits are. This is a frustrating situation, because it leaves users entirely in the dark regarding how much they can rely on Canva’s AI features each month. Canva does say however that usage limits apply to all of its AI features, however.

Web design tools

In an attempt to cover all the bases, both Canva and Adobe Express give you access to easy-to-use website building tools.

It’s important to say that these tools are very basic in nature, and are not going to be replacing standalone website building platforms like Wix or Shopify any time soon. However, they do let you design smart looking, responsive single-page sites.

Now, Canva has a big edge over Adobe Express in terms of the number of website templates available — it offers over 3,500 customizable website designs while Adobe Express provides 1,000.

Both platforms let you publish your site on their servers — meaning you can either use an express.adobe.com or my.canva.site URL to host your site when it’s ready.

Importantly however, Canva also lets you map your site to a custom domain name (i.e., yoursitename.com). This means that technically, you can build a site with Canva that is more likely to be indexed properly by Google, and more trusted by users.

Despite this, Canva’s website builder really only suitable for the most basic of applications — at a push I’d use it for a simple portfolio site or a holding page for a project. If I wanted to build a truly professional site, I’d look elsewhere (most likely in the direction of Squarespace for a content site and Shopify for an ecommerce one).

Creating charts

You can create charts (bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, etc.) in both Canva and Adobe Express.

To use these tools, you enter your data into a simple table in the respective interfaces, and both tools automatically turn this into a chart or graph.

Adobe Express gives you more chart types to play with, giving you over 60 different chart styles to Canva’s 30 or so.

Canva makes it easier however to actually chart your data, thanks to integrations with a range of data services (including Google Sheets, Hubspot, Google Analytics and SheetSync). It also lets you upload data for charting.

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Brand controls

Both Adobe Express and Canva give you tools to help ensure your brand stays consistent across all of your designs. This is extremely important, because both tools are often used by team members without a background in graphic design.

Canva’s ‘Brand Kit’ and Adobe Express’ ‘Brands’ tool both allow you to:

(Canva also lets you upload brand photos, icons and graphics to your brand kit).

Once you have all of these brand elements in place, you can apply them across all of your designs in each platform.

In terms of typefaces, both platforms give you access to a large number of them — especially Adobe Express — its premium plans let you make use of 30,000+ Adobe fonts.

Canva lets you use around 3,000 typefaces (you can upload your own custom fonts to Canva, however, if the one you need isn’t present).

Now, if you’re looking to get access to these brand features on the free plans, unfortunately you’re out of luck — brand tools are only fully available on the paid-for versions of the two platforms.

In terms of brand kit capacity, Canva allows you to create one on its free plan, five on ‘Pro,’ 100 on ‘Business,’ and as many as 1,000 on ‘Enterprise.’

Adobe doesn’t specify equivalent limits for Adobe Express, but its marketing material suggests that you can create as many as you like so long as you are on a paid plan. Free plan users can’t make any brand kits in Adobe Express at all, however, so a win for Canva on that front.

Collaboration features

It’s very easy to organize your work in Canva and Adobe Express. Both tools have ‘project’ sections that let you create folders with which to store and organize your designs.

When it comes to collaborating on your work with Adobe Express, you can invite people to collaborate on or access a single design via an email link. However, the platform doesn’t let you share folders containing multiple projects.

With Canva, collaboration features are very strong. Even on its single-user plans (‘Free’ and ‘Pro’) you can share folders with others, and set ‘view’ or ‘edit’ permissions.

And if you’re on a Business plan, Canva gives you ‘workspaces’ where you can drop design assets and brand kits for others to access, as well as add members to your team (or create sub-groups within a team).

Content planning tools

Both Canva and Adobe Express include content planning tools that feature a calendar-style scheduler, allowing you to connect your account to social media platforms and schedule posts on them.

Both tools let you schedule posts on X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tiktok and LinkedIn; Canva goes a bit further by letting you publish to Slack and Tumblr too.

All in all, both tools provide good organization and collaboration features, but ultimately Canva offers more of them.

Exporting your designs

Once your design is completed, both Adobe Express and Canva offer a range of options for sharing and exporting your designs.

First, you can simply make use of a ‘share link’ from both platforms to send your graphic designs to others. This gives you an easy way to get feedback on your work from friends and colleagues.

Second, both platforms let you export your projects into a variety of file formats. With Canva, you can output your projects to:

Adobe Express caters for the following export formats:

Now although both platforms let you export your projects in PDF format, Adobe Express produces ‘unflattened’ PDFs. These files retain all the individual layers of your design as separate items — which means that you can easily edit an exported PDF in another program like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Acrobat.

By contrast, PDFs exported with Canva are ‘flattened’ files, so it’s not possible to tweak the individual design layers in another program.

(For the record, during my testing of Adobe Express, I could access the layers of my exported PDFs in Illustrator, but not in Photoshop).

On premium Canva plans, you have the ability to download ‘scalable vector graphics’ files (commonly referred to as SVGs). These are particularly useful for creating larger designs, because they can be blown up in size without becoming pixelated. They are also useful for creating web page designs and customizable icons.

So the lack of an SVG export option in Adobe Express is a significant omission (but that said, the option it gives you to export work in PDF can serve as a workaround.)

Another key difference between Canva and Adobe Express in terms of export options is the fact that Canva lets you export ‘PPTX’ Microsoft PowerPoint files. This lets you load a presentation created in Canva directly into PowerPoint for editing or presentation purposes.

To do this with Adobe Express, you’ll need to export your file to PDF format and then convert it to a PowerPoint file via another piece of software like Adobe Acrobat DC.

So the bottom line on exporting your design is this: Canva wins when it comes to the overall number of output formats available, but — thanks to the fact that its PDF export option preserves layers — Adobe Express can still be more flexible when it comes to letting you edit your designs in other applications.

Printables

As I discussed above, both Canva and Adobe Express let you export your designs as PDF files — the standard format that printers normally expect your artwork to come in. This means that you can use either platform to create designs that you print with a printer of your choice.

However, both Canva and Adobe Express also provide a range of design templates that are specifically for creating printed merchandise.

And, what’s more, both platforms can actually act as your printer (or product manufacturer). When you edit a print product template in either tool, you can use a ‘Print’ button to get your design professionally printed from within either interface.

Now, the range of printable items available from Adobe Express is fairly small — you only get a choice of a few different item types (these include folded cards, invitations, flyers, posters, business cards, t-shirts, and hoodies).

By contrast, Canva’s printable product range is significantly larger, with 60 different product types available — these include notebooks, photo books, t-shirts, table tents, retractable banners, tote bags, diaries, and more.

So I think it’s fair to say that Canva has the upper hand as a print solution for now, certainly when it comes to the selection of products available.

Now, let’s take a quick look at a few features you’ll find in Canva for which there are no equivalents in Adobe Express.

Features in Canva that you won’t find in Adobe Express

I’ll preface this by saying that Adobe Express has only been around since 2021, while Canva has been with us for well over a decade. So, it’s perhaps not unexpected that Canva is the more fully-featured tool.

But nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that there are several Canva features that have no equivalent in Adobe Express.

These include:

Let’s take a quick look at each.

Infinite whiteboard

Canva’s ‘Whiteboard’ tool allows you (and your team) conduct brainstorming workshops and design sprints, and create wireframe designs and mind maps.

The whiteboard is essentially an expandable canvas that lets you zoom out, pan and scroll around; you can drop any of Canva’s design assets onto it, as well as ‘sticky notes’ and a countdown timer.

The whiteboard facilitates real-time collaboration nicely: you can see what others are doing on a shared whiteboard (this works in a similar way to collaborating on a shared Google Doc). It also provides features for commenting and reacting to contributions with emojis and stickers.

In terms of the quality of Canva’s whiteboard feature, it is really good. When trying it out, I was very impressed with its ‘infinite zoom’ feature and its general usability and functionality.

While it doesn’t yet have the number of features available from dedicated whiteboard programs like Miro or Stormboard, you can definitely use it for team workshops or presentations — and the fact that it’s fully integrated with Canva’s massive asset library is a real plus.

Mockups

Canva includes a really useful mockup generator which lets you see how your designs will look in a ‘real world’ context.

For example, you can use the feature to quickly create a mockup of your design on a book cover, a phone screen, a mug, a greeting card or a laptop.

Considering that a dedicated mockup tool like ‘PlaceIt’ costs $7.47 per month, the fact that Canva offers this as a standard feature on its paid plans is highly commendable.

Documents

Canva’s word processing feature, ‘Canva Docs’, lets you create documents and can potentially be used as an alternative to desktop publishing apps like Microsoft Word.

This feature lets you make use of the full range of Canva design tools, templates and image assets — thus giving you the ability to craft very attractive, on-brand documents.

When you create a Canva Doc, there’s a handy ‘plus’ button in the body of your page that gives you access to lots of standard document editing tools (headings, tables, bullet point lists, etc.) — this makes the document creation process really quick and easy.

Canva Docs also features something rather unique that you won’t find in traditional desktop publishing software: a ‘Magic Write’ tool. This is an ‘AI-powered’ text generator that automatically generates content for your document — you enter a phrase or title and it generates the copy for you.

(Our tests found that the ‘Magic Write’ tool was good for generating ideas for articles, but not so brilliant when it came to creating fully accurate copy. For more details on this, check out our full Canva review.)

Canva Docs has a long way to go before it could fully replace the likes of Microsoft Word and Google Docs. It only lets you export your documents to PDF, for a start.

That said, it lets you do the large majority of word processing tasks really easily, and the Magic Write feature has its uses — so its inclusion in the Canva tool set is definitely a welcome addition.

Apps and integrations

The functionality of both Canva and Adobe Express can be enhanced thanks to the availability of apps that add additional functionality, and integrations with other tools and services.

Adobe Express has a library of 375+ different add-ons that can be used to beef up the built-in features of the platform. These include pattern makers, icon directories, audio editors, barcode makers and QR code makers.

In terms of integrations with popular business apps — and as discussed earlier — Adobe Express integrates pretty neatly with the major social networks; Google Drive; Google Classroom; Microsoft Teams, DropBox, One Drive and Blackboard.

As for Canva, its apps and integrations, can be found in its ‘app directory,’ pictured below. At the time of writing, there are around 300 apps available — less than the Adobe Express offering.

The majority of Canva’s apps and integrations relate to adding extra effects and extra touches to your designs, but there are also apps on offer that are more focused on integrations. These let you Canva account to web apps and services like YouTube, Facebook, Google Maps and Google Photos; form builders like Typeform; email marketing tools like Mailchimp; and productivity tools like Slack or OneDrive.

Using Canva and Adobe Express on mobile devices

Adobe Express and Canva both provide users with mobile apps — in both iOS and Android format — for creating designs on the go.

User reviews of these apps are very positive — the Adobe Express mobile app is rated 4.8 out of 5 in the iOS app store and Android users rate it at 4.5 out of 5. The Canva mobile app has also been well received by users, with a rating of 4.9 out of 5 in the iOS app store and 4.7 out of 5 in the Google Play Store.

In terms of functionality, the two sets of mobile apps provide almost all of the features available on the browser versions of these tools.

As for my personal testing, I tried out the Android versions of the two apps, and I found them both to be very user friendly — but overall, I felt that Canva’s app was the closer of the two to the desktop version of the tool.

(With either product, I’d generally recommend doing serious design work using the web app version though — content creation on a smartphone is very fiddly!).

Languages

Adobe Express and Canva both offer a range of ‘account languages’ — meaning that users can set up the platforms’ interfaces to display in their own language.

Adobe Express is available in 27 languages in total. By contrast, with Canva, there are around 100 account languages available in total.

Customer support

In terms of getting the help you need from Adobe Express and Canva, Adobe Express provides the more comprehensive offering here: it offers phone and live chat support, while Canva restricts you to raising support tickets via a contact form.

It’s a little bit tricky to actually access Adobe Express’ support, though; you’ll need to go to the Adobe Express help page and then click a (slightly buried) chat icon at the bottom of the page to start a help conversation. This will involve dealing with an AI chatbot, but one that can connect you to an agent…eventually.

If you need support from Canva however, the options are considerably more limited.

You’re basically restricted to raising support tickets via a contact form, and then waiting for a follow-up email. Finding this contact form is difficult — you’ll have to search for an answer to your problem in Canva’s troubleshooting page, and then click a ‘I still need help’ option. This will then surface the contact form.

(No information about response times to queries entered through it is provided on the Canva website.)

On the plus side, when it comes to accessing learning materials for the two platforms, both offer a plentiful supply of easy-to-follow support articles and videos via their online help portals. And both provide AI assistants that are actually pretty good.

User reviews and ratings

So far in this comparison, I’ve outlined my own perspective on Adobe Express and Canva. But it’s also worth looking at what users on independent review sites are saying.

The table below brings together ratings from major software review platforms (data accurate as of January 2026):

* Recalculated from an out-of-ten score

Both Adobe Express and Canva earn strong marks from users, with consistently high ratings across all three review platforms. The difference is very slight, but Canva came out marginally ahead.

Adobe Express vs Canva: the verdict

If you’re looking for a simple, browser-based design tool that lets you create professional-looking graphics quickly, both Canva and Adobe Express deliver. They’re easy to learn, packed with templates, and make it possible for non-designers to produce work that looks like it came from a professional creative team. In short, both platforms offer great value for money.

That said, Canva is probably the better all-in-one option for most users.

The main reason is breadth: Canva gives you considerably more features than Adobe Express and vastly more templates. It provides a better video editor, more output formats, and access to far more AI tools (even if some of their outputs are hit-and-miss). Perhaps the biggest edge that Canva has over Adobe Express however is its collaboration and organization features — these are considerably more advanced than the Adobe Express equivalents.

Adobe Express can still be a really good option however, particularly if you’re already in the Adobe ecosystem — the tool integrates really well with Adobe’s wider toolset. Its interface is cleaner, its “Quick Actions” are excellent time-savers, and its layer-preserving PDF exports can make it a more flexible option if you plan to hand work off into Illustrator or Acrobat for more advanced editing. And on pricing, Adobe offers a much lower per-seat cost (especially for teams) and very generous storage on multi-user plans.

As ever, the best way to discover which platform is right for you is to try both out — and you’ll find links to free trials for both platforms below.

I’ll conclude with a summary of the key pros and cons of both tools; if you have any questions about Canva vs Adobe Express, feel free to leave a comment below. We read them all and will do our best to help.

Adobe Express vs Canva — pros and cons summary

Alternatives to Adobe Express and Canva

In terms of browser-based apps, key alternatives include Visme, Kittl and VistaCreate (formerly Crello). These are similar graphic design platforms that let non-professional designers create visual material easily. To learn more about these tools, check out our Visme vs Canva, Canva vs Kittl and VistaCreate vs Canva comparisons). Our Kittl review is also of relevance here.

In some ways Figma can be considered an alternative to Canva too, as it provides presentation and whiteboard creation tools; but overall it caters for quite different use cases (you can learn more about these similarities and differences in our Canva vs Figma comparison).

It’s tempting to think of desktop Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere — and other tools you get in an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription — as direct alternatives to Adobe Express and Canva. But they are actually quite different.

While Adobe Express and Canva come with a built-in library of graphics, stock photos and videos, when using other Adobe apps, you usually have to source assets ‘outside’ of them. But they are nonetheless great tools for putting visual assets together with and ultimately considerably more powerful than Adobe Express or Canva.

(We highlight some of the key similarities and differences between Canva and Photoshop in our full Canva vs Photoshop comparison.)