Marketplace
Canva
A design tool that makes templates editable by people who cannot use Photoshop. Cheap if you need what it does, expensive if what you need is a logo.
Our assessment
What is good
- +Free tier includes full editor and 1.6M templates, enough to evaluate properly
- +Same price every year — no introductory rates that expire
- +One-click resize turns one design into formats for every platform
- +Brand kits enforce consistency across team without training in design systems
- +Background removal and object removal included, no per-use charge
What to know first
- −Output looks like Canva — templates are widely used and constraints are visible
- −Cannot create custom illustrations or logos from scratch
- −Storage limits are low if working with video — 100 GB on Pro, 500 GB on Business
- −No version control or approval workflows on Pro, only on Business tier
- −Price is per-person on teams, so a five-person team pays US$600/year minimum
Buy it for
Teams producing branded graphics at volume — social posts, presentations, internal documents — where consistency matters more than originality.Do not buy it for
Anyone needing custom design work, precise control over typography, or output that does not look template-based.The full read
Canva is a browser-based design editor built around templates. You pick a social media graphic or a presentation slide, change the text and colours, and download the result. It is for people who need designed output but do not design — small business owners making Instagram posts, teachers building worksheets, anyone producing something visual on a schedule.
The free plan gives you access to the editor and 1.6 million templates, which is enough to know whether this is useful to you. The limit is one brand kit, and only three colours in it — which means you can keep things consistent within a project but not across several clients or departments. Storage is 5 GB, shared across everything you make.
Pro costs US$120 a year and adds the tools that save time if you use this daily: background removal, one-click resizing for different platforms, and translation. The template library grows to 3.6 million. Canva does not publish how much storage comes with Pro, which is worth knowing before you move a library into it.
Business is US$210 per person per year and is designed for teams. You can share templates across the organisation, keep up to a hundred brand kits, and approve designs before they go out. Storage jumps to 500 GB. The price makes sense if five people are producing branded materials and you want them to stop reinventing the header every time. It does not make sense if you are one person who occasionally needs a flyer.
Canva will not replace a designer. It will not give you a custom illustration or a wordmark that works at any size. The output looks like Canva because the templates are widely used and the constraints are narrow — you are rearranging elements, not drawing new ones. What it does do is let someone with no design training produce something that looks intentional, and do it in minutes rather than hours. That is worth US$120 a year if it is a problem you have every week. It is not worth anything if what you need only happens once.
The pricing is honest. The same rate in year three as in month one, no jumps after an introductory period, and a free tier that is actually usable rather than a trial in disguise. If you are comparing it with hiring a designer, it is cheap. If you are comparing it with learning to use free software, it is a question of whether your time is worth the subscription.
Written 2026-09-01 by payless.host. Performance figures come from independent testers who publish their method. The section above is our own assessment. The prices below are copied from the provider's pricing page and are not affected by it.
What it costs
Canva lists $0 a month with no separate renewal rate — the price is the same in the first term and afterwards. The three-year total below is simply thirty-six times that.
Prices read from the provider's own pricing page on 2026-09-01.
https://www.canva.com/pricing/
Where the introductory term or the renewal rate is not published, the three-year column is left blank rather than estimated.
We earn a commission when someone buys through our links. It has no effect on the figures above, which are read from the provider's own page and published as they are.