Canva Pro Review:What is Canva?

Canva Pro is the professional, premium version of Canva, a graphic design platform that combines simplicity, high-quality resources and powerful functionality to solve all your creative needs at once.

Canva Pro includes access to an image editor, unlimited downloads of your pick of millions of stock photos, illustrations, templates and more, and special features for businesses and teams to collaborate and create visuals effortlessly. All for a very affordable, flat monthly fee. 

The multiple applications of the Canva Pro function added to the integral approach to content creation and its low cost, make it one of the best choices for small businesses. 

And now you can test the service for free for 45 days, thanks to the Canva Free Trial! 

Canva Review: What is it, Pros and Cons, and a Lot More

Are you looking for a new graphic design tool? Would you like to read a detailed Canva review?Canva is probably the most popular online graphic design software, with over 30 million users and a $6 billion valuation.I discovered Canva around the time it launched. It made a lot of waves, so I checked it out. If I am honest, back then, I didn’t like it.Before Canva came about, I used a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and PicMonkey for designing.

I got used to them and felt that Canva was harder to use when compared to PicMonkey. Canva required a learning curve and didn’t have all the features I wanted.

I ignored it. But I experimented with it again about two or three years ago and liked it so much that I replaced PicMonkey with it in my tools trio. Canva had introduced a ton of features that made it easier to use and provided support to do more.I’ll discuss Canva in detail, and share what I like and dislike about it, who it’s best suited for, its features, and walk you through how to design an image with it.

What is Canva?

Canva signup page

Canva is a complete design tool for anyone who isn’t an experienced designer. Most people see it as an image design tool, but it is much more. You can design everything from printables to PDFs to invoices to flyers to infographics to websites.Depending on your experience, you can either start from scratch or with their templates.It has a web version and apps for mobile phones and desktops.

Pros

"Use of use, the ability to customize my items, the options for design across multiple platforms are amazing. I love creating with Canva because it has elevated my business offerings exponentially."

"My 45 year old, family-run company enjoys the advantages of a very good reputation. However it takes a LOT of creative work to stay there in our extremely competitive field."

"I run my business with the confidence that I have a powerful tool at my fingertips to create a beautiful design in a matter of moments."

"Free trial is good and all the creations you can make for free. Great app for business and promoting."

Cons

"Another negative point is the fact that you are not able to manipulate the material when you download it, it is a little frustrating."

"The inability to remove watermarks without the paid version. This prohibits a user from downloading their design and further editing it without a blurry version."

"The only defect of this app is for sure that it is not completely free. For those who do not use it professionally or are not yet able to invest money it ends up becoming bad."

"We struggle with putting our so much information to our community quickly that sometimes the product of our communication is boring and disregarded because no one reads."

Getting Started With Canva

Canva is available as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, a web app, and a mobile app for Android and Apple devices. You can sign up for an account with an email address and password or by authenticating via Google or Facebook on any platform.

For people who are new to Canva and making branded content, the website offers some excellent videos, articles, and even full courses to help you learn how to create the best possible materials. For example, some videos teach you how to use the app, while the courses cover topics such as the basics of graphic design and how to master making social media content, branding, and more. From time to time, Canva also offers free, live, webinar-style classes on specific topics, such as Designing for Accessibility and Storytelling With Data.

Storage Space with Canva

As it goes with any online service, there is always a limit for any free plan. Canva is not alien to this concept.It is different storage capabilities for free and paid plans.If you want a free plan, you will get up to 1 GB of storage. If you upgrade to Pro or Enterprise plan, you will get unlimited storage.

It means that if you are on a free plan, you will soon run out of storage space because any design you create will be automatically saved. When you run out of storage space, you have to delete old design or creative work to open up more space.

You will not run into this problem if you upgrade.

What if you want to see all your designs at once? You can do so by clicking on the Home menu item.

Clicking on the Home will take you to the start page where you can see a segment called “Your designs.” This is what you will see:

Canva plans and prices 

The free version of Canva gets you 250,000 free templates, over 100 design types and some free photos and graphics, you also get 5GB of cloud storage. This will be more than enough for casual users.

With Canva Pro you get all that plus the features we've mentioned above. Canva Pro costs $119.99 / £99.99 per year, or $12.99 / £10.99 per month for up to five people, and a 30-day free trial is available. 

To compare, the premium version of Adobe's Creative Cloud Express, which offers similar features to Canva (and seems to have been created to compete with Canva and other similar software), costs $9.99 / £10.10 a month per person, and offers a 30-day free trial – there's a free version available, too. Photoshop or another single app from Adobe, such as Illustrator, costs you $9.99 / £9.98 per month, although with these apps, the learning curve is a lot steeper.

Serif's apps are cheaper, and arguably easier to get to grips with than Adobe's offerings. The likes of Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer will set you back $54.99 / £47.99, but that's a one-off fee.

We feel Canva Pro is good value for a single person if you're going to be using it a lot, but if you do work with a team of five, it’s an absolute steal. There’s only one Pro Plan but bigger businesses should look at the Enterprise plan too, which costs $30 / £24 per month, per person and has everything the Pro plan has along with a host of benefits centred around team working, including built-in workflows, template locking, unlimited storage and 24/7 support. 

Conclusion

If you’ve managed to get this far, thank you for taking the time to read my Canva Pro review! I am very honoured to have you around. I already gave you my short answer in the beginning of the article, and I stick with it till the end.

In my opinion, I think that Canva Pro is worth every feature for the affordable price it has. Of course, as with everything, it will depend on how much use you are giving to it:

• If you are occasionally making a design or two, but not using Canva more than 3-4 times a month, you probably don’t need the Pro version.
• If you are using Canva a lot, but only make simple designs and don’t care about animations, videos, transparent backgrounds and other more advanced features, you probably don’t need it either. Especially if you already have another subscription to an image bank.
• In all other cases, I think that Canva Pro is definitely worth every single cent. Again, it is not Photoshop, but it definitely has a lot of the most common features that you could need for your visuals.

The good news is, it has a 30-day free trial, so you don’t have to decide anything yet. Just give Canva Pro a try (afffiliate link), and test it out for yourself to see if it’s worth it for your goals and needs!

Also, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading my Canva Pro review, and hopefully I will see you in my next article!