Canva is a powerful design tool for anyone who needs visuals for their projects, homework, presentations, and businesses. It allows non-designers to create professional photos, graphics, and illustrations without any experience. We use it at Castos and recommend it to most creators.
That said, it does have some limitations. Recent price changes, feature limitations, and aggressive upselling has some users looking for Canva alternatives. You may be looking for another option that offers powerful tools, an easy-to-learn experience, and a low cost.
Whether you’re a designer or a DIYer, consider trying these Canva alternatives.
1. Visme (Free and Paid Tiers)
Visme is a powerful and user-friendly tool for creating stunning visual content. With Visme, you can easily create professional-looking presentations, infographics, and other types of visual content without any design experience. The tool offers a wide variety of customizable templates, as well as a drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to add and customize your own graphics and text.
One of the standout features of Visme is its extensive library of graphics and icons, which can be easily incorporated into your designs. This makes it simple to add visual interest to your content without having to create everything from scratch. Additionally, Visme offers a range of animation options, allowing you to add dynamic effects to your designs.
We also love Visme’s data visualization tool. It includes over 40 charts and graphs, customizable flowcharts, an easy-to-use table maker, customizable data widgets, and an interactive map builder. With the Graph Engine, you can create any type of chart you like with your own data, imported manually or via spreadsheet.
2. Crello (Free and Paid Tiers)
Crello is a design tool that offers a similar interface to Canva, with a quick search bar to easily locate thousands of templates and preset dimensions for specific designs like Facebook posts.
Like Canva, Crello offers a free plan, though it is limited to five design downloads per month, so most users will want to pay for the premium tier.
In addition to its easy-to-use interface, Crello offers a range of advanced features that set it apart from other design tools. Some of these features include more than 30,000 design templates for things like blogging, headers, and social media, as well as a rapid image cropping tool and beautiful photo filters.
Crello also offers image rotation and flipping, instant background removal, and interesting effects like frames and speech bubbles. In the design module, you can add objects, set color palettes with the branding kit, and drag-and-drop items like text boxes and shapes anywhere you want.
Additionally, Crello belongs on our list of Canva alternatives because it has a range of slick design elements like shapes, stickers, and badges, as well as audio editing tools to add music to pictures and audio to video.
3. PicMonkey ($8/month)
PicMonkey is an online photo editing tool that is user-friendly, intuitive, and packed with a wide range of features and tools. Whether you’re a professional photographer or simply someone who loves to edit their photos, create social media graphics or ads, PicMonkey has something to offer.
One of the things we appreciate most about PicMonkey is its user-friendly interface. It’s easy to navigate and find the tools and features you need, making it accessible for users of all skill levels. The wide variety of filters and effects available are also a huge plus, as well as free stock photos, templates, and over 9,000 graphics and icons.
The Smart Resize tool is particularly helpful. It lets you resize an image to be used on different social media accounts so your images are always the right size.
In addition to its user-friendly interface and wide range of filters and effects, PicMonkey also offers a variety of advanced editing tools. These include features like advanced color correction, blemish removal, and red-eye reduction, which allow users to fine-tune their photos and achieve professional-quality results.
The downside to PickMonkey is the cost. At $72/year for the basic license and up to $228/year for the business license, it’s a decent commitment, but worth the price.
4. Snappa (Free and Paid Tiers)
Snappa belongs on our list of Canva alternatives because it’s excellent for creating graphics for social media, profile pages, and blogs. The tool offers a range of handy templates that make it easy to get the perfect dimensions for your designs, and it has millions of free, high-resolution photos to help you create stunning designs quickly.
Some of Snappa’s standout features include a sleek designer with thousands of free templates, access to millions of free photos and graphics, and links to social media accounts and Buffer. The tool also offers font uploads, making it easy to use your own custom fonts in your designs, and it has the potential for collaboration and multi-user accounts.
Additionally, Snappa has quick background removal tools that make it easy to create clean, professional-looking designs. Overall, Snappa is a powerful and versatile design tool that offers a range of features and customization options.
Snappa’s pricing is slightly higher than that of Canva, but it does offer a few unique editing features that make it a valuable tool for designers.
5. Adobe Express (Free and Paid Tiers)
Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is a popular Canva alternative made by Adobe, who has a long history of producing high quality image editing software. Even though Express is part of the Adobe Suite, you don’t have to know how to use products like Photoshop or InDesign to use it.
Adobe Express offers a large library of templates full of unique designs, including lots of assets for social media, presentations, sales, holidays, collages, and more. It comes with icons, backgrounds, stock photos, and other digital assets. The resizing tool is particularly easy to use and helpful for many creators. You can send your design to other Adobe tools instantly, download as PNG or JPG, or save everything to Google Drive.
Adobe Express is free for an unlimited number of designs, but all downloads have the Adobe watermark. To remove the watermark and access all features, it costs $10/month.
6. Easil (Free and Paid Tiers)
Easil is an easy-to-use DIY graphic design tool that allows users to create professional-looking images using basic editing tools and one of the most advanced option of the Canva alternatives.
The Brand Kit feature is particularly useful for brand-oriented projects, as it allows users to store and access design elements like colors, fonts, and logos that match their company’s branding. In addition to offering professional templates, Easil also comes with more than a million stock images.
The team collaboration feature is another great aspect of Easil. It allows users to add an approval workflow, and the locking permissions feature lets you dictate which elements of the design team members can edit, add, or remove. This ensures that your designs won’t be accidentally messed up by team members who aren’t supposed to make changes.
Easil also offers a range of tools for improving the look of your designs. You can add drop shadows, glows, and curved effects to your text, and the Text Mask tool allows you to add metallic or glitter textures. You can even animate text and graphics.
With the background removal tool, you can easily remove the background from your images, something that would normally require advanced photo editing software like Photoshop. Overall, Easil is a versatile and user-friendly graphic design tool that simplifies the design process.
7. Venngage (Free and Paid Tiers)
Venngage is a versatile graphic design tool that offers a wide array of templates to choose from. With templates for social media images, cards, postcards, and reports and presentations, Venngage is a great option for users with a wide range of visual design needs.
Venngage’s main focus is on data visualization and infographic content creation, so users will find a limited number of templates in other formats and plenty of infographic templates to choose from. It’s great for turning boring data into pleasing graphics.
One of the standout features of Venngage is its real-time collaboration. This allows users to edit infographics with their team in real-time and easily gather feedback. Venngage also sets itself apart from other tools by using actual content in its templates, rather than Lorem Ipsum filler. This helps users visualize the information they need to include in their designs. Venngage also offers smart features and templates that automatically generate slide layouts from text blocks, saving time when arranging content.
However, Venngage does have some limitations. Its free plan is quite limited, and users must upgrade to one of the more expensive plans to access features like real-time collaboration. Additionally, the tool can sometimes experience slow performance when arranging elements.
8. Placeit ($15/month)
Placeit is an easy-to-use online graphic design tool that is well-suited for anyone who needs a simple way to create images for social media posts. It offers a wide range of templates that are constantly updated, so users can easily find one that suits their needs and customize it to their liking.
One of the standout features of Placeit is its product mockups. Typically, creating product images for online businesses or social media influencers would require photoshoots and image editing, but with Placeit, all you need to do is upload your design and place it on top of the available mockups. This is especially useful for businesses in the apparel space, as Placeit offers mockups for a wide range of clothing items, including shirts, hoodies, hats, and face masks. Placeit also offers mockups for other items, such as mugs, books, business cards, banners, and iPads.
In addition to product mockups, Placeit also offers tools for creating logos, gaming overlays, and social media videos. This makes it an excellent choice for social media influencers with little to no graphic design experience who want to create stunning visual content to promote their products.
Canva Alternatives Honorable Mentions
These aren’t the best Canva alternatives, but they are useful tools in their own right. They offer some unique features you might find useful.
Best for vector graphics: Drawtify
Drawtify is a Canva alternative for graphic design, especially creating logos, infographics, illustrations, unique fonts, and vector-based images. It also has a barcode generator for product label design.
Best for display banners: QwikBanners
QwikBanners is a simple, easy-to-use banner maker for display campaigns. You can turn one design into multiple banner sizes in seconds. It offers a large collection of high-converting templates to help you design quickly.
Best for WordPress users: Stencil
Stencil is a lightweight alternative to Canva that’s best for making social media or website images on-the-fly while you create content. The browser extension lets you grab images from the web and the WordPress plugin lets you edit visuals as you create content without leaving the platform.
Best for charts and graphs: Piktochart
Piktochart is best for creating charts based on data using its wide variety of professional templates, illustrations, and icons. He can also automatically transcribe your videos and add subtitles.
Best cartoonizer: Colorcinch
Colorcinch is a unique Canva alternative for turning your photos into artwork. You can also resize, enhance, transform, and add special effects, overlays, and filters to your photos.
Choose the best Canva Alternative for Your Needs
That concludes our list of the best Canva alternatives. As you can see, you have a lot of options. Take a few minutes to play around with each of them to find the one that works best for you and your team. Don’t be afraid to spend a few dollars on a premium option if it has all of the right tools for your needs.
What’s your favorite Canva alternative? Let us know in the comments!
