Canva Review

By Joshua Botello

If you’re looking to create graphics for your emails for marketing materials but have no idea how to do that, then using the tool Canva may be something you want to look into. Canva is a free online graphic design tool that can help any small business owner be a graphic designer with free templates for Marketing and social media. So let’s get into the review.

Who’s it For?

Canva is primarily for small business owners who don’t have a large marketing budget to spend on graphic design. It is also for the non-artistic or creative business owner who needs to create email or other social media content. You can easily grab a pre-sized template for most social media platforms and quickly edit for a graphic or make your own custom ebook, worksheet, or presentation. Canva is not for those who are engaged in creative marketing and do you have a budget for a graphic designer to create their graphics for them.

Demo

So getting started with Canva is as easy as setting up a free account with your username and password. When we get into the interface, you will need to know some things before you can get started. Canva has a lot of different templates for many of the larger social media platforms. A lot of these templates are four different types of posts that you can customize for anything you can think of.

When starting your design you just choose from 250,000 templates for your type of content. From there you can change the color scheme, text style, choose from hundreds of thousands of photos and download them to your computer to use later.

Sure you get a lot for your free account but if you’d like to upgrade you get a few more features: a library of 75 million photos and graphics, a contact planner for 8 social media platforms, your own brand kit to save logos and text styles for your business and more folder options. So if you’re making an email template for a marketing poster or a social media post Canva has you covered with Rich and beautiful templates.

Pros and Cons

Canva gives you the ability to use and customize templates for basically any occasion and create just about any marketing content that looks professional. You can grab photos and some videos to upgrade your social media posts and create eye-catching graphics. You are also able to download these assets and hold onto them on your own computer without having to pay for anything.

What I don’t like about Canva is the photo library may seem limited, because a lot of the nicer photos are in the pro accounts. I feel like you can get a lot out of Canva, but you will quickly realize you have to spend money for the pro account to get the features, templates, and photos you need for a lot of your content. 

Pricing

So speaking of paying for the pro account, the cost for a lot of the pro features is $119.99 per year per user account. So, what do you get for that $120? The pro account feature gives you access to more than 75 million photos and graphics, the pro features also allow you to use more than 450,000 different templates that are updated daily.

You are also able to use the magic resize feature that allows you to create content for many different types of platforms at the same time. The content planning feature that we have for the SBDC account allows us to schedule up to eight different platforms for social media. There is a higher feature for enterprises but the price does not seem to justify what kind of features you get and the pro account should be sufficient for your small business.

We deal with individuals who look to create or manage non-profits, many of the problems with nonprofits are to build awareness of the mission. Canva has a plan specifically for non-profits and is free with the approval of an application. What qualifies you? You need to be set up as 501(c)3 nonprofit or social impact organizations with missions consistent with serving the public good or government/public health organizations. With this plan, nonprofits have all pro features for free if approved by Canva.

Conclusion

So should you get Canva? If you’re looking to save money on graphic design and do a lot of this work yourself then Canva might be something you want to get into. If you are a content creator who is just starting out, then paying for the pro account for Canva is a great way to facilitate the growth of your business. If you want to make content creation a large part of your business and can afford to pay for a graphic designer, you may want to skip Canva.

Let me know what you think? Are you looking for a new tool to create graphics for your business? Have you ever used Canva before? Let me know in the comments below.

Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.