Canva Review (2023) — All the Pros and Cons

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In this detailed Canva review, I’m going to look at all the key pros and cons of an increasingly popular app for designing visual materials. Is it right for your business? Or should you stick with a professional desktop app like Adobe Photoshop? Let’s find out.

Let’s start our deep dive into Canva with a key question…

What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design app that aims to let you design visual materials without needing extensive graphic design experience. Typically, the tool is used to create social media graphics, simple videos, presentations, slides, posters and other visual assets — and a wide range of customizable templates and royalty free images is provided to help users do so easily.

Unlike traditional graphic design tools like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Canva’s learning curve is designed to be extremely gentle. This means that its feature set is more basic that these sorts of ‘pro’ solutions — but its pricing is considerably lower than them too.

Launched in 2013 by technology entrepreneur Melanie Perkins, Canva is now a hugely popular solution for creating designs, boasting over 135 million monthly active users (MAUs) in over 190 countries.

Over 15 billion designs have been created with the tool and 4,000 staff members now work for the company.

But how does it actually work?

How does Canva work?

Canva can be used either in a web browser or as a downloadable app (for Mac, PC, Chromebook, iOS or Android).

It gives you three key things to help you create your design:

Additionally, Canva provides controls for editing the typefaces and colours used on a template; it also lets you create custom templates.

The idea is that you simply pick a template, drop some content into it, make a few tweaks and then export your design for use online or as a printed item.

But how easy is this in practice?

Ease of use

When you log into Canva, you are presented with a question: ‘What will you design?’

You can answer this question by entering design ideas in the search bar provided, or clicking the icons underneath it. Doing so will give you access to suggested layouts for presentations, social media posts, videos, printed products and more.

Either way, you’ll end up with a wide range of templates to choose from. You can pick one of these as the starting point for your design.

From there, it’s a case of editing the template so that it meets your needs. You can do this by clicking on one of the design’s elements (text, visuals etc.) and using the controls that appear above it to change that element.

Alternatively, you can replace the placeholder content with your own images or text (or add additional pictures and copy).

To add an image to a template, you can either search for an element from Canva’s ‘elements’ library (hundreds of thousands are available, and I’ve yet to come across a search phrase that isn’t adequately catered for).

You just click on an element to add it to your design, and you can resize it easily to suit your purposes.

Where changing text is concerned, it’s simply a case of overwriting the existing copy, or using the ‘text’ tool (pictured below) to add new headings or body text.

Using ‘Magic Design’ to create a template

You don’t necessarily have to search for a template in Canva to find the right one for your project. This is thanks to a new AI feature, ‘Magic Design,’ that creates one for you based on images you upload. I tested this out using a picture of a musician, and Canva surfaced various template suggestions that were suitably ‘arty’ — I would have been happy to use them as a starting point for a design.

You can learn more about this feature in the video below.

Ultimately, the process involved in creating a design in Canva is simple and its interface is extremely user-friendly — anyone who’s used a word processor or a simple graphics tool will find the learning curve fairly non-existent.

And this learning curve has been made even more gentle recently with the addition of a new feature: the ‘Canva Assistant’, a chatbot-style tool that sits in the bottom-right corner of the design interface.

You can use the assistant to quickly search for design assets or Canva features that you wish to use in your current design.

It’s also worth pointing out that the fact that Canva’s interface is available in over 130 languages helps matters from an ease-of-use point of view too.

So all in all, it’s fair to say that Canva meets its goal of making graphic design extremely accessible to non-designers.

What about adding your own assets to Canva?

Although a key aim of Canva is to give you everything you need to create designs all in one place — photos, videos, typefaces, templates etc. — it also lets you import your own assets too.

This can be done via its ‘uploads’ section, which allows you to import images, videos or audio to your Canva account in a variety of formats: JPG, PNG, SVG, MP3, MP4, Illustrator and PPT.

(It also lets you record a video of yourself).

Once you’ve uploaded an asset, you can simply grab it from the ‘images,’ ‘videos’ and ‘audio’ tabs provided and insert it into your projects.

You can also add your own custom fonts to Canva — I discuss this in more depth shortly.

Photo editing options in Canva

Once you’ve added a photo to a design, you can tweak it easily using Canva’s photo editing tool.

To access this, you just click on a photo contained in one of your projects, and then on the ‘edit image’ button.

This gives you access to a set of simple controls that let you alter that image’s appearance in various ways. Sliders to adjust brightness, contrast, highlights and saturation are provided (amongst several others), and you can also make use of Instagram-style filters.

You can apply changes to your whole image, its background, or the foregrounded object (see screenshot below for an example of Canva controls being used to make some extreme changes to the background of a picture).

If you like, you can also edit images via Canva’s ‘modal photo editor’ (pictured below). This is a new, ‘standalone’ image editor that allows you to crop images, apply filters to them, remove their backgrounds or adjust color settings before adding them to a design.

You can also make use of an ‘auto-adjust’ option for correcting image colors.

I touched on Canva’s ‘background remover’ feature briefly above. This is a handy tool that, as its name suggests, lets you remove or replace the background from photographs. It works well and is particularly useful for creating headshot photos for websites or email signatures and thumbnails for YouTube videos.

Another photo-editing tool worth mentioning is Canva’s new ‘Photo Colors’ feature (pictured below). This automatically extracts the main colors from a photo into a palette, allowing you to incorporate them into other parts of your design — text, shapes, graphics etc.

Ultimately, it’s fair to say that Canva’s image editing tools are of a ‘cut-down’ nature. But they are powerful, incredibly easy to use and give you access to the features that are arguably the most relevant to effective graphic design work.

Editing videos in Canva

In addition to letting you create ‘static’ designs, Canva lets you create videos too. The process for video creation works in a broadly similar way to designing static content — you pick a template, tweak it, and add clips to your video as necessary.

Clips can either be imported to the uploads section, or you can add them to your video timeline using Canva’s extensive library of stock videos (which you’ll find in its ‘Elements’ section). Alternatively, you can use your webcam to record video directly into Canva.

The clips themselves can be tweaked —for example, you can crop, flip or animate them. We did find however that when we added animations to videos, they did not always export successfully; there may be a bug to address here.

One particular editing feature that’s worth singling out as being particularly impressive is Canva’s new video background removal feature (pictured below).

Although this is just available in BETA mode for now, and only works with videos that are 90 seconds or less in length, it’s very effective at stripping out busy backgrounds behind speakers — and just as easy to use as Canva’s background removal tool for static images.

Another nifty (and recently introduced) feature that helps simplify video editing is Canva’s automated ‘beat sync’ tool. This automatically matches your clips, footage, and accompanying animations to the tempo of the background music you’re using in your video.

Once you’ve got your video clips in place, a timeline lets you drag and drop them into place, trim them and create your final edit. You can also add audio to your video from a royalty-free library of over 25,000 pieces of music / sound effects.

Although the video creation functionality on offer from Canva is nowhere near as extensive as that which you’d find in a dedicated video editing application — you won’t be able to play with a wide range of transitions, or professionally grade your video content, for example — it’s extremely usable, and the built-in stock videos and audio libraries can help users save a lot of time and money.

Creating presentations in Canva

A key use of Canva is as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Now, it doesn’t give you all the bells and whistles that PowerPoint does (there are no 3D models or equation features to play with, for example, and the types of graphs you can create are more basic than those you can make with PowerPoint).

However, the range of tools on offer is still decent and the interface for designing presentations is extremely easy to use — in my view, easier than PowerPoint’s.

The template range is much bigger than PowerPoint’s too: Canva gives you over 16,200 templates to choose from, which come in 3 formats (16:9, 4:3 and ‘mobile first’). By contrast, PowerPoint gives you just 50 out of the box.

(You can read our full Canva vs PowerPoint comparison here.)

Recording a presentation in Canva is simple too; you can use your computer’s webcam and built-in microphone to record a video of yourself as you present the content (a circular video of you appears in the bottom left corner of the presentation when you do so — see highlighted section in screengrab below).

The only issue I have with creating presentations in Canva involves exporting them: although it’s perfectly possible to output your presentation to PowerPoint format (PPTX), it involves a strange and clunky process. Rather than using the standard ‘download’ link to export your presentation, you need to use a separate ‘share’ option and trawl through a wide range of sharing formats to do so.

It would be much better if you could simply choose to export designs to PPTX in the same manner as other file formats (I discuss exporting options in more depth shortly).

On the plus side, Canva does a very good job of exporting to PowerPoint format: when testing the feature, I was pleased to see that the exported version looked exactly how it did in Canva (see screenshot below).

If you like, you can import PowerPoint files to Canva for editing too. My experience of this was less positive — the imported files didn’t look quite the same as they did in PowerPoint. Some of this was down to font choice (not all the typefaces you have installed locally will be available in Canva), but other design elements didn’t import exactly as hoped for either.

Creating documents with Canva

The most significant recent addition to Canva’s feature set is its new ‘Canva Docs’ feature.

As its name suggests, this lets you create documents and can, if desired, be used as a simple alternative to desktop publishing apps like Microsoft Word.

Canva Docs lets you use all of Canva’s design tools, templates, brand kits and stock visuals when creating a document, giving you a quick way to create attractive, on-brand content that ‘pops’ off the page or screen.

(There are over 310 templates available that are specifically for creating documents with — these include project proposal, press release, style guide and student journal templates).

Although you could technically create similar documents with tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, the process for doing so would arguably take a lot longer and you’d need to source all the imagery for your documents outside of the applications themselves.

That said, Canva Docs is not yet a substitute for a professional desktop publishing app — try inserting a table of contents, using advanced markup or adding page numbers into a Canva document and you’ll find out why!

You’ll also be disappointed if you’re hoping to create something in Canva Docs for editing in Word: only PDF export of documents is currently possible (that said, there are plenty of tools available that you can use to convert PDFs to Microsoft Word format).

But Canva Docs does offer something unique that you won’t yet find in traditional desktop publishing apps: its new ‘Magic Write’ tool. This is an ‘AI-powered’ text generator that Canva claims can automatically create the content for your document — you give it an article or paragraph title and let it come up with the copy for you.

You can think of this as a basic ChatGPT-style content generating tool, albeit a more basic one.

In my tests, I found that the copy that Magic Write provided wasn’t terrible — but there were issues with accuracy.

For example, when I asked Magic Write to give me a summary of The Beatles’ history, it gave me a grammatically-sound and broadly correct paragraph about the band’s early years — but also a weird section about their ‘final era’ which apparently ‘lasted from 1970 until their break up in 1970.’

I found Magic Write to be of most use for getting ideas for document structures. As a test, I asked it to give me an outline for a blog post comparing two ecommerce platforms we write about a lot, Wix and Shopify — and I was pretty impressed with the content headings it suggested (see screenshot below for the test results). The headings provided definitely reflected the type of sections we typically use in our ecommerce comparisons.

Ultimately the Magic Write feature has a bit of a way to go before it can create copy that doesn’t require editing before publication. But it is good at generating ideas that can inform how you go about creating text-based content.

Creating charts and data visualizations in Canva

Although Canva is typically thought of primarily as a go-to tool for creating social media graphics, it also gives you some really useful (and often overlooked) features for creating charts and graphs.

You can create up to 19 different types of chart using Canva, including bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, histograms and more.

The feature is extraordinarily easy to use — you simply enter your data into a table on the left hand side of the Canva interface, which Canva then automatically turns into a chart or graph (see screenshot below).

These can be exported to a variety of file formats, or embedded on websites via a code snippet (the latter method of presentation giving you a way to update your data in Canva and show the most up to date graphs on your site automatically).

If that’s not enough for you, you can also make use of a new data visualization feature in Canva — an integration with the ‘Flourish’ platform, which is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to create interactive data visualizations.

We’ve used Flourish in the past and it is capable of truly stunning results, so its integration into Canva is a really exciting development.

As things stand, you can only produce two types of data visualizations via the Flourish integration, a hierarchical treemap and packed circle charts, but even these formats give you fantastic ways to present your information.

For me, Canva’s charting capabilities and the Flourish integration represent standout features of the tool that give you really simple ways to present statistics and data in an extremely attractive, on-brand way.

You can learn more about creating charts with Canva here.

Exporting your projects

Once you’ve created your design or video in Canva, you can export it to a variety of formats, namely:

To be honest, by comparison to professional design tools (or even similar ‘prosumer’ tools like Adobe Express), this is quite a small range of output formats, and represents one of the key drawbacks of Canva.

If you use a professional graphics or video editing package, you’ll be able to export your content into just about any format going — but Canva really limits your options here.

Significantly, you can’t export to Adobe Photoshop’s PSD format, meaning that if you want to start a design off in Canva and then send it to a professional graphic designer for enhancement, you’re out of luck.

(Workarounds for addressing this situation exist — involving converting files to PDF and using third-party tools to separate layers out — but they’re clunky).

And only one video export format is provided: MP4 (with no options provided to adjust its size or quality).

Now, to be fair, Canva does cover the basics with its output formats, and a lot of its users won’t really need a bunch of additional ones; the key aim of the product is to let people create quickly, and export simply. For most applications, the range of export formats will be fine (especially if you’re using Canva to create content that’s destined to be consumed online).

But some users will miss the flexibility to output in a format of their own choosing.

And speaking of flexibility…

Embedding Canva projects

It’s important to note that you don’t always have to export your Canva project to a file format. If displaying a design digitally, you can also embed it.

To do this, you simply grab a snippet of code from Canva and add it to your website. Doing so will display your project — but crucially, reflect any changes that you make to it in Canva automatically.

Ensuring brand consistency with Canva

As we’ve seen above, Canva provides users with a lot of tools and content to create marketing materials with — templates, graphics, stock photos, videos etc. In theory, you could use all these to design your assets, without needing to resort to anything else.

You could even use Canva to create an entire brand identity — i.e., create a logo in Canva; define a color palette; and choose fonts for your brand from the extensive range provided within the platform.

In fact, ‘suggested’ brand identities are available from Canva — color palettes and typefaces.

But in practice, most businesses will need to configure Canva so that they can create designs that reflect an existing brand identity.

To this end, Canva provides you with the option to create a ‘brand hub.’

This lets you:

On paid-for plans, you can create multiple brand kits (100 on the ‘Canva Pro’ plan, and 300 on ‘Canva for Teams’).

Once your brand kit is in place, whenever you’re creating in Canva, you can apply / add any of these brand assets to your design.

On the ‘Canva for Teams’ plan, you also get a couple of other features to help you maintain brand consistency across your designs:

(You can learn more about the Canva free trial here).

Organizing work and collaborating in Canva

Organizing your work in Canva is pretty straightforward. A simple folder structure lets you create folders that house your designs.

If you’re on a ‘Canva for Teams’ plan, these folders can be shared with other team members, who can then edit any designs that they contain. This works in a similar way to Dropbox and other sharing services — you simply share a folder with a team member by entering their email address into the folder’s settings.

One thing you’ll need to note here is that to share a folder with a team member, you have to create a ‘team’ in Canva first.

The ‘Canva for Teams’ plan gives you 5 user accounts by default, with additional charges applying when you add more team member accounts to your plan.

(More details on Canva pricing in a moment!).

Building a website with Canva

In addition to being able to create visual assets with Canva, you can technically use it to build websites too.

It has to be said however that only very simple websites can be created with the platform — you can build a one-page site ‘brochure’ site with Canva, but that’s about it. The sites that you can make with Canva look very professional and on-brand, but you can forget about incorporating things like a complex navigation structure or ecommerce into them.

Simply put, although you can create a simple online presence with Canva (and a lot of people have: over 2 million, according to Canva), it doesn’t give you the sort of professional website building features that site builders like Shopify and Squarespace do.

The site designer might be appropriate for some users’ needs, however — if all you need is a basic resume site with some copy and a few pictures, it’ll do the job fine. Over 900 web design templates are available which you can populate with website content easily.

When you’ve created your site, you can publish it in three ways:

Making products with Canva

Another interesting aspect of Canva is the fact that you can actually manufacture physical products using the platform.

To do this, you go to its ‘Print products’ section, where a wide range of items can be designed (45 different products in total) and purchased.

These include:

In a nice ‘ethical’ touch, Canva runs an ecological scheme to offset the environmental impact of manufacturing a product through the platform: for every order made, Canva plants one tree.

Ultimately though, I’d view Canva’s product manufacturing option as a ‘nice to have’ feature rather than a core one.

First, all the products available are quite expensive, meaning that you can’t really make something, mark up on it, and sell it to somebody else. The cost price of a t-shirt is around $25, for example.

Second, the number you can order at once is capped — when testing the feature, any item I tried to manufacture was limited to 50 copies. This makes the option unsuitable for anyone wishing to mass produce items — such users would be better off using a dedicated print on demand solution like Printful or SPOD instead.

Finally, it’s worth noting that printed products created with this feature can’t be shipped to all countries yet (this is a particular issue where African nations are concerned).

Additionally, you need to be careful regarding using stock imagery on items that you print from Canva — various licensing restrictions apply. The below video explains some of the issues involved.

Apps and integrations

Like a lot of other SaaS (software as a service) products, Canva provides a range of apps and integrations that add functionality or help it integrate more neatly with other popular services.

At time of writing, 154 are currently available, which you’ll find in its ‘app directory,’ pictured below.

The apps on offer generally are to do with adding special effects to your images, or retouching them; but some add more ‘key’ functionality too (apps are required, for example, if you want to draw with Canva or create digital art).

The integrations available generally help you import images or videos from other apps into Canva. For example, you can connect your Canva account to services like Google Photos, Google Maps, YouTube and Facebook and bring content in from them (which you can then incorporate into your designs).

A particularly useful app for many users will be the ‘Mockups‘ one (previously ‘Smartmockups’). This lets you see how your design will look in context in the ‘real world’ — for example on a book cover, in a picture frame, in a smartphone etc.; it can serve as a built-in alternative to the similar ‘PlaceIt’ mockup generator.

If you’re in search of original imagery to use in your designs, you might be interested in Canva’s new ‘text to image’ generator app (currently available in BETA mode).

This app lets you enter a phrase that, thanks to the magic of AI (artificial intelligence), is automatically converted into a new image for you. 18 styles are available, presented in three categories: photography, digital art and fine art.

I tested this app out by entering the phrase ‘David Bowie eating cheese’ into Canva, and I got the below result for its ‘colorful’ digital art setting.

Another app we found particularly useful while testing Canva was ‘Typecraft,’ which lets you bend, warp and twist text in lots of interesting ways.

Oddly however, I couldn’t find any Canva apps for popular website builders, like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify. These are all services that could definitely benefit from an integration with Canva, because it is so good for producing web graphics, product mockups and blog banners.

Email marketing services and CRM tools are catered for, however — integrations are available for popular tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot, Constant Contact and Activity Messenger.

If the apps on offer aren’t enough for you, you could always consider building your own — a developer’s platform for Canva provides access to the platform’s API and lets you create your own ‘content extensions’ that let you integrate Canva with other tools in various ways. (Obviously you’ll need the development skills to do this.)

Using Canva on mobile phones

As you’ll have noticed from the screenshots on this post, I’ve largely based this Canva review on the browser-based version of the app (for the record, the desktop versions for Mac OS and Windows are very similar to to this).

You can however also use Canva on a mobile device, thanks to iOS and Android apps that are available for the platform.

The app scores exceptionally highly on the Google Play app store, with a 4.8 out of 5 stars; however, iOS users seem a bit less impressed however, awarding it 3.6 out of 5 stars.

In my own test of the app, I found that it was really easy to use, providing an interface that was very similar in nature to the desktop version (albeit squashed down a bit!).

And we are not talking about a cut-down version of the platform here; you can do serious work with Canva on a smartphone.

That said, I’d still be inclined to use the browser or desktop-based version of Canva wherever possible: editing photos and videos on a phone is rather fiddly and I don’t enjoy doing that much!

But for people who are on the move and want to put together a slick-looking video for social media platforms really quickly, Canva’s mobile apps are an excellent option.

Customer support

There are two ways to avail of customer support from Canva.

First, there’s the Canva help center, which contains a searchable archive of help resources and how-to guides.

There’s also email support. The form for this is easy to access — with some other online apps, you don’t get to see contact details until you’ve searched a help center for a solution to your problem first, but Canva makes the them very easy to find (googling ‘contact Canva support’ should sort you out pretty quickly).

In terms of turnaround times for support queries, these vary according to plan:

It’s a shame that phone or live support isn’t available, but the fact that users of the Canva free plan get support is commendable, and given the low pricing point of Canva, it’s fairly understandable that customer service is email-only.

And speaking of pricing…

Pricing and value for money

So far, we’ve looked at all the key features of Canva; but not its pricing. Let’s dive into that now.

Canva pricing plans

There are three main versions of Canva to consider:

If you pay for your Canva plan on an annual basis, a discount of 16% is applied.

Subject to a vetting process, free or discounted plans are provided to educational organizations (via the company’s ‘Canva for Education’ and ‘Canva for Districts’ plans). Similarly, and again subject to eligibility checks, non-profits can use Canva for free too (via the ‘Canva for Nonprofits’ plan).

In terms of the differences between these three plans, the key things to watch out for are as follows:

(Note: our Canva Pro vs Free comparison spells some of these feature differences out in more detail).

Value for money

There’s no doubt about it: Canva offers you a lot of bang for your buck.

For a relatively small monthly fee, you can enjoy access to a wide range of design tools and visual assets that let you create extremely professional results, extremely quickly.

Not just you, necessarily — 5 seats are included by default on a $29.99 ‘Canva for Teams’ account. By any stretch, this represents very good value, particularly for small business owners on low budgets.

And, when you consider that Canva’s monthly fee is less than what you’d pay for just one stock photo from Getty or iStock, but gives you access to millions of stock images and videos, this sense of value for money becomes even more pronounced.

It’s worth pointing out however that oddly, Canva becomes more expensive on a per-user basis if you purchase more accounts (the reverse is often the case with other apps). For example, if you have 5 users in your Canva account, the average monthly fee per user is just $5.99. But if you increase the number of users to 50, the per-user price rises significantly — to $13.49 per user.

Even so, you need to remember that many business apps requiring a monthly subscription typically cost a lot more than Canva — the SEO apps we review, for example, typically range from $99 to $400 per month in price, and come with extremely small seat counts. So despite Canva’s slightly strange approach to seat pricing, I’m still struggling to think of any product that we’ve reviewed to date that offers quite so much functionality for such a low price.

Canva review conclusion

Overall, Canva is a really solid, easy-to-use app that is packed with features that make designing visual assets simple. Whilst not always a substitute for a professional graphic design tool or video editing application, it is considerably easier to use than such tools, and in many contexts will do the job just as well as them (and more cheaply, too).

The main downsides of Canva are the fact that it’s output formats are limited; there’s no way to back up projects; and support is email-only. Of those three flaws, the output formats issue is the most significant, as it limits your ability to start a design in Canva and have it finished off by a professional designer in another app. But given how cheap Canva is, it’s hard to feel too annoyed by these omissions.

I’ll leave you with a summary of the key pros and cons of Canva, and you’ll also find some information on some alternative tools below.

Key pros and cons of Canva

Alternatives to Canva

There are quite a few alternatives to Canva available.

Browser-based alternatives

In terms of browser-based apps, key alternatives include Visme, Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) and VistaCreate (formerly Crello). These are similarly affordable graphic design tools that let non-professional designers create visual material easily. (If you’re interested in learning more about these tools, we have Visme vs Canva, Adobe Express vs Canva and Canva vs VistaCreate comparisons available.)

Adobe apps

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 Canva. But they are actually quite different beasts.

While Canva comes with a built-in library of graphics, stock photos and videos, when using the Adobe apps, you often have to source assets ‘outside’ of them. But they are nonetheless great tools for putting visual assets together with, and at the end of the day, considerably more functional than Canva.

(You can learn more about the differences between Adobe Photoshop and Canva in our in-depth comparison of Canva and Photoshop.)

Web design tools

Although Canva can technically be used as a web design tool, the truth is that there significantly better platforms available for building websites — just a few examples include Squarespace, Webflow, Wix and Shopify.

Print-on-demand tools

If a key aim of using Canva is to create printed materials or physical items with it, you might also want to investigate dedicated print-on-demand apps like Printful or Printify. These tend to come with larger and cheaper product ranges, and facilitate the production of greater number of items in one go.

You can learn more about Printful in our ‘What is Printful?’ guide and our in-depth review of the platform.