Premium Stock Library
Transcript
One of the first differences you may notice about the Pro plan is just how many more options you have when it comes to Canva’s stock library.
In fact, you’ll now have access to the entirety of Canva’s *premium* stock library, which includes not only stock photos but also an incredibly wide variety of icons & illustrations, video and audio.
There’s still a lot of options available to you in the free plan, but I know that most of the graphics I have used in my various website images, social media, presentations, and other designs have all been part of that premium library.
For example, the icons used in this webinar slide deck are mostly or all premium elements. Same for the icons in these featured images that are in use on my website. And ditto for the icon components of these tutorial video cover images.
And chances are that the graphics and photos you’ll want to use will also be part of that larger set of options.
To be clear, you still have access to more than a million stock elements on a free Canva plan, and if you typically find that the graphics you are attracted to using are part of the free plan, then having access to the premium stock library may not be a major differentiator for you.
But if flexibility of image choice is important to you, you’ll have significantly more stock library options on Canva Pro.
You *can* utilize the elements in the premium stock library if you’re on Canva Free, but you’ll have to purchase them when you download your designs.
If you’re on a free Canva plan, Canva will issue a content license every time you purchase a premium element. The license allows unlimited edits and downloads of the purchased element in the same design.
If you want to use the same element in a different design, you’ll need to purchase it again to get a new license for it.
And that will often quickly end up costing you more than the Canva Pro subscription.
It will probably be more helpful if I show you what I mean about free versus premium elements instead of just telling you, so let’s hop into Canva now and go to the Elements area here in the left hand object panel.
Let’s say I wanted to find an icon to use as part of an image I’m going to create for promoting my courses. I’m going to search on the term “icon course,” and then I’ll narrow to Graphics because I don’t want photo or video or other results, I only want graphic results.
And immediately you can see my point here… you’ll see how many of these have the crown icon on them, indicating that the graphic is a part of Canva Pro’s premium library. While there are options here that don’t have the crown on it so they’re available in the free plan, I would prefer a lot of the choices that are premium and it’s worth it to me personally to have the flexibility to choose those rather than being limited to the smaller subset of options.
Ultimately, whether the larger stock library is important to you comes down to your own needs and wants
For me, I like the freedom to be able to choose exactly the graphics I want for my designs, without feeling limited in my choices. Plus it helps me to save time because I don’t have to sort through determining which ones I can use on the free plan versus which ones are only available on a Pro subscription.
Instead, I can focus my choices on the best result, not the best free result.