Canva Alternatives & Competitors

Canva is one of the most popular visual content creation and graphic designing tools. It offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface with a wide range of features that allow users to create social media graphics, posters, presentations, flyers, infographics and more.

Canva is widely utilized by businesses, organizations, and individuals of all sizes for its versatility, simplicity and a large collection of design resources. Thanks to this software, users can easily create professional-looking and eye-catching designs without the requirement for a complicated design software.

Overview of Canva Alternatives

Canva allows users to customize several aspects of their design such as fonts, backgrounds, colours, and more. Users can add their assets and images or choose stock photos, icons, and illustrations from Canva's extensive library. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for users to add and arrange elements like texts, images, illustrations, and icons in their design. Moreover, they can also rotate, resize and position the elements with ease.

Despite all the advantages, Canva has some noteworthy limitations. First is the limitation in design flexibility as professional graphic designing software. Users with complicated design needs or specific requirements don't find its capabilities as helpful as other professional software. Secondly, it supports regularly used file formats such as PNG, PDF, JPEG, but it has limitations when working or exporting other file types like vector formats (SVG) or some exclusive design file formats.

Why are People Looking for Apps like Canva?

Here are the reasons that give us clarity about why some businesses look for sites like Canva.

• Minimal Design Flexibility: Although Canva offers pre-designed templates and user-friendly interface. But it does not offer a similar level of design flexibility as some professional designing platforms like Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop. Moreover, it has limited customization options and users find it challenging to create advanced designs.
• Limited Font Options: In Canva, you get the option to choose from a wide variety of fonts, but still this selection is not as extensive as that of dedicated graphic designing platforms. Additionally, in the free version, you might also not have access to certain specialized or premium fonts. This is why people look for websites similar to Canva.
• Limited Image Editing Capabilities: Canva offers basic image editing features like cropping, filters and resizing. For more advanced photo editing attributes such as masking, advanced retouching, layer adjustments and masking, users need to use a dedicated photo editing system.

What To Consider When Looking for an Alternative of Canva?

A few important things you should keep in mind while looking for Canva similar sites:

• Templates: Canva boasts of a library with more than 50,000 templates to choose from. You get the option to edit and customize them as per your requirement. New templates are regularly added to the current library. You must make sure that alternatives to Canva come with a large collection of templates.
• Collaboration: Design apps like Canva should support collaboration, allowing several users to work on a project simultaneously. It must have a feature that lets you invite team members to share feedback on designs and leave comments on different elements.
• Branding: All Canva similar sites should let you create and save your brand assets like fonts, colours and logos for consistency across various designs. You should be able to create a branding kit to align your designs with your brand identity. This helps in maintaining a cohesive look.

Must Have Features in Websites like Canva

Any software like Canva must offer several unique features such as colour pallet, background removal, social media integration and downloading & print option.

• Downloading & print option

Canva gives you the option to download the designs in several file formats and you can choose from different resolutions & file sizes based on your specific needs. Moreover, the printing option allows you to take physical prints of your designs. Similarly, graphic design platforms like Canva should also offer printing & downloading options.

• Colour Pallet

If you want to alter the colour pallet of any design, then this feature is a time saver. Tools like Canva with this feature can allow you to change the element from the older to a new version. Even if your design has a lot of elements and multiple pages in the same colour, this feature will help you change the colour pallet.

• Background Removal Tool

Canva's background removal tool allows you to edit the background of images. Erase and restore tools also help in removing missed cleaning spots. Whichever substitute of Canva you select, make sure that it is loaded with a background removal feature.

• Social Media Integration

Canva like sites must support the integration with popular social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram, making it easier for you to create and directly publish your content.

Comparison of Canva Competitors

Here's the list of Canva alternatives with detailed comparison in terms of features:

What Type of Businesses are Looking for Canva Substitutes?

While Canva is a widely used and popular software, some companies that look for other apps Similar to Canva. Let's look are some popular businesses that seek alternatives for Canva.

• Graphic Design Agencies: Graphic design agencies often seek Canva similar apps because of their advanced design capabilities. Despite all the benefits, Canva does not offer as advanced designing features as Sketch or Adobe Creative Suit. Therefore, they look for other apps that offer precise control over design elements along with the facility to create complex designs. Moreover, as designing agencies work in collaboration with clients, they seek a tool that ensures real time collaboration, advanced project management, and version control facility.
• Animation studios: Animation Studios look for software similar to Canva as this popular software only provides basic animation features. On the other hand, solutions like Autodesk Maya or Adobe After Effects provide advanced character animation, keyframe animation, particle effects and many other specialized features required for complex animation projects. Moreover, animation studios require rendering capabilities and the facility to distribute the rendering across several machines, which cannot be done on Canva.
• Professional Photographers: Professional photographers often need more advanced editing capabilities to retain maximum image quality and make advanced adjustments and enhancements. They need a tool that can do landscape adjustments, portrait retouching and selective editing. This is only possible with software like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, hence they seek other software like Canva.

Techjockey’s Verdict

Canva is a highly versatile platform that offers a user-friendly interface, a basic design and editing facility and thousands of templates. It has gained worldwide popularity due to its ease of use and accessibility, which makes it suitable for small businesses and individuals with basic design requirements. The key strength of this software is its drag and drop feature and the ability to create visually appealing designs within a short period. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive solution to create social media posts, posters, presentations and other forms of visual content.

There are, but, a few drawbacks to Canva, like restricted design flexibility, restricted photo modifying, and a subscription fee. Additionally, it isn't an excellent choice of selection for specialists like photographers, animation studios, and image designers. There are different websites like Canva that offer greater advanced layout capabilities. If you are seeking different alternatives, you should maintain your commercial enterprise necessities, competence stage and financial state of affairs in thoughts to make a sensible decision.