Canva Pro compared: design platform with templates, AI and brand kits

Canva is available as the free version Canva Free and in the paid plans Canva Pro, Canva Business and Canva Enterprise. The reference edition in this comparison is Canva Pro on the yearly plan for one person. According to Canva, Pro is aimed at individuals who want to use premium tools, templates and content. Over three years, the yearly plan costs less than the monthly plan. The comparison takes the monthly price from the German App Store, because the pricing page only shows it after switching to monthly billing. The amounts are listed under “All plans”. Canva Business is billed per person and adds tools for teams.

Canva is an online service and is updated continuously. Canva does not state a version number for the web application on the checked pages; the app for iPhone and iPad has version 4.230.0 in the App Store. Canva lists new features on the pricing page, currently for example Canva Offline. According to the terms of use, Canva may add, change or remove features.

Platforms according to the technical requirements:

• Browser: current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera.
• Windows: desktop app from Windows 10 (version 1909).
• macOS: desktop app from macOS 12, according to the help for Macs with Intel and with Apple processors.
• iPhone and iPad: app from iOS 15.4 according to the help; the App Store names iOS 15.0 and iPadOS 15.0.
• Android: app, according to the requirements with Android System WebView from version 99.

Canva does not name a separate app for Linux there.

The interface is available in German; you set the language in the account settings. According to the terms of use, an account belongs to exactly one person, and you may not pass on your login details. With Canva Pro you cannot invite people to your team.

All plans renew automatically. If you cancel, payments stop and you keep the paid features until the end of the billing period. After that you continue with Canva Free; according to the help, your designs, brand kit content and shared folders are kept. According to Canva, there are generally no refunds, but every request is looked at. Instead of cancelling, you can pause Pro for up to three months. A plan bought in the App Store is cancelled via the App Store.

Canva works with designs rather than classic typesetting documents. You start with one of over a thousand design types or with a template; according to the pricing page, Canva Pro offers more than 3.6 million templates and over 141 million premium photos, videos, graphics and audio tracks. You drag and drop elements onto the page, and a design can have several pages.

Layout aids include margins, guides and rulers. According to the help, rulers are only available on a computer, and Canva currently does not support automatic custom margins. You can lock pages and elements so that they do not move by accident. However, anyone with edit access can remove the lock again.

Text sits in text boxes. According to the help, text does not flow automatically across several text boxes, and it does not wrap around a graphic or image placed over a text box. The help does not describe master pages, linked paragraph and character styles or a baseline grid. In our view, Canva is therefore of limited use for brochures, magazines and books with a lot of running text that you will revise and reflow later.

In brand kits you store logos, colours and fonts centrally; according to the pricing page, Canva Pro includes five brand kits. In Pro you upload your own fonts in OTF, TTF or WOFF format, provided their licence allows embedding. For text-heavy documents there is Canva Docs with columns, automatic and manual page breaks and an outline that shows your headings for navigation. According to the help, margins, bleed, rulers and crop marks are not yet available in Canva Docs.

For printing, you download your design as a print PDF. The PDF has 300 dpi and, if you want, bleed, crop marks and a colour profile in RGB or CMYK. According to the help, Canva fixes the bleed at one eighth of an inch, i.e. just over three millimetres on each side. It cannot be changed, and neither can the size of the crop marks. So check in advance which bleed your print shop expects.

According to the help, the editor works with hex codes, i.e. with RGB values. You convert CMYK values into hex codes with a colour picker, and in Canva Pro you can also add CMYK values to the colours of your brand kit. The CMYK PDF is part of the paid plans. The help does not say which ICC profile Canva uses for the conversion, and it does not describe soft proofing either. According to Canva, very bright RGB colours lie outside the printable colour range and cannot be printed exactly.

The help does not describe PDF/X, spot colours such as Pantone or HKS, a separations or overprint view, or a preflight check of finished PDFs. According to the help, however, Canva automatically detects problems in the design before printing and shows them per page; you accept corrections one by one. The help does not say whether this check also applies to PDFs that you have printed by another print shop.

For screen and web, Canva exports designs as PNG, JPG, SVG, GIF and MP4, presentations as PPTX and Canva Docs as DOCX. According to the help, SVG files and PNGs with a transparent background are part of the paid plans. You publish websites directly from Canva, on a free Canva domain or on your own domain; without the Canva footer this requires Pro. The help on download formats does not list EPUB or interactive PDFs with form fields.

In our view, Canva is not designed for long documents. Canva Docs offers page breaks, columns and an outline. The help does not describe an automatic table of contents, an index, footnotes, cross-references, a book file made of several documents, conditional text or an XML structure. In addition, according to the help, text does not flow across several text boxes. For manuals, catalogues and books with many pages, a classic layout program is therefore a better fit.

For data-driven layouts there is bulk creation (Bulk Create). According to the help, it generates hundreds of variants of a design in one go. The data comes from Canva Sheets, from an Excel or CSV file or from data apps, or you enter it directly. You connect text boxes as well as frames or grids for images to data fields, up to 150 fields are possible. Each row becomes a separate design or a new page in a shared design. The feature is only available on a computer and only in the paid plans, so it is included in Canva Pro.

For extensions there are apps from the Apps Marketplace that you use directly in the editor, for example to embed YouTube videos. Developers build their own apps and integrations. The help does not describe a scripting language that lets you control workflows in the program yourself.

Canva is an online service with an account. An internet connection is needed for, among other things, AI features, templates and elements from the Canva library, comments and real-time collaboration, new uploads, creating new designs as well as downloading and exporting. With Canva Offline you edit designs that you made available offline beforehand for up to 14 days without a connection. According to the help, this works in desktop browsers, in the desktop app and in the Android app, but not in the apps for iPhone and iPad.

AI tools in Canva Pro:

• Magic Write writes text from your prompt, rephrases, continues or shortens.
• The image generator creates images from a text description.
• Image tools remove backgrounds, among other things.
• You translate designs into over 100 languages; the original is kept, and the translation goes into a copy.
• Resize brings a design into other formats.

All AI tools need an internet connection and, according to the help, share one allowance. In Canva Pro this means up to 200 uses of premium AI tools or up to 20 uses of ultra AI tools per month; the allowance also resets monthly on the yearly plan. Standard AI tools do not count towards the allowance in paid plans. More uses are available with the paid add-on AI Pass.

According to Canva, you control in the privacy settings whether your content may be used to improve AI features, and you can change the setting at any time. The checked pages do not state the default for individual accounts. According to the Trust Center, Canva does not use content from Business, Teams and Enterprise accounts for this.

You share a design with the right to edit, comment or view, also via a link that lets others edit without signing in. Collaborators see other people’s changes live; guests can only comment after signing in. With Canva Pro you cannot invite people to your team; for that you need Canva Business. Brand controls that restrict colours and fonts to the brand kit and send designs for approval before publishing are, according to the help, available to admins in Canva Teams and Canva Business.

Your designs are stored in your Canva account; Canva Pro offers 100 GB of cloud storage for this. The help on download formats does not name a native file format for saving to your computer or an export as IDML.

Import:

• PDF: according to the help, you import a PDF to change text and replace images. Depending on the file, text and images are separated into editable elements, and scanned PDFs arrive as one merged image. Up to 500 pages and 300 MB are possible. According to the PDF editor page, Canva does not yet support soft masks, shadings, tiling patterns, colour filters, JPEG 2000 and JBIG, and Canva cannot always find the matching font. However, the same page and the help on upload formats also say that PDF pages arrive as images in an A4 document; the statements partly contradict each other.
• Word: you upload DOC, DOCX and DOTX files and, before converting, edit things such as text, font and spacing. According to Canva, fonts, line spacing, page numbers and indents are kept; comments from DOCX files are imported too.
• Other formats: PowerPoint, Illustrator files in PDF-compatible format and Photoshop files, plus images, videos, audio and fonts. According to the help, you upload Affinity files as originals with a full view of the content and convert them when needed.
• The list of upload formats does not include IDML or INDD files.

For the print shop you use the print PDF with bleed, crop marks and CMYK colour profile. In addition there are standard PDF, PNG, JPG, SVG, GIF and MP4, PPTX for presentations and DOCX for Canva Docs. Other people get a link to edit, comment or view.

When you switch to another program, you take your work with you in these formats. A PowerPoint export only works for presentations, a Word export only for Canva Docs. If you cancel Canva Pro, your designs remain accessible in Canva Free according to the help, and the paid features end with the billing period.

In our view, Canva suits anyone who wants to create designs quickly from templates while keeping brand colours, logos and fonts consistent.

Suitable for:

• beginners and clubs who design flyers, invitations and social media graphics in German and have them printed as a PDF with bleed,
• marketing and social media teams who resize many formats, translate designs, generate series from spreadsheets and work together in real time,
• freelancers and small businesses who want brand kits, presentations, documents and simple websites in one tool.

Less suitable for:

• books, magazines and catalogues with a lot of running text, because text does not flow across several text boxes and master pages and tables of contents are not documented,
• technical documentation with cross-references, conditional text or XML,
• prepress with PDF/X, spot colours, separations and a freely adjustable bleed,
• working without an account or without internet for longer periods.

According to the pricing page, Canva Free, Pro and Business include access to Affinity, Canva’s separate program; with Canva Pro you can also use the AI tools there. Affinity has its own entry in this comparison.