Canva's Visual Suite is a template-based cloud app for creating communication graphics. It enables anyone—regardless of artistic talent or skill—to use simple, drag-and-drop features to create broadly accessible visual content. Small businesses can use the platform to collaborate in real time on animated branded assets, social media posts, slide decks, and more. Moreover, communications teams at larger enterprises can easily organize graphic assets into a corporate design system that keeps employee-generated content on brand. Otherwise, the app offers a wide range of AI-powered Magic Studio tools, an array of useful plug-ins, free workshops for learning best practices, a robust image library, and templates galore. Thanks to its accessibility and deep collection of tools, Canva is easily an Editors' Choice winner for graphic design software.

Pricing: Somewhat Pricey, With a Great Free Plan

Canva has four pricing tiers: Canva Free (free for one person), Canva Pro ($15 per month or $120 per year for one person), Canva for Teams ($10 per month or $100 per person per year, with a minimum of three users), and Canva Enterprise (custom pricing). If you plan to use Canva for an extended period, the annual billing option offers significant savings. A 30-day trial is available for the Canva Pro and Canva for Teams plans, though you must provide payment information up front. The company generously makes Canva Pro free for verified and registered not-for-profit organizations, schools, and teachers. 

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

With the free plan, you can create and experiment with Canva’s drag-and-drop editor using over a thousand design formats (documents, social posts, spreadsheets, and videos), two million templates, and four million photos and graphics (including Mockups, which overlay your design on products, such as phone screens and t-shirts). You also get one brand kit (ensures brand consistency across custom sets of colors, fonts, and logos) and limited access to a subset of Magic AI-powered tools, including interactive design building, Magic Design, Magic Write, and manual Beat Sync. Although the Free plan now offers unlimited folders, it restricts you to 5GB of online storage.

A Canva Pro account includes 1TB of cloud storage, up to 1,000 Brand Kits, and over five million templates. You also get a collection of around 140 million animations, audio files, fonts, graphics, photos, and videos. This level also provides a social content planner that supports direct publishing on eight social media platforms. Finally, this plan lets you upload custom fonts and unlocks the remaining suite of AI and design tools—Automatic Beat Sync, Magic Edit, Magic Eraser, Magic Grab, Magic Resize (including at scale), and more. You also need at least this tier to get live chat support.

The Canva Teams plan includes everything in Pro, along with the ability to control who can access AI features. It also unlocks usage reports. Canva for Enterprise adds dedicated support case management, organization-wide brand kits and templates, and single sign-on support.

All plans allow you to export designs as JPGs, PDFs, and PNGs, but Canva Pro subscribers and above can export CMYK files, too, which is essential for printing outside of Canva's ecosystem. That said, you can order basic prints directly through Canva. Note that, as with Adobe Firefly, using AI features requires credits. Each account level comes with a limited number of credits for various features each month.

Canva vs. Adobe Express: The Last Two of Their Kind

With the demise of Microsoft Designer’s lightweight, standalone version (it’s now available only through a Microsoft 365 subscription), Canva’s most serious competition is the slightly more affordable Adobe Express. It has a robust free tier that includes more than 220,000 professional templates, 500,000 stock images, and oodles of stock audio clips, fonts, icons, sound effects, videos, and more. A multitude of file conversion options, real-time collaboration features, video editing capabilities, and 5GB of online storage round out the package. You also get a limited number of credits.

The Express Premium tier (which you can try for 30 days) has more of everything, along with basic brand management capabilities and various time-saving features. It's available for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. You can also get it as part of a Creative Cloud subscription ($69.99 per month, with an annual commitment). The Express Teams tier offers a 14-day trial, after which it costs $7.99 per person per month or $79.99 per year up front. Note that this plan has a two-seat minimum.

Adobe Express and Canva are easy-to-use, drag-and-drop web apps. Both continuously gain rousing improvements across their AI functionality (Magic Studio and Firefly, respectively), branding tools, collaboration, stock audio and images, and more. Both companies offer a profusion of onboarding material for new users and education highways for more advanced ones.

Even though Express works seamlessly within the Adobe ecosystem (you can copy and paste from Creative Cloud apps and automatically save InDesign and Illustrator designs to Express), it’s still an astute alternative.

What's New in Canva?

Canva recently debuted its ambitious Visual Suite 2.0, which propels it ahead of Express not just in terms of the variety and usefulness of its templates but also its special features. For instance, you can now easily access hundreds of third-party apps and integrations, build complex data visualization tools, create live mind maps, and construct compelling spreadsheets. This update also introduces a text-to-code capability and a website builder (which supports multipage or scrolling layouts). The latter is much more flexible than the Spark Page feature in Express, which helps you build just scrolling web pages. 

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Here are some of the highlights among the sparkling new productivity tools: 

• Canva Sheets are visual, AI-powered spreadsheets that support live data connectors to Google Analytics, HubSpot, Statista, and more. A Magic Insights tool automatically detects trends and evaluates them.
• Magic Charts convert raw spreadsheets into interactive, shareable visuals and infographics based on your data.
• Canva Code lets you build interactive tools such as calculators, quizzes, and widgets using natural-language prompts. This is convenient for kids, teachers, and others who either don’t code or are learning.
• Magic Studio at Scale enables next-level personalization via bulk content creation using spreadsheet-driven templates. One design can become a variable data piece or transform into a multitude of different layouts instantly, while staying on brand.  

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Other Improvements and Some Requests

Two upgrades to Canva’s typography controls delight me: Kerning (the spacing between some or all letterforms in a word) and Ligatures (a special glyph made by combining two letterforms that otherwise struggle with one another spatially; 'f' and 'i' are a common example). Typography control is slowly improving, yet it still has a long way to go. I hope Canva soon gives me control over spacing between paragraphs so I don’t have to use the loathed double return. Additionally, I want access to OpenType features, better control of linespacing and indents in bulleted items, true small caps, and better hyphenation options.

Similar Products

Our Current Picks for The 5 Best AI Tools to Maximize Your Online Meetings

Zoom Workplace

4.5 Outstanding

Read Our Review

Canva

4.5 Outstanding

Read Our Review

Miro

4.5 Outstanding

Read Our Review

Otter

4.5 Outstanding

Read Our Review

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Aside from the aforementioned ability to create multi-page websites, you can now embed sheets, whiteboards, and most anything else you assemble in Canva on your site—and it’s all free to publish. The only caveat is that the domain name will have the word Canva in it somewhere. I occasionally use Canva to make ephemeral mini sites for events, and if my clients care about the Canva word showing up in the URL, I create a hyperlink using other words. Of course, you will still see the word Canva in the destination URL.

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Finally, the new AI Voice in Video feature is here to save you if, like most people, you hate the sound of your own voice. It simply generates a text-based voice-over for your explainer videos and the like.

Those changes are all good, but I would still like the ability to add effects like a drop shadow to elements, such as outlined text, shapes, and other vector-based graphics.

Getting Started and Interface: A Significant Evolution

Canva works on all major platforms (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows) and the web. With its friendly “What will you design today?” header on its home page and familiar placement of toolbars, Canva is easy to explore and learn the ropes. A scrolling row of project options (such as PhotoEditor, Presentation, Video, and Whiteboard) helps you decide what to design. The modern interface stays manageable by relying on lots of collapsible tool and action menus. Canva stores your projects under the Projects tab, where you can make folders as necessary. Recent designs always appear at the top of the list.

Alongside Visual Studio 2.0, Canva introduces a unified One-Design workspace, a merged environment for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, videos, whiteboards, and websites—all within a single project. The abundance of options feels a bit paralyzing at first, but it won't take long for your brain to adjust to where everything is.

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Canva’s support Chatbot is actually really helpful. Any time you get stuck, you can just ask, for example: “How do I create a mock-up?” It then comes up with numbered steps. If following the steps doesn't get you the result you want, like in my example, you can follow up with the chatbot. The bot responded that “the art you are wrapping must be an ungrouped raster image.” Problem solved…I simply needed to make a JPG out of my grouped image. 

(Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Canva)

Magic Studio: The Core of Canva’s Visual Suite

To clarify Canva’s nomenclature, Magic Studio refers to the collective AI features within Visual Suite. Canva introduced Magic Studio in 2023 as an AI-first design platform, but the since-acquired Leonardo.AI startup now powers the experience. You can find all the following gems, and many more, within Magic Studio 2.0.

• Magic Design turns a prompt or your own media into captivating and fully designed presentations, videos, and more. Speed up the creation process by simply entering your idea, selecting a color scheme, and watching complete designs come to life—ready for you to share or further customize.
• Magic Expand can extend the canvas of zoomed-in images or turn a vertical shot horizontal by recovering or filling in whatever is outside the frame.
• Magic Grab lets you select and separate any subject in your photo so that you can edit, reposition, or resize it.
• Magic Media is the app's text-to-image and text-to-video component. It turns text into engaging photos or images, and lets you explore a wide range of style options. The new Create a Video Clip tool lets you create cinematic-quality video clips—with sound— from a simple text prompt.
• Magic Morph instantly transforms words and shapes into new colors, patterns, styles, and textures with a simple prompt.
• Magic Switch is a feature that converts designs into an array of formats with one click. So, for example, you can turn a presentation into an executive summary or create a blog post from a whiteboard or mind map. It can also translate your text into various languages while you’re at it.
• Magic Write and Brand Voice combine to serve as a supercharged AI copywriting assistant with an ear for your brand's style. All you need to ensure consistency in designs or documents is to add tone guidelines to your Brand Kit. These features can generate on-brand content every time, in testing.

(Credit: Canva/PCMag)

Creating a Test Project: Quick and Easy

I wanted to create a fast project for this review from scratch (almost), so I designed a little poster to celebrate my studio’s upcoming anniversary. To save time, I developed the concept to highlight Canva’s AI variety that could be generated from a single prompt: A bee coming out of a conch shell.

The first step was to make the nine AI-generated illustrations. I wanted the number of illustrations to be a multiple of the years the studio has been in business (36). Then I used AI writing to find a word that meant a period of nine years.

(Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper/Canva)

Next up was setting the type and using the AI mock-up feature, and voilà.

(Credit: Shelby Putnam Tupper)

Safety, AI Training, and Accessibility: Serious Precautions

Canva makes safe, ethical AI use a priority. The privacy, safety, and security controls under the Canva Shield umbrella help you and your team protect your data.

If you are a creator, Canva advertises the Creator Compensation Program. In effect, the company will pay $200 million in content and AI royalties to members of the creator community over the next three years if they allow their content to train Canva's AI.

Finally, Canva helps you build accessibility into your designs with an AI-assisted alternative text (alt text) generator that guides users with cognitive or visual impairments to perceive your image's content and function.