Review of Canva (2024)
Canva has long sought to make an intricate web of visuals simpler. With simple drag-and-drop features that work on any device from anywhere in the globe, it enables anyone to produce visual material, regardless of artistic ability or proficiency with graphic design tools. Additionally, it lets small businesses create and edit polished slide slideshows, animated Instagram posts, Facebook advertising, and other branded materials in addition to professional-looking social media photos and videos. Large businesses can also utilize the platform to assign coordinated oversight of all employee-generated content to their internal communications departments, ensuring that it stays consistent with the brand. The app is better than ever thanks to its abundance of templates, extensive picture library, free courses that teach best practices, and new AI-powered Magic Studio capabilities. Canva receives our Editors' Choice award for graphic design software because of all of this.
How Much Does Canva Cost?
Three price tiers are available for Canva: Canva Free, Canva Pro ($14.99/month or $119.99/year for an individual), and Canva for Teams ($29.99/month or $300/year for the first five users). For verified and registered educators, schools, and non-profit organizations, Canva is completely free. A 16% discount is offered on all paid tiers when choosing annual billing over monthly. For really large enterprises with specific integration needs, Canva also offers an Enterprise tier (ask the firm for a price quote).
More than a million free photos and graphics, including Smartmockups that allow you to overlay your design on products like t-shirts and smartphone screens, more than 1,000 fonts, and a selection of AI-powered tools like Magic Write, Magic Design, manual Beat Sync, and Magic Edit are all available to free account holders. While the Free plan now allows you to have an infinite number of folders, your data storage is restricted to 5GB, and you are not able to use any of the Pro features—such as exporting files in CMYK—that are listed below.
More AI-powered tools, 1TB of cloud storage, 60,000 templates, up to 100 Brand Kits (for storing unique sets of logos, colors, and fonts to ensure brand consistency), Magic Switch (which allows you to resize designs—a significant improvement over Canva Embeds—and a social content planner with direct publishing capabilities to eight social media platforms are all included in the Pro account. The remaining set of design and AI capabilities, including Magic Eraser, Magic Write, Magic Grab, Automatic Beat Sync, AI Admin tools, and more, are all included in Pro, along with access to over 100,000,000 additional graphics, typefaces, movies, animations, audio, and photographs.
Exporting designs as PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs is possible with all plans; however, Pro now includes the ability to export print-ready CMYK files, which is crucial if you plan to print your design outside of the Canva environment. This package also includes round-the-clock customer service. The Pro plan is available for a 30-day free trial, but in order to participate, you must first submit payment information.
All the features found in the Pro account are also available in the Teams account, along with extra centralized brand-scaling tools (3,000 Brand Kits, Brand Templates, Brand Controls, and Logo Builder), one-click background removal for photos and videos, and controls for limiting who can manage brand assets and edit templates.
Scalable branding, bespoke enterprise-level security, and real-time team collaboration are all included with anva for Enterprise. Additionally, administration and security capabilities, like support for single sign-on, are included with enterprise accounts.
Note that each Canva account type has usage limits for the majority of AI-powered tools, just like other AI apps like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney.
How Do Canva’s Prices Compare With the Competition?
The costs of Canva are comparable to those of its rivals, depending on the service level that you require. With the recent inclusion of Adobe FireFly, Adobe Express, the company's comparable web program, is now less expensive and more akin to Canva's Magic Studio (more on this below). Access to a limited selection of templates, graphics, and fonts is provided along with 2GB of storage with the Adobe Express Free plan. Express Premium is available for $9.99/month or $99.99/year; however, if you already have a membership to Adobe Creative Cloud ($84.99/month or $599.88/year) for an extensive collection of content-creation applications, it is free of charge. 100GB of storage and all of Adobe's premium assets, features, and tools are included in the subscription plan.
As of this writing, Canva's toolkit is more comprehensive than Adobe Express's in terms of the diversity and practicality of templates and unique components. For instance, Canva offers live mind maps, intricate data visualizations, 21 AI Apps (as well as third-party app and plug-in access), and a scrolling website builder that is more flexible than the previous Spark Page, which is now a part of Express.
At least until Canva's October 2023 AI mega-launch, Microsoft Designer, the first significant web software to dive into AI text-to-image realm, is a rival. Designer is already available to you if you have a subscription to any Microsoft Office product. However, as it is still in preview, you may use it for free on the web right now by logging in with a Microsoft account.
Though not exactly a direct rival to Canva, Prezi is comparable in that it enables users of all skill levels to produce eye-catching visual business materials, mostly talking-head films and presentations. Prezi offers about a dozen distinct service packages, with annual prices ranging from $36 to $708. Should you be purchasing a license for personal use alone, rather than for a whole team, the monthly cost should be between $3 to $7. Canva offers design tools for developing marketing and advertising content, whereas Prezi does not, despite being an Editors' Choice winner for its inventive presentation-building capabilities.
New AI Magic in Canva
The Australian startup Canva has created Magic Studio, the first all-in-one AI design platform for any and all businesses, in honor of its tenth anniversary.
The introduction of Magic Studio further Canva's goal of making design more accessible. Magic Studio, according to Canva, is now the most complete AI-powered design tool in the world for assisting people, groups, and companies in increasing their creativity, productivity, and brand size.
I'll go over each of Magic Studio's capabilities in brief before showcasing some of the pictures I created with it.
Magic Switch
With just a single click, Magic Switch—an industry first—transforms designs into a variety of formats, enabling you to transform a presentation into an executive summary or a whiteboard of ideas into a blog post. While you're at it, this tool has the ability to translate your text into multiple languages.
Magic Media
The text-to-image and text-to-video features of the app are powered by Magic Media. With this most recent version, it transforms text into captivating images and allows you to experiment with a plethora of new style possibilities for any outcome. Additionally, you can use Gen-2, an AI model for video generation powered by Runway, a New York-based firm, to generate captivating films from a picture or text.
Design Magic
Brand Voice
Canva's Magic Write copywriting assistant has been enhanced with the ability to recognize the voice of your brand. To guarantee a uniform tone in designs or documents, simply incorporate tone parameters into your Brand Kit, and it will consistently produce content that is in keeping with your brand.
Magic Morph
With only a simple prompt, Magic Morph instantaneously transforms words and shapes into new colors, textures, patterns, and styles, elevating your design from ordinary to exceptional.
Magic Grab
Magic Grab is a completely new way to rethink your photos. It allows you to alter, resize, or reposition any subject in your shot by selecting and separating it.
Magic Expand
Magic enlarge may make a vertical shot horizontal by recovering objects outside the frame, or it can enlarge the canvas of zoomed-in images.
Other AI Apps in Canva
The greatest AI-powered design and productivity tools available are gathered in one location by the Canva Apps Marketplace. Currently having access to cutting-edge AI, such as Dall-E, Google Imagen, MurfAI, Soundraw, and more.
From Poster to (Instagram) Post
I tested out a few of Canva's latest features. For example, I used Magic Switch to reformat my huge Tirade Sunglasses poster into an Instagram post, and it worked well.
Even though I followed one of Canva's own recommended recommendations, I kept getting error messages when I tried to tie in my tagline by adding red sunglasses to the boxer.
As I discovered after looking online, Canva was having problems connecting to several apps and had temporarily stopped them while they fixed the problem. It's possible that the mishaps occurred because a large number of excited people wanted to try their own prestidigitation.
What Else Can You Do With Canva?
Canva is an amazing tool because of all the things it can do for you. There are numerous ways to improve images, such as cropping them artistically, adding a range of effects and animations, adding text, adding amusing frames and borders, and converting between different file types such as HEIC, PNG, JPG, WEBP, SVG, and PDF. With Magic, you may alter the aspect ratio of pictures, stretch their edges, add, remove, or relocate any element from them. You can also use the AI Face Generator to make unique faces for your photos. Your ideas can be translated into pictures and movies by Magic Media using your words.
You can also create videos using Canva. You may create shareable short-form videos from still photos and clips with Magic Design. In addition to offering suitable stock music recommendations, Magic Design for Video also syncs the beat to the frames either manually or automatically with a Pro membership.
Magic Write helps you create effective copy for your writing and text by checking for errors and producing on-brand language based on your prompts. Next, utilize an eye-catching selection of typefaces and imaginative styles to craft your design; alternatively, utilize a template to expedite the process.
I have a few complaints about the tool, most of which are hidden until you want to accomplish a certain task and find you can't. For instance, objects cannot have a drop shadow applied to them, but text can.
Safety and Accessibility in Canva
Canva uses Canva Shield and takes ethical and secure AI seriously. Its security, privacy, and safety features work to safeguard your information as well as those of your team.
Canva offers a Creator Compensation Program that covers creators as well. If creators allow their content to train Canva's AI, the firm will pay $200 million in content and AI royalties to them over the course of the next three years.
Lastly, Canva offers an AI-assisted alternative text (alt text) generator that assists viewers with cognitive or visual impairments in understanding the content and functionality of your image, helping you include accessibility into your designs.
Canva’s Magic Moment
The entire feature set of Magic Studio is a mind-blowing addition to Canva. Canva is a magician in the field of digital design because of its concoction of innovative and practical tools that are available to everyone, as well as its consideration for security, privacy, and equitable pay. For anyone who needs to create graphics for their company, organization, or personal branding, this is our Editors' Choice winner.
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