Canva Pro vs Free — What’s the Difference?

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In this Canva Pro vs Free comparison, I highlight the main differences between two key versions of this popular DIY graphic design tool, and help you decide whether you can get away with using the free version of Canva — or if it’s better to upgrade to a paid-for version.

Canva is a graphic design tool that aims to make it easy to produce visual assets without needing any graphic design skills.

Increasingly popular with small business owners and solopreneurs, it comes with a huge number of customizable templates, graphics, images and videos; these can all be used to create a wide range of marketing materials (social media graphics, videos, presentations, slides, posters, business cards and even printed products).

Now, for many people starting out with Canva, there’s a key decision to be made — between the ‘Canva Free’ and ‘Canva Pro‘ plans. Which version is right for you?

Let’s find out, starting with a look at Canva Free.

Canva Free features

As its name suggests, this plan is entirely free. And it’s surprisingly featured-packed.

On the plan, you get free access to:

You can use the free plan indefinitely, and as you can see from the feature set above, it’s highly functional too. So Canva Free definitely represents a good option for anyone who is starting a new business but doesn’t have a huge budget to put into graphic design.

There are some significant downsides of the free Canva plan, however — with three in particular worth singling out as particularly strong reasons for upgrading to Canva Pro.

First, there’s very limited branding tools. On the paid-for plan, you can create 1,000 ‘brand kits’ — these let you upload a logo, define your brand color palettes, add your own fonts, photos, graphics and icons and incorporate all these easily into proceedings — but on the free Canva plan, you can only create one single brand kit.

(Canva Pro also lets you use brand controls, brand templates, lock brand elements and run approvals on brand designs — none of this is possible with the free Canva plan.)

Second, on the free plan there are no filters for showing only the free design elements. When you search for a design element (for example, a photo, icon, graphic etc.), Canva Free shows you all the relevant results for these – i.e., it includes all the elements that you only get on Canva Pro.

There’s no way to filter out these paid-for results, which can result in a rather lengthy trawl through assets you can’t use before you find a free element that works for your design.

(Technically, you can insert a premium stock image / graphic into a design created with Canva Free — but it will contain a Canva watermark).

And finally, the free plan gives you rather limited output options: you can’t adjust compression settings for your images or specify a limit for your downloaded files, and you can’t download SVGs (vector graphics), PNGs with transparent backgrounds, or print-ready CMYK files.

There are of course, a lot of other features that might tempt you to upgrade to Canva Pro. Let’s take a look at some of these now.

Canva Pro features

Canva Pro is available as a monthly or yearly subscription. The tool costs $15 per month if paid for on a monthly basis, or $120 if you pay upfront for a year.

Either way a Canva Pro account unlocks a huge number of additional important features — for me, the key ones are…

More stock photos, videos and graphics

The free version of Canva, whilst still generous in terms of the royalty free images and graphic elements it provides, limits you to a more basic library of stock images and graphics.

With Canva Pro, you get a huge range of additional stock photos and graphics (127 million+ in total); and you also get access to a much more extensive audio and video library too.

Specifically, Canva Pro gives you access to:

The free version of Canva doesn’t really provide you with any audio, and the number of free videos available is extremely limited by comparison to the ‘Pro’ version.

Given how much stock photography, video and audio generally costs, access to such a large content library for such a low monthly fee is one of the most compelling reasons for upgrading to Canva Pro.

More templates

Although the Canva free plan gives you a lot of professionally designed templates to work with — over 2.1 million — you get a far more of them on the Canva Pro one: 3.8 million+.

The Magic Switch tool

Another tempting aspect of Canva Pro is its Magic Switch feature (previously known as ‘Magic Resize’) — this lets you repurpose existing designs for different platforms really easily.

You simply open an existing design, and then use Canva Pro’s Magic Switch tool to automatically reformat it to suit different social media channels / purposes. You can then output these all in one go, which is a huge time-saver.

Canva Pro’s Magic Switch doesn’t just let you alter your designs for different channels and sizes though.

It also lets you create multiple versions of your design for different languages thanks to a built-in translation tool.

You simply click the Magic Switch button at the top of the Canva interface, choose the language you want to translate your design into, and click translate. Magic Switch then creates a translated version of your design for you.

This is ideal when you have to create multiple versions of the same design for use in different territories.

Background removal

On the Canva Pro plan, you get access to a background removal tool. This is particularly useful for creating headshots or thumbnails for YouTube videos easily.

More AI-powered design tools

Canva has recently introduced quite a few AI-powered design features to the platform — 14 different AI tools in fact!

While some of these new tools — such as Canva’s ‘Magic Write’ writing assistant and Canva’s ‘text to image’ generator — can be used on all plans, you can only use them a handful of times on the free Canva plan.

With ‘Canva Pro’, by contrast, you not only get access to the full suite of Canva’s ‘Magic Studio’ AI features, but the monthly usage limits for each AI tool are fairly generous and should cover most users’ requirements without difficulty.

Customizable templates

While the free version of Canva only lets you work with pre-designed Canva templates, in ‘Canva Pro,’ you can create fully-customizable templates. This means that you can create reusable, fully on-brand templates that work better for your organization.

Storage and folders

With Canva free, you get 5GB of storage, which can be used to store your own assets (photos, videos, logos etc.). However, this can be used up quickly if you are working with large assets, particularly video and audio.

‘Canva Pro’ gives you a much more generous 1TB storage limit.

Customer support

All Canva plans provide access to email support, and this is technically available 24/7.

However, the turnaround times are quite different for ‘Canva Pro’ and ‘Canva Free’. While with the Pro plan, you can expect a reply to your query within 24 hours, you may find yourself waiting up to 1 week for help queries if you’re using ‘Canva Free.’

Users

Up until recently, a key difference between the ‘Canva Pro’ and ‘Canva Free’ plans was that the ‘Canva Pro’ plan included 5 user accounts for just $15 per month. Sadly, this is no longer the case, and both ‘Canva Pro’ and ‘Canva Free’ come with just one user seat.

However, the ‘Canva Teams’ plan can be used to give your team access to Canva — this is priced at $10 per month per user (or $100 per year per user if paying for an annual plan).

Canva Teams includes a wide range of collaboration features, including team-only links, team approvals, team reports and admin controls.

(Note — a minimum of three team members is required to begin a Canva Teams subscription.)

(You can find out more about the 30 day free trial of Canva Pro here).

Canva Pro vs Free — side-by-side comparison table

Below you’ll find a side-by-side comparison of Canva Free vs Pro, to help you get an at-a-glance view of whether the free or pro version is right for you.

So, should you upgrade to Canva Pro?

Given that there is a lot of functionality available in Canva Free, not everybody will need to upgrade. But in summary, to make a decision on Canva Pro vs Free, I’d suggest asking yourself these questions:

If the answer to most of these questions is ‘yes,’ then of the two versions of Canva available, I’d recommend going with a Canva Pro subscription.

If you need more than 1 account, then you’ll have to use Canva for Teams.

Otherwise, a Canva Free account will suit you perfectly fine.

Canva alternatives

Direct alternatives to Canva include Visme, Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) and VistaCreate (formerly Crello). These are similarly affordable graphic design tools that run in a browser and allow non-professional designers to create visual material easily.

(Our Visme vs Canva comparison, VistaCreate vs Canva comparison and Adobe Express vs Canva comparison might be of interest here.)

Desktop applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere (and other graphic design software that you get as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription) can also serve as alternatives to Canva. But whereas Canva offers you a built-in library of royalty free photos, graphics and videos, you usually have to source assets ‘outside’ of these Adobe apps.

(Check out our Canva vs Photoshop comparison for more details on the differences between Adobe’s flagship image editor and Canva).

Now, over to you: got any questions about Canva Pro vs Free? Just scroll down and leave them in the comments section below. We’ll do our best to answer any queries you may have 🙂