Choose Your Canva Plan
Transcript
This video will give you an overview of the differences between Canva’s free account and their Canva Pro account which is a paid service that you can pay for either monthly or annually.
I’m going to assume that you already have a Canva account, but if you don’t, the first thing you’re going to want to do is to set up that account and you would simply go to canva.com and then you would sign up ideally with email.
I don’t usually like to connect my accounts to other accounts in order to log in. I would advise you just set it up with an individual email address and you’ll simply click on here, enter your name and your email address and your password.
Be sure to make note of all that information and then get started.
You’ll start with the free account and you will still be able to do a lot of what I show you in my tutorials and videos with Canva’s free option. However, in the spirit of full transparency, I also regularly highlight features or tools that require a Canva Pro account. For example, features like the Brand Kit or various Magic Studio tools.
So with that in mind, I would highly encourage you to consider taking advantage of a free trial of Canva Pro so that you’re able to take full advantage of all of the features. You can find more information about that at BrendaCadman.com/pro.
So let’s talk about the differences between the two plans, and Canva outlines them quite nicely on their pricing page which you will find at Canva.com/pricing
The cost you see listed for Canva Pro is going to vary depending on what country and what region you’re in.
I’m not going to go over every single feature here but I do want to highlight for you what I think are the most important features that are available to you regardless of the whether you’re on the free or Pro version of Canva, and I also want to flag for you some of what I consider to be the most significant reasons to upgrade to the paid Canva Pro.
Design & Publishing
Whether you’re on the free or Pro version, you will have access to a wide range of free stock images, videos, audio and fonts.
You’ll also have access to free Canva templates, over 100 different design document types, and the ability create designs with custom dimensions.
And all users have the ability to export their designs in a variety of formats.
What is only available on a Pro or Teams account in terms of design & publishing is:
Access to Canva’s entire premium stock library, and this includes not just photos but also all sorts of icons & illustrations, video and audio. I know that a lot of the illustrations I have used in social media designs and various worksheets have all been part of that premium library.
It indicates here that you can export designs as PDF, JPG and PNG files in both the free and paid plans, but what it doesn’t indicate here that is a key differentiator is that you can only download designs with a transparent background in the paid version.
Also only on a paid account is the ability to save your designs as templates… and to access the entirety of Canva’s template library. You do have access to a wide variety of templates on the free plan, but significantly more on Pro, which will give you far more flexibility in terms of designing great looking content in Canva.
You’ll have access to basic design insights in Canva’s free plan, which includes the ability to see how many people have viewed your design, but only Pro users will be able to access advanced design insights like the number of unique views and clicks.
Plus you can only access sound effects on a Canva Pro account.
AI Tools
Under AI-powered design tools, you have access to a number of the features on both free and paid plans, though there are usage limitations that come with the free subscription.
However you’ll see here that quite a few of the Magic Studio features are only available on Canva Pro and Teams accounts, such as Magic Eraser, Magic Morph, Magic Grab, Magic Expand, and Magic Animate.
Additionally, the ability to resize a design into new dimensions included in “Resize & Magic Switch” is only available on a Pro or Teams account. You would use this if you wanted to quickly repurpose a design into multiple different dimensions. For example, if you wanted to take an Instagram post design and resize it for an Instagram Story or a Pinterest Pin or another social channel’s specific size requirements.
The resizing feature is one of the top features that had me willing to upgrade my account so long ago.
And if you want to be able to access Canva’s photo and video background remover, that is also only on a Pro account.
Workplace Tools
We’ll skip over Workplace tools as this is just highlighting the different document types that Canva provides, and you will be able to access all design types regardless of the plan you’re on.
Collaboration
Under Collaboration, you’ll see that you have access to a variety of collaboration tools on both the free and paid plans.
Brand Management & Controls
The primary thing to note under brand management is that brand controls, templates and brand kits are only available on Pro and Teams accounts.
It says you have access to 1 brand kit here under the free plan, but the only feature you’ll have access to is the ability to add 3 colors in the colour palette area. You won’t be able to add any additional colors or to access any of the other core features of the brand kit.
Whereas on a Pro account, you can add up to 1000 complete brand kits.
The ability to setup and use the Canva brand kit feature is an *enormous* reason why I believe the Pro account is so important for business owners, and it’s probably one of the biggest reasons why folks using Canva to support a small business will end up choosing to upgrade from the free Canva plan to Canva Pro.
Team Management & Permissions
We’ll skip right over Team management and permissions as that’s not going to apply to the Pro account, only to a Teams account.
Apps & Integrations
You’ll be able to access the Apps marketplace regardless of which plan you’re on.
Storage & Organization
And then we have Storage and Organization.
On a free plan, you will only have 5 GB of storage space for your designs and media while Pro and Teams accounts allow for up to 1 TB of storage.
Depending on how much you use Canva, this may not be an issue. But if you do upload a lot of images or video, you may find yourself running into that storage limitation.
There is currently no feature available to indicate how much storage space you have left, but you should receive an alert message if you do hit that maximum allotment. Also note that media in the trash folder does not count towards your storage totals at this time.
In terms of creating custom folders, you can create an unlimited number of folders on all plans, though the number of items you can store in a given folder does differ. While it’s not indicated here, at last update, free users could store a maximum of 200 items in a folder whereas Pro users could store up to 1000 designs or images in a folder.
And finally, it has indicated Media tagging here, which is only available on the paid plan, but you can actually tag not just images and videos with keywords for easier searching, but also your designs.
Support
Then under Support, Pro plans will have access to support ticket and live chat, whereas free plans will only have access to Canva’s AI assistant and chatbot for support.
Non-Profit & Education
The last thing I want to highlight about the free versus pro account is that you might actually be eligible for a free Canva Pro account.
Canva Pro is available for free to nonprofits and K-12 educational organizations.
You’ll find that there are dedicated pages with more information for both of those categories, under the Plans and pricing option in the menu at the top of the page here.
So if you are an educator or part of a non-profit organization, check out the eligibility requirements and the process for applying for a free Canva account.