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If you’ve been using the free plan of Canva, you know it’s the best online tool for creating designs, right?
But you’ve probably wondered whether paying for Canva Pro is worth it, or if it’s better to stick with the free plan and save money.
Let’s look at what each tier offers and decide if it is worth the extra investment or not.
Here’s everything you need to know:
- What is Canva Pro?
- Ease of Use
- Pricing
- Free vs. Paid
- Pros and Cons
- Is Canva Pro Worth It?
- How to Upgrade to Canva Pro?
- Summary
What is Canva Pro?
Canva Pro is a premium version of Canva, which includes everything of the free plan plus access to 400,000 free photos, premium templates, team functionalities, unlimited storage, create transparent backgrounds, resize your designs, create animated GIFs, upload custom fonts and much more.
Many of you may know what type of designs you can make with it, but for those who are new may know that you can get layouts for almost any designs.
Whether it’s a social media post, presentation, invitation, documents, blog banner, and so much more, they got it ready for you with the perfect dimensions.
Canva is used and loved by more than 15 million active users around the globe who have made more than 1 billion designs.
According to them, more than 10,000 organizations create designs with Canva Pro, and some of the popular ones are:
Unlike other tools, it is available for both web and print media design and graphics.
Is Canva Easy to Use?
The first thing you should always look when choosing graphic designing tools is how easy it is to use, right?
Graphic designing tools or software often struggle to combine power with ease of use, but Canva has excelled in this crucial area.
The great thing about Canva is that anyone can use it, a non-designer as well as professionals.
It is as easy as that – you don’t need graphic designing skills, hire a professional designer for your projects and a high budget.
All of these make Canva a quick and affordable way of creating professional-looking designs.
You could start designing today if you wanted to!
The good news is that they have a free trial of 30 days, so you can try it out yourself to see if it’s the right tool for you or not.
Canva Pro Pricing
Canva plans is pretty straightforward, and they offer monthly and yearly plans:
- Canva Pro Monthly: The monthly plan costs $12.95 per team member per month
- Canva Pro Annual: The annual plan costs $9.95 per team member per month
If you select the yearly plan of Canva, you’ll get a 23% discount which is billed as one payment of $119.40 yearly.
Besides these plans, they also have a “Canva Enterprise” plan which costs $30 per team member per month but it mainly depends on the company’s designing needs.
The monthly and yearly plan offers the same features but the pricing is different, don’t worry, I am going to cover them as well.
However, most users are going to be interested in a monthly subscription but it cost $12.95, which is a few bucks extra than annually.
I recommend you to select the monthly plan first or 30 days free trial at no cost.
After that, if you are satisfied then you should go for the annual plan to save the money.
Canva Free vs. Paid
Canva gives you the option of choosing either the free plan or the pro plan.
The free plan of Canva is a legitimate option for most people who create simple graphics and don’t mind the limitation that comes with it.
Don’t get us wrong – you can also create good designs with a free plan but as I already said, you can’t get access to the excellent features of Canva Pro.
Let’s take a look at what both of these plans have to offer.
Canva Free Benefits
The free plan includes:
- Two Folders – Create and use two folders for free to organize your designs and images within your Canva account.
- 1GB Storage – You’ll have 1GB of storage for uploading your photos and assets.
- 8,000 Templates – Access to over 8,000 templates but not all of them can be used for designs. You can only use free templates, not the pro ones.
- Photos – Get access to millions of free images and the premium starting at $1 each.
- Invite Your Team – Invite team members for free through email and give them access as a member or administrator.
So, these are the basic features you get with the free version.
Canva Pro Benefits
Now, let’s take a look at the benefits of using the pro plan:
- Animator – Create animated graphics with different animation styles, which you can download as a GIF or movie format (MP4).
- Transparent Images – Download your designs with transparent backgrounds with one click, keep in mind that your design must be in the white background.
- Magic Resize – Instantly resize your designs into custom dimensions or create a copy of it in any size you want.
- Brand Kit – It allows you to organize and customize elements of a brand’s visual identity with logos, colors, and fonts, so you or your team members produce designs that fit your brand.
- Invite Your Team – Invite unlimited members through email and give them access as a member, template designer, or administrator. It includes more features than the free one.
- Custom Templates – Design custom templates for your team and share them with your team so they can also use it.
- Premium Fonts – If you upgrade to Canva Pro, you’ll get to access over 500 premium fonts.
- Premium Templates – Get access to 20,000+ premium ready-to-use templates.
- Set Download Quality – Set high as well as low quality or size for your design when downloading.
- 1000+ Fonts – You’ll also get access to 1000+ fonts or you can upload your own.
- 100 GB Storage – The pro user access to 100GB of storage for uploading your photos and assets.
- 4M+ Photos & Elements – Canva Pro users get access to 4 million-plus premium free photos, illustrations, and icons that they can use in their designs for free.
- Unlimited Folders – Create and add unlimited folders to organize your designs and images within your Canva account, you can move your designs into folders, rename a folder, delete a folder, share a folder or open folders in the editor.
- Priority Support – If you upgrade to the pro plan, you’ll have priority support from the Canva support team.
Every feature of the Canva Pro plan is helpful but the first three features are probably the big draw of the Canva Pro plan.
Being able to create animated gifs & professional looking designs, resizing, and transparent images in seconds is a huge benefit of Canva Pro.
Canva Print
Besides all that, you get a service from them called Canva Print which allows you to print your designs and order them if you want.
Here’s a quick introduction:
For more information, head over to the Canva printing page.
Canva Pros and Cons
No matter which tool you use, there will be some pros and cons, but you must know what they are before choosing a tool.
A lot of people write some pros and cons online – usually with user-generated reviews which is fine but I will share my personal experience with Canva Pro.
So, here are the main pros and cons that I think you can expect to encounter if using Canva.
Pros of Using Canva
Let’s start by looking at some of the advantages of Canva.
Quick & Easy To Use
As I already discussed, it is one of the easiest tools out there for designing with the perfect dimensions.
Other tools such as Adobe Photoshop can be overwhelming and frustrating to use for the beginner designer, but Canva is easy to use.
It is a helpful tool, especially for beginners or people with little design experience, and even photoshop experts use Canva for quick and easy designs.
Interface
The interface is straightforward and easy to use, it’s got a clean, modern interface, and the layout is clean, professional and user-friendly.
Here is how the Canva Pro homepage looks like and quick overview:
- Create Design: By clicking on Create a design, you can select any type of design, whether FB post, presentation, or any other template, and also select custom dimensions.
- All Your Designs: Everything you design will appear there.
- Templates: From here, you can discover free and premium pre-designed templates.
- Photos: From here, you can discover free and premium photos.
- Print: It allows you to create and order professional prints delivered straight to your home, but currently, it’s only available in few countries such as US, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Europe, New Zealand, Mexico, Southeast Asia, and India.
- Brand Kit: Organize and customize key elements of a brand’s visual identity from here.
- Design School: From here, you can find tutorials and courses, etc. to learn everything about Canva.
- Create a team: It allows you to invite team members.
Predesigned Templates
There are thousands of pre-designed templates available which is a huge plus because you only have to customize it.
Simply select any design, whether a social media post, advertisement, presentation, or any other design and it just needs to be customized according to your liking.
The templates are professional and flexible, and you can change the photos, colors, font, add elements, icon, and much more!
Integrations
Canva allows you to integrate with different popular platforms, and these are:
- Youtube
- Google Maps
- Dropbox
- Pexels
- Pixabay
- GIPHY
Integrating with the platforms saves your time to do things right from Canva, such as sharing your photos or saving your designs in Dropbox with one click.
Besides that, you can add Emojis and Embeds media in your designs just by pasting a link from different platforms.
Once you click on Embeds, you will see a screen like this.
Collaboration
One of the benefits especially for businesses is that they can work together on Canva, inviting a team is an excellent way to collaborate with peers on any project
Sending invitation is pretty simple, you just need the person’s email and give them access as a member and administrator.
Access To Millions of Photos
As I already said, Canva provides millions of free and premium high-quality photos to create beautiful designs.
The pro user gets access to more than 50 million premium photos that you can download and use anywhere, whether it’s for social media ads or blog posts.
It’s great because you don’t have to pay per photo or for the expensive stock subscriptions to publish fresh content.
Designing & Writing an eBook
It’s good for anyone who wants to create designs for their eBooks for free, definitely give it a try.
Cons of Using Canva
Now, let’s talk about the negatives of Canva.
Mobile App Isn’t User-Friendly
Canva’s mobile app is a little bit hard to use on mobile devices, and it has more design restrictions than the browser.
The reviews of the app are excellent but the main issue is that it is not entirely user-friendly and sometimes the templates get ruined.
The app is a lot better now than before but still, it has some issues which need to be fixed.
I recommend creating all your designs on your laptop or PC’s browser.
Customer Support
One of the downsides of Canva is that their customer service is not the greatest.
Sometimes Canva support team takes a while to get back to you but your issue/question will be resolved eventually.
Anybody else having problems downloading animated gifs from @canva?
— Nicky Nelson (@TropicNicky) November 3, 2019
What I figured is, they mostly response to their customers on Twitter so you can contact them there if you are facing any issue.
Limited Features (For Free Users)
The free version is good, but there will be limitations with the free plan
Although it is a great tool but to gain access to all of its features, the users have to upgrade to pro plan, and it’s only $12.95 per month.
Poor Search Results
Finding images, elements, or graphics is not user-friendly, especially for free users.
Maybe you are searching for free elements or graphics, but since there is not any filter option so you’ll see free and premium elements or images but mostly the premium ones.
No Offline Feature
Since it is an online platform, you can use this tool only when you have an internet connection.
If you have a poor internet connection or looking for an offline graphic designing tool, then Canva won’t be an option for you.
Instead, it’s better to learn and use Photoshop in these situations 🙂
Is Canva Pro Worth It?
Canva helps you to create awesome designs – but if you are using the free plan of it, you’ll know that it tries to upgrade to its premium offering regularly.
So, is it worth paying for Canva Pro?
Yes, it is worth it if you don’t want to hire a graphics designer or looking for an affordable, easy to use tool to create stunning designs in minutes.
.@canva is by far the easiest to use design software I’ve ever come across. I don’t know why it took me so long to upgrade! #blog #design #simple
— Ben Cummings (@blogwithben) October 12, 2019
The free version is useful as well, but it comes with limited features, so if you don’t mind the limitation that comes with it, then the pro plan is probably not worth it for you.
Canva Pro costs only a few bucks a month, and it got such a good value for money feedback from users.
Personally, I recommend to try out Canva Pro 30 days free trial and then make your decision whether it’s worth it for you or not.
How to Upgrade to Canva Pro?
So, if you made your decision to jump to pro plan let’s know how to upgrade to it.
- Head to the Canva.com in your browser and click on “Pro“.
- Scroll down and click on “Try free for 30 days” and sign up with Facebook, Google, or email if you already haven’t.
- After that, you’ll see a screen like this, click on “Try it free for 30 days“.
- Now, select a monthly or yearly plan and proceed through the payment with your credit card, and you’ll become a Pro member.
Don’t worry! You won’t be charged until your free trial ends, and also you can cancel your trial at any time.
That’s it!
Enjoy using it for a month and then decide whether you want to stay with the pro plan if you find it useful.
Here’s a quick video as well.
Summary: Should You Upgrade?
Canva makes it very easy to create stunning designs for your project – and you can do it within a few minutes without graphic designing skills.
Its pre-designed templates give you a huge advantage because you can customize them easily using a drag-and-drop tool.
I only recommend it for small businesses/individuals who don’t have the resources to hire a designer and want to do designing on there own quickly and easily without any experience.
To sum it up, I just want to say that trying Canva Pro by yourself is the best way to know if it’s the best choice for you or not and why not to try when it is free of cost for 30 days.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Which feature of Canva Pro from today’s post you are excited to use first?
Are you going to animate your image or use a transparent background feature?
Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.