Canva review, is it worth it? 13 pros and cons

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn everything related to the benefits and drawbacks of using Canva for your business.

Without further ado let’s get started.

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What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design platform where you can design graphic designs for different uses like,

• Social media posts.
• Brochures.
• Logos.
• Book covers.
• Presentations.
• Posters.
• Documents.

Canva offers many Features to get things done in minutes like,

• Drag and drop features.
• So many premade templates.
• Lots of additional features you will learn later in the benefits of the canva section of this blog.

With that said let’s see what are the free and premium plans of the canva.

Free and premium plans of the Canva.

Here is the image of Canva plans,

Canva has got 3 plans in its tools,

As you can see in the image, there is a free plan, pro plan, and enterprise plan.

They got their own amazing features in it,

Use the link to get the Canva pro plan with some discount or get a 30-day free trial with this.

You will now learn the pros and cons or benefits and drawbacks or advantages and disadvantages of using Canva for your website and business in 2021.

Let’s get started.

Benefits and drawbacks of using Canva.

Check the quick table of the benefits and drawbacks of using Canva.

S.no.	Benefits of canva.	Drawbacks of canva.
1.	Very easy to use	A mobile app is not easy to use and user friendly.
2.	The tool automatically saves all your designs itself.	The tool can get slow or crash sometimes.
3.	Direct sharing to social media channels.	It is not a tool to be used if you are a graphic designer
4.	Download options are awesome.	It had a massive security breach.
5.	So many templates and options to choose from for each design.
6.	Get canva Pro free forever
7.	You can save a lot of money and time with canva Pro.
8.	Better collaborations with team members on designs.
9.	You can learn graphic design courses for free.

Let’s learn the things in detail.

Benefits of using Canva. 

Here are the top 9 benefits of using canva.

1. Very easy to use.

The most amazing thing about canva as a tool is that it is so easy to use.

The design, the interface, and all are very user-centric and very beginner-friendly.

You can move to different sections and add new features to your graphic designs with just a few clicks,

Here are a few things in design and interface which are simply outstanding in canvas.

• You can add all the graphic elements to your graphics through the drag and drop feature.
• With just a single click you can add new templates or replace existing templates on your design.
• You can easily find your favorite designs in the search bar.
• You can duplicate all your designs to a new one instead of creating it all over again.
• You can add many features in a single design like position, transparency, font size, color and style, new filters, and effects on your design in just a few clicks.

Although if you are very brand new to canvas, invest a couple of hours in the tool and you will be alright or simply hooked with the tool.

Read, benefits of graphic design.

The biggest advantage with CANVA is being very easy to use and this tool has the potential to make even the dumbest person on the planet a great graphic designer with this tool.

2. This tool automatically saves all your designs by itself.

Another interesting thing about canva is that,

It automatically saves all the changes that you make to your design while making the design.

You will not lose your designs if your website or app crashes or you lose network or your battery dies if you switch off your phone or shut down your computer,

You can easily resume your work from where you left.

The canvas saves all of your designs automatically on the cloud and even after completion of the designs,

Canva keeps the design with itself without deleting it unless you delete it by yourself.

Another good thing about Canva is that you can easily upload images or videos to your designs so you can add them to your designs later.

3. Direct sharing to social media channels.

Another interesting thing about canva is that,

You have this automatic sharing feature

You can instead of downloading the design and then uploading it to other platforms like,

• Facebook.
• Pinterest.
• YouTube 
• Twitter.
• Telegram.
• Tumblr.
• LinkedIn, etc.

You can directly share your design to these platforms instead of downloading and re-upload to these platforms altogether.

You can also schedule the posts and uploading the posts to these platforms without manually doing them.

For example,

You have created a bunch of pins for Pinterest then instead of uploading all the pins directly to Pinterest at a time, you can easily schedule the uploading of the posts.

It is a very cool feature and benefit of having canva.

Sadly this feature is only there for higher plans not for a free one.

• Read, which platform is superior between blogs and social media.
• Read, pros and cons of using Pinterest for your website.

4. Export of design or download options are awesome.

With CANVA, after completing the design when you are looking for downloading the files or design,

You have some amazing options and ways to download the file.

You can use your file through ways like,

• PNG image.
• JPEG image.
• Pdf file.
• A video file.

You can both increase or decrease the size of your images.

Lastly but if you are using canva for your website, you can use PNG image files at the same time use additional options like,

• Transparent the background.
• Compress the image quality.
• Increase the size of the file.

With that said let’s see another advantage of the benefit of using canva.

• Read the pros and cons of using cdn.

5. So many templates and options to choose from for each design.

The thing that makes canva the best graphic design tool for beginners is how easy it is to make a good piece of graphic with the tool.

You can simply choose any design you want to create or search for those in the search bar of the tool.

By searching and selecting the tool, you can either choose to create your graphic with the exact dimensions for that design or,

Save your time using some amazing list of templates and options you can use within the tool.

Here are a few stats about canvas pro,

• 420000 free templates there in canvas pro and 250000 in free.
• 100 GB of cloud storage to create and store unlimited designs without thinking of deleting them due to storage and 5GB cloud storage in the free plan.
• 3000+ font types and styles.

If you don’t want to choose predetermined dimensions for a specific design then you can create custom dimensions and start creating your custom design with that.

6. Get canva Pro free forever.

The good thing about canva though

 is that,

You can get canva for free, you can use the platform and some basic features for free of cost but,

If you are a teacher or a student, by enrolling in the canva education program, you can get a canva premium membership free forever.

It is an amazing opportunity for students and teachers of k12 or your entire school to use the tool for free by just registering to the tool and get value from it being a member free forever.

The process is simple,

• Fill the necessary form and application with some details.
• Canva team will review it.
• You will get an email notification.
• If you are approved, you can log in and get started.

You can click here to grab the opportunity.

If you just want to enjoy canvas for a year with a pro plan,

GitHub is a platform that offers students real-life experiences by giving access to premium tools for free and if you can prove you are a student by submitting documents of your school or your student IDs.

You can sign-up for GitHub for free and enjoy some amazing tools access for free,

GitHub has partnered with canva, by enrolling in GitHub as a student,

You can enjoy the canva pro account free for an entire year.

You will get some amazing tools other than canva pro account for free like,

• Free domain, domain privacy, SSL certificate from Namecheap for a year.
• Free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services and learning resources.
• 6 free months of subscription to educative to learn coding and web development for free.
• Develop video games using unity for free as long as you are a student.
• Bootstrap studio to create a responsive website using a bootstrap framework for free as long as you are a student.

There are hundreds of free tools that you can have access to for free for some time being a student, you can click here to learn all the tools you can get for free with a GitHub account.

You can sign-up for GitHub membership here.

7. You can save a lot of money and time with CANVA pro.

The most amazing benefit about canva Pro account is that,

You can save thousands of dollars of money with canva Pro with just costs around $12 a month.

Here is a list of the top 7 ways where you can save thousands of dollars using a canvas premium account.

• You can save money by creating a logo for your business instead of outsourcing it.
• There are over 75 million premium stock photos, videos, graphics, and audios that you can access with the premium plan.
• There are a bunch of templates divided into different categories that you can use to design infographics instead of outsourcing it to a freelancer.
• You can easily design the cover or the PDF for the ebook that you want to sell on your website with a premium plan.
• You can find a good replacement for Pinterest tailwind scheduler with canva scheduler and save your money if you are tight on budget.
• You can create business cards and visiting cards with easy drag and drop features and choose from hundreds of templates or create a brand new one with the custom dimension by yourself and improve your business.
• You can create a new custom-designed menu or brochures for your business or resumes for new jobs with a bunch of templates available.

If you think about it for a second,

You will have to spend a lot of money around thousands of dollars I would say depending on the work and the company that you hire in outsourcing these designs to a freelancer for a graphic design company,

But you can save the same amount of money,

Learning the design by yourself and working on the creative side of yourself with this amazing tool.

8. Better collaborations with other team members on designs.

Another benefit you have with canva premium plan is that,

With a single premium account, you can add up to four members in a single account.

Not just that,

All the different members of the team can easily collaborate and work on a single design share their thoughts and comments on,

Different designs with some amazing features that the canvas enables you to do.

You can save different designs that you create in the tool in different folders so that you can easily find them rather than storing all of them in one folder or you can allocate different folders for different users within your account.

You can work with your other team members in real-time as well.

You can share the templates or design in Google classroom and the Microsoft team and remind them.

The feature of better collaboration work was highly requested by the users of the canva.

Now finally canva has been adding new features to its tool including the comment feature and looking at adding a likes feature within each design to it as well in the future.

9. You can learn graphic design courses for free.

The last but the best benefit of using canva Pro is that,

You can have the access to some amazing graphic design courses for free.

There are the top teachers who are actually teaching the courses for free,

It is just like Udemy or skillshare for free,

Here is a list of a couple of things you can learn from the free courses of Canva.

• You can learn things about social media mastery.
• You can learn things about some basics of graphic design.
• You can learn things about the branding of the business or many other things in the Canva premium plan.

These are a few things you can learn from the Canva pro plan.

By the way, you can read my blog on the benefits of graphic design for your website if you think graphic design is not a big deal or want to know some benefits of it in detail.

With that said let’s see what are the drawbacks of using Canva.

Drawbacks of using Canva.

Here are 5 drawbacks of using Canva let’s learn them in detail.

1. Canva Mobile app is not so user-friendly.

One of the most important drawbacks or disappointments with canva is that,

Its mobile application can be better.

When you are using canva, compared to using it on the web browser and on the mobile app,

Use the tool for a while,

You will notice some things issues with the mobile application of canva being not that user-friendly.

I don’t know how to describe issues you will have with using canva mobile app,

They are not extreme and not repetitive but they are definitely worth addressing.

It is quite hard to use on small screens like phone, things like, 

Like the image resizing can be a problem a bit with a mobile app, adding elements, removing elements, etc features can be tough and time-consuming sometimes compared to what experience you will have with using the tool on the web browser on a computer.

1.The tool can get slow or even crash sometimes.

Another problem you have with canva is that the tool can get slow or even crash sometimes this can be pretty frustrating,

If you are a regular user of canva or you have some urgent work of editing or producing some design work for your Pinterest or any social media platform.

If the tool crashes or gets slow or whatever the design that you have created does not gets downloaded or shared on social channels properly like lagging or crashing can happen with using canvas,

It can really be frustrating, it is my personal experience with the tool,

I have unfortunately experienced such situations a couple of times in the past like errors while downloading the design work and difficulty in adding new elements to the design.

It is not that issues are going to stay for a long time,

They will be solved in a few minutes but this kind of experience can really hurt user experience with the tool and can leave a negative impression of the tool for a user whereas it can be a great tool.

Although canva team is regularly working on solving the issues and bugs in the tool still there are lots of things to be addressed and solved with the tool.

3. It is not a tool to be used if you are a graphic designer.

Canva is known for the best graphic design tool for beginners and bloggers and business owners. It is a tool highly recommended for those who don’t have knowledge of design.

I would not recommend this tool to a graphic designer,

Here are a few reasons why,

• Though you can easily create new designs with drag and drop features, there are fewer template categories to choose from within each design.
• Of course millions of graphics that you can use in your design work, you can not create your own custom graphic element like the way you can do using Photoshop.
• If you are using canva to design the graphics for your website or business as a graphic designer you can’t trademark the designs because even if you are using the premium plan of canva, there are millions of other users using the same plan and the same templates and graphic elements within canva and all the elements in canva is free to use for everybody.

If you are a graphic designer that is no doubt that you should pick the following tools for ditching canvas.

1. Photoshop.
2. Illustrator.
3. Sketch.

You can click here to learn more of the top tools to use for graphic design.

Ultimately I would want to say one thing,

If you are a professional graphic designer and using canva there is always a limit to using the tool, you will be confined with the features and restrictions within the tool whereas,

The sky is the limit using other tools like Photoshop which are meant for graphic designers.

4. It had a massive security breach.

The last problem with canva is that,

Canvas has got a massive security attack and hack exposing the data of approximately 139 million users including their details like,

• Usernames, email addresses, passwords, users’ locations of their countries.

This happened on 24th May 2019,

The attack was not the only thing that happened to canva, 

There were many attacks that happened to such tools in the past including tools like,

• Dubsmash
• My Fitness Pal.
• Zynga.

Millions of users’ data from different countries were hacked but the good thing about the Canva security breach was that Canva company was very intuitive in taking the right steps they stopped the data breach while it was still occurring.

You can read the complete scenario here.

This incident has now let us know the fact that companies are not that secure in terms of having to keep their user’s data safe.

Canva being one of the biggest companies is not an exception to the fact of being having data breaches,

Even companies like Facebook and YouTube have faced such cases in the past so it is not a big deal if you heard it happening with Canva.

Well, these are all the benefits and drawbacks of using canva.

Is Canva worth it?

Of course yes, Canva is highly worth it,

I use Canva every single day for Pinterest pins and blog post images,

You can observe all the images that I use in my blog are custom and I use them making them in Canva,

There are the disadvantages of using Canva though, and I would say not all the tools are perfect, some have good things in a few things and some have bad things,

You can expect to have all the things perfect in every tool, there is nothing like perfect, and Canva has its own limitations,

Besides that, I would say, Canva is by far the best graphic design tool for non-designers and beginners or website owners,

I would highly recommend you to use it as I do it every single day,

Use my link to get some discount on your Canva pro plan or get your 30 days free trial of the pro plan if you want to test the tool but definitely try the tool for sure.

You will definitely thank me later,

Use my link to get a discount for your Canva plan.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered everything related to the benefits and drawbacks of using Canva.

Do comment on what do you think about using Canva in the comment section below.

Share the blog with your family and friends if you found it helpful,

sharing is caring.

Read my other blogs,

• Pros and cons of using Pinterest.
• Future of graphic design.
• Benefits of graphic design.

I will catch you next time till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.