Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to design and publish social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content using its user-friendly drag and drop tool and thousands of customizable templates. It is by far one of the most popular graphic design sites for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and bloggers – but is Canva worth the hype? 

In this Canva review, we’ll go through what exactly Canva is, the prices, all the different features and the pros and cons so that you can decide for yourself whether it’s for you. 

What is Canva?

As we know, recently, the importance of visual content has skyrocketed. This means that all business owners should work to produce the best visual images they can for their business and/or marketing campaigns. 

Canva a simple tool is designed to give anyone the ability to create professional-looking images and videos in no time so it’s perfect for busy solopreneurs, bloggers and small business who don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to their designs/branding but don’t want to sacrifice on the quality of the end product.

Canva Features

Complete customisation

Canva has a huge collection of resources at your fingertips. This includes over 1.5 million images, templates, designs, icons, shapes, symbols backgrounds and more. You can easily use these elements to customise your designs by simply drag and dropping them into your editor. 

All the designs are professional-looking and ready-to-use but can be customized by editing the colours, sizes, shapes or by uploading your images. 

You can easily crop your images, trim your videos, add stickers, gifs, add effects, adjust the transparency, blur your images and a lot more, all within your editor.

Canva Resources

The so-called Canva ‘Design School’ is a series of courses, blogs and articles that help you make the most of the platform, whether you are an amateur designer or a professional. The school has several courses and tutorials teaching users about all the different aspects of design, marketing and branding. There are also blogs and articles written by professionals containing, tips, inspiration and design secrets. 

Canva has a complete resource library to help you interactively choose your brand colour with their colour wheel and colour palette functionalities. They also have logo maker and font combinations feature to help you with the branding of your business.

This is a free resource, so it’s a good idea to take advantage of it, especially if you are a graphic design newbie, and even if you do have design experience, it’s still worth browsing through as you are sure to learn something new.

Canva Brand Kit

The Brand Kit is a resource in Canva Pro that lets you put all your branding in one place. This ensures that all your designs for your business or blog stay consistent which is crucial if you want your business to look professional and for building a brand image for your consumers. 

Canva Integration

Canva integrates well with a lot of third-party sites. Some of these include emoji, Typeform, bitmoji and Hubspot.

One useful tool that you might not know about is the integration of smart mockup. It is a great tool to help you create realistic and beautiful mockups of your designs with book covers, T-shirts, mugs and others.

Canva now has a social planner function for you to visualise when your content will be published on your social media platforms. You can also upload them directly to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other third-party sites without going through the effort of downloading and saving them, which helps keep your work efficient and organized.

Create a team

The ‘Create a team’ feature of Canva is a brilliant way to collaborate with your staff or coworkers. You can communicate and share templates, designs, folders with your team members without clogging up your teams’ emails with multiple emails filled with heavy attachments after each tiny tweak in the design. 

So it’s a must-have feature for small teams who want to keep all their members on the same page when designing a marketing campaign. If you’re a marketing consultant, on the other hand, this feature is also a useful way to let your clients see what you are doing and give input. 

Canva Additional features

Canva continues to change and evolve and there are new incredible features that get rolled out regularly, like adding animations to your content, making a website straight from Canva, one-click function to remove the image background. 

They now have Canva Print, which prints your designs or other professional designs directly through the Canva platform. You can get T-shirts, business cards, posters, invitations and all kinds of physical products. 

They have also recently introduced a new feature where you can record yourself talking through a presentation. This is so valuable so you can share the presentation with your team or even your audience. You can also engage with your audience when you present with Canva Live and allow people to ask questions and display them on the screen so you can take discussions. 

How I use canva

Canva is my favourite tool to use for creating beautiful and professional designs. I use Canva to design nearly everything for my businesses, from social media images, banners, promotional images to book covers and a lot more.

Even for producing some short-form videos like videos for social media posts, I use Canva to help me quickly and easily create engaging and eye-catching content. 

The downside I see with using Canva is that it is a very popular tool and I see the same templates being used over and over again. That’s why I tend to spend some time creating my templates and buy Canva templates from marketplaces such as Creativemarket. It has a lot of templates that are made especially for Canva for an affordable price. 

Canva Pro’s

• Easy to use – Canva is super user-friendly. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to navigate through it and it allows for easy use from the customer. It’s a strength because similar products will be more complex and require you to have a better understanding of design techniques.
• Design – Anyone can easily throw together an appealing looking graphic on this platform. You don’t need to be a marketing genius to use this platform as Canva is essentially a graphic design software for dummies, so it’s ideal for those with little design experience
• A wide array of templates – Canva has an extensive selection of different templates to use, as well as objects to create templates that are great for whatever you need. It also has the advantage of creating design specific materials like a LinkedIn header or Twitter post/poster

Canva Con’s

• 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 already a really popular design platform, and because of this, the templates might become overused. So your designs would seem unoriginal. This can be fixed by upgrading to the paid version or customising your designs more.
• The mobile app is not a good as the website, the company would do well to ensure consistency across all versions of the platform

Canva Pricing 

Canva Free plan

For individuals and small businesses who want to create and download designs for any occasion

Most entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and bloggers can get by on Canva’s free plan and won’t be disappointed. There are templates in nearly every format you can think of – from Twitter banners, Instagram stories, Pinterest graphics, to LinkedIn headers – in all sorts of resolution qualities.

The free plan still offers lots of styles, layout ideas, backgrounds and fonts. Everything is customizable, but all these elements ensure that everything you make looks appealing and professional. 

Canva Pro plan

For individuals and small businesses who want more advanced tools and more content, £8.99/month billed yearly (approx £108) or £10.99 billed monthly. 

The pro plan of Canva has a few additional features that some people consider indispensable such as the unlimited storage for photos, exclusive access to 400,000 free photos, illustrations and templates. 

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to improve your marketing by enhancing your images and videos, but you are new to design, then Canva may just be the platform for you. It’s a simple tool that gives anyone the ability to create professional-looking images and videos in no time, so it’s perfect for busy solopreneurs, bloggers and small business who don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to their designs/branding but don’t want to sacrifice on the quality of the end product.

It’s possible to get by on just the free version of Canva but bear in mind that the popularity of this site may lead to some of the templates being overused by other entrepreneurs, though this is nothing that a little extra customization won’t fix.