Canva – A Free Powerful Marketing Solution

If you have been around in the online marketing space for a while I am perfectly sure that you would have heard about Canva, a free powerful marketing solution that enables you to create graphics to satisfy pretty much all of your graphic design needs 100% free of charge.

Guess how many people search for Canva on a monthly basis? According to my keyword research tool, Jaaxy, there are almost 8.6 million searches for Canva per month, so this will give you an idea of how popular Canva really is. Further to this I could not believe it when I was watching television and there was a Canva advertisement that popped up on television. I was totally blown away. How often do you see online marketing related software featured on television advertisements?

The bottom line is that Canva is certainly a massive deal. In fact, Canva is so massive that around 65 million people across the globe build their brand with Canva.

So what can I do with Canva?

The question is more, what can you not do with Canva? Canva has so many features that it will make your head spin. With Canva you can create powerpoint style presentations, videos, animations, Pinterest pins, TikTok videos, banners, social media covers and posts, YouTube thumbnails, posters, flyers, logos etc.

What really surprised me is that Canva even runs a printing service that allows you to design your own custom hoodies, T-shirts, mugs etc. that can be shipped to any address of your choice. All of the aspects mentioned here can be done with a 100% free account and to top all of this you are offered 5GB of storage in the free Canva account in order to save your created designs. Storage is never really an issue anyways as you can simply download your created designs to your computer.

I am pretty convinced that you will not find a 100% free graphic design software out there that offers so much value in the free account and that is the reason why Canva is so incredibly popular.

Canva Features:

When you study the image below you will get a good idea of the kind of features Canva has on offer, but then of course you will see that these are just some of the features. When you hit the “See All” button below each section it will reveal a lot more features available.

Canva Templates

In the introductory section of this article I already mentioned a lot of the templates and fucntionality on offer by Canva, but when you study the Canva Templates image below you will see that I have only touched the surface.

Canva Apps

Canva integrates seamlessly with a great variety of popular apps like Bitmoji, Giphy, Brandfetch, Smartmockups etc. that you will instantly recognise and this is what contributes to making Canva such a powerful graphic design tool. In the below image you will see just a small sample of the powerful apps that integrates seamlessly with Canva.

Canva Free vs Canva Pro vs Canva Enterprise

Canva has 3 levels of access namely free, pro and enterprise. A lot of Canva users only make use of the free version as they feel that it already offers them with enough power to do what it is they need to do in terms of graphic design and they never bother to upgrade to a paid membership. However, there are a lot of incentives to go pro e.g. you are offered a 100+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics, whereas with the free version a lot of the premium stock is locked for free users.

The Canva enterprise version is more applicable when team collaboration on graphic design is a requirement.

Canva Free Account

So what is included in the Canva Free account?

• 250,000+ free templates
• 100+ design types (social media posts, presentations, letters, and more)
• Hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics
• Invite members to your team
• Collaborate and comment in real-time
• 5GB of cloud storage

Canva Pro Account

The awesome thing about a Canva Pro account is that your account entitles up to 5 people to use the account, which means if you and 4 other friends want to use the Canva Pro account, then you can. This means you can split the bill between 5 people which will pretty much make Canva Pro free to use, as it only costs £99.99 per year. This will result in paying £1.67 per month per person to utilise Canva Pro.

Study the image below to see exactly what is included with your Canva Pro account.

Canva Enterprise Account

If considering the Canva Enterprise account you will require a minimum of 25 people to be on board at a cost of £24/month per person. The purpose of the enterprise account is to empower your team, manage your brand, and scale your content all in one place.

Canva Enterprise includes everything the Canva Pro account has plus the following additional features:

• Establish your brand’s visual identity with logos, colours and fonts across multiple Brand Kits
• Control your team’s access to apps, graphics, colours, logos and fonts with brand controls
• Control team uploads into Canva
• Built-in workflows to get approval on your designs
• Set which elements your team can edit, and stay on-brand with template locking
• Unlimited storage
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• 24/7 Enterprise-level support

Canva Price Comparison

In the section above I have already pretty much covered Canva pricing, but for better clarity please see the image below which should make the price comparison between the free, pro and enterprise Canva accounts quite obvious.

Please note that you can pay monthly or yearly. The yearly plan will be slightly more expensive than a monthly plan.

Summary

Canva is a fantastic graphic design tool that are utilised by millions of companies and online marketers around the globe for a very good reason. If you are an online marketer or business owner and not utilising Canva, then I personally think you are missing out.

The best thing about Canva is that it offers a lot of power in the free account and although many see the clear benefit of upgrading to a Canva Pro account, there are hundreds of thousands of users that are happy to simply continue to use Canva for free without having to ever pay a cent for Canva.

If you are already a Canva user let me know in the comments section your opinion and experience with Canva and how you utilise it for your business needs. If this is the first time you heard about Canva and you found this information both informative and interesting and you think that this article may be helpful to others, especially to those starting out with online marketing, then please feel free to use the social share buttons below to share this article with friends and family.