Canva made graphic design on the go possible. This popular platform rose to fame due to its incredible ease of use, making it a perfect fit for those lacking skills in complex design tools. Its simple interface, extensive template library, and free stock imagery made creating quality graphics possible even for those with zero experience.
As much as it’s wonderful, Canva does have its shortcomings. If you need to compensate for its downsides, there are a few great Canva alternatives for your do-it-yourself designs.
Read the article to find out more about the best Canva alternatives.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express is a cloud-based design platform allowing users to easily create and share excellent designs. This software offers all features you need for creating high-quality instant graphic design, and it’s one of the best alternatives for Canva. Adobe has a reputation among designers, and you won’t miss by choosing any of the programs in its suite.
Adobe Express allows you to use a free stock photo collection and a library of free fonts. It also offers thousands of trendy templates for creating versatile content. You can use them to create excellent designs for flyers, social media posts, and other content for both personal and commercial use. This tool lets you make graphics with a professional appeal in just a few clicks and even schedule posts for release.
The tool integrates Adobe Fonts, a valuable source for any graphic designer, featuring more than 20,000 licensed fonts. They are free of charge and include some of the most popular ones, like Proxima Nova and Museo Sans. Adobe Stock is another vital feature of this design tool, allowing you to use over 1 million free stock images on the free plan.
Adobe created this tool to update Adobe Sparks, providing simplified versions of advanced design tools to beginners. It is our top choice for simplified graphic design since it seamlessly integrates with Photoshop and Premiere. Using multiple Adobe Programs, even when creating a quick design, provides you with an extensive set of features, like converting file formats and in-detail editing. This allows you to pursue your creativity and use basic tools to produce professional-looking content.
While it performs slightly worse than Canva, choose this program if you need a solid substitute. Its free plan provides you with everything necessary, and it’s a perfect alternative if you’re intimidated by complicated professional tools. Adobe Express also features video editing features, like cropping video clips.
Adobe Express’s free plan includes essential features of this tool. It allows you to create professional content using 2 GB of storage, basic editing, photo effects, and a limited collection of free Adobe Stock images. This is often enough for most users. However, suppose you need a more comprehensive approach to design. In that case, the Premium plan has a free trial and is billed $9.99 per month after it ends.
Picmaker
When it comes to the best tool for quick creation, Picmaker is a way to go. It’s an AI-based DIY graphic design tool best known for its ease of use among designers. Managing this tool doesn’t require extra graphic design knowledge. It lets you manipulate the images and text fairly easily with excellent results.
Its best feature is templates for more than 70 design categories, featuring Instagram posts, Twitter ads, and YouTube thumbnails. Picmaker also features an extensive library of ready-made templates, over 100 million stock images, and a custom Brand Kit.
Many digital marketers find this tool helpful when creating banner ads and cover images, allowing them to create designs in minutes without extra struggle. We highlight Picmaker’s Brand Kit since it provides an easy and quick design reflecting brand identity.
This tool is a powerful alternative to Canva since it provides a user-friendly interface while remaining feature-loaded. The AI-based MAD button allows for creating social media post designs, flyers, posters, or memes in a snap. Picmaker also integrates an online background remover, which uses AI-powered layers to erase image backgrounds. Another feature we underline is the Resize, allowing you to change the dimensions of your social media post designs in one click.
Picmakers is a great example of getting value for money. It provides some features for free, which Canva doesn’t. Its free plan offers more than 10,000 design templates and more than 100 design categories. However, the downside of the free plan is that it only allows you seven downloads per month, for which the premium plan nicely compensates. Overall, Picmaker is an excellent go-to design platform for novice designers who need a simple and efficient tool.
Visme
Visme is a presentation-oriented design platform with an excellent set of tools for graphic design. It’s cloud-based and suitable for marketers since it streamlines creating social media posts, logos, ads, storyboards, and more. This software is a well-rounded solution for those seeking a quick way to create effective and quality designs. It can also help organizations make professional presentations with little effort. As a result, it’s a great option when you need graphic design for work.
Compared to Canva, Visme is slightly more expensive. However, it focuses on more complicated designs like infographics, charts, widgets, and other marketing documents. Their features are similar regarding user-friendly interface, photo and video creation, and real-time sharing features. You can embed graphics on a website into an infographic and save items to a board, allowing easy access and reuse.
This tool is also very brand-oriented, enabling organizations to create stunning visual presentations, combining them with collaborative features. It provides an extensive template and stock image of the library, allowing companies to work efficiently with quality, ready-made samples.
Visme offers automation features for publishing and presentation, allowing users to set the publishing time and automate analytics. This makes it a versatile solution for those who need a multifunctional marketing design tool.
While most users find Visme an excellent alternative to Canva, they often choose the latter because it’s cheaper. Visme offers a free plan with 100 MB of storage, with limited access to templates and design assets. The Starter plan is the most suitable for individual use and costs $12.25 per month, billed yearly. Aside from this, Visme provides excellent tools for making professional presentational material quickly.
VistaCreate
VistaCreate, formerly known as Crello, makes another good alternative to Canva since it offers a similar interface and features. VistaCreate provides an efficient solution for creating impressive visuals in various content forms, including social media, blogs, presentations, eBooks, and more. It features 40 different formats and over 12,000 static and 3,000 animated designs at your disposal for a reasonable price.
This feature-rich tool provides an extensive library of free templates, images, and objects. For example, you can choose from a library of trendy templates and filters, crop some photos in, and set transparency and blur levels according to your needs. It’s perfect for users who need a well-rounded design tool that doesn’t require extensive design education.
Users praise VistaCreate for its motion design tool. It allows introducing animated objects to static photos in a minute. The platform will enable you to include high-definition animations in your designs, create Facebook video covers and animated social media posts, and design Instagram stories. VistaCreate also features a rich video library you can use with your designs anytime.
VistaCreate is incredibly customizable. You can upload your files and fuse them with static and animated objects to create stunning visuals. It’s fast and easy to use, making design concepts a reality quickly.
The Starter plan features a well-rounded set of options, including free fonts, animation, and 100,000 design templates. On the other hand, VistaCreate’s Pro version gives you full access to its features for a sensible cost of $10 per month. You’ll get unlimited Brand Kits and storage, access to the platform’s complete library, and the resize option.
Snappa
Snappa is a blogger-friendly design tool. It has received mostly positive reviews from the design community, and many users claim it’s the best free graphic design software. Snappa is a good Canva substitute because it is suitable for both individuals and businesses who want to test out editing software on a budget. It features an intuitive user interface and provides a quick way for novice designers to create appealing graphics.
Snappa offers a vast collection of fancy templates to create display ads, blogs, and social media posts. Marketers and entrepreneurs widely use this platform since it provides team collaboration features, making working together flow seamlessly. The software is also easily integrated with social media platforms, allowing you to easily share your designs with the public.
Key benefits of this app include the background removal tool, adding speech bubbles, and the Resize option. These options add to Snappa’s versatility and make it suitable for various uses. You can crop images and choose from the library of over 4 million high-resolution pictures at no cost.
Adding textual content like comments and captions to images is another well-designed feature of this app. Snappa’s library features over 200 fonts for adding a unique flair to your designs, including popular fonts like Montserrat Extra Bold, Roboto, and Cinzel. Snappa allows you to upload custom fonts and supports file formats like .ttf, .otf, and .woff.
Snappa is one of the best Canva alternatives since it provides a balanced suite of features for free. However, if you need more advanced features of this great design tool, you’ll need to upgrade to Pro at $20 per month with yearly billing.
Stencil
Stencil focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It’s an excellent tool for those seeking a straightforward solution for creating basic designs. Stencil’s main idea is to provide essential design tools by using a background image and stamping text, icons, and shapes over it. However, it lacks animation and video features and interactive capabilities.
Stencil was formerly known as Share As Image, a famous brand among social media marketers. It’s cloud-based, just like Canva, and finds its best use in creating posts across social media platforms. This tool integrates social sharing features well and makes it easy to share your designs across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
Stencil’s main benefit is streamlining the graphic design process with unique user-friendly features, some of which Canva lacks. You can use Stencil to quickly create stunning social media graphics, and it makes a perfect fit with bloggers and businesses.
This platform offers you background content in the palm of your hand. It saves you time and resources by providing an extensive library of more than 1.4 million images. Additionally, you can access over 1 million icons and illustrations for adding to your designs. Over 650 templates are available for social media posts and are bound to fit almost any marketing purpose. Stencil uses Google Fonts, offering you access to more than 2,000 of them. They’re integrated into the platform and free to use.
Stencil doesn’t lag in customizing, letting you upload icons or other visual content to the platform. Combining your original material with Stencil’s built-in content and features adds to time-efficient content creation.
Finally, Stencil is reasonably priced, even if its free plan offers limited features. On the other hand, the Pro version features 5,000,000 photos, more than 1,350 additional templates, and Premium support, among other benefits. It’s billed $9 per month annually, and you should consider it if you search for an economical instant design tool.
Balancing Features and Value
If Canva doesn’t work for you, there are many solutions offering similar features on the market. Always consider which features you will use the most, as some tools are more specialized than others. However, the most important is to make your design process more intuitive and cheaper. Most of these tools have a free plan, allowing you to use essential design features for zero cost. Many online tools also have a free trial which allows you to sample their premium offer before committing.
Which Canva alternatives have worked for you? Do you have a better choice not mentioned on this list? Leave a comment below to let us and the other readers know.
