Is Canva Pro Worth It?

In this video, I break down the main differences between Canva’s free and Pro plans to help you decide if the Canva Pro upgrade is worth it for your design needs.

We’ll go over Pro features like the premium stock library, premium templates, saving and sharing features, the Canva brand kit, Canva AI and Magic Studio, plus the differences between free and Pro when it comes to storage and Canva organization features.

By the end, you’ll know if Canva Pro’s additional flexibility, time-saving options, and creative tools align with your workflow, or if the free plan is sufficient for your needs.

Resources Mentioned

• Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)

Transcript

When deciding whether to upgrade to Canva Pro, it’s important to understand the key differences between the free plan and the Pro subscription.

In this video, I’ll walk you through the most notable features that set Canva Pro apart, including access to the premium stock and template libraries, saving and sharing options, the Canva brand kit, Magic Studio tools, and organization features.

By the end, you’ll have a more clear idea of whether these upgrades are worth the investment for your design needs.

Premium Stock Library

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 3 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.

Premium Template Library

In addition to having access to Canva’s premium stock library, Canva Pro will also give you access to the entirety of Canva’s template library.

While you do have a variety of templates available to you on the free plan, you’ll have *significantly* more on Pro, giving you far more choice and the flexibility to choose the template that best fits your design needs.

And to be quite frank, the templates included as part of the premium library tend to be better designed as well.

Additionally, Pro templates will often look more polished because they can utilize graphics from Canva’s premium library, whereas the templates available on Canva free will be limited to free photos and icons.

Pro templates will also be able to utilize premium fonts, but I don’t consider that as much of a restriction, simply because you should be modifying a templates fonts to suit your own brand fonts anyways.

Let’s hop into Canva’s template library so I can show you what that looks like, rather than just telling you.

I’ve already done a search for the phrase “instagram post” and I’ve used the filters to narrow the results to portrait sized templates that are tagged as being an “elegant” style

So if we look through these results, you’ll see there’s a mixture of template options that have the crown on them and those that don’t.

Those with the crown are part of the premium template library, and those without the crown would be available on your free Canva plan.

At this time there unfortunately isn’t a way to filter the template results to show free templates versus premium templates, so you’ll have to do a visual scan to look for that crown icon.

Saving & Sharing Features

Most of your focus when working in Canva will be on what you’re creating, but once you’ve finished the design process, you’ll need to get your design out of Canva and into the world so you can actually use it, whether that’s a graphic for social media, a PDF guide, a presentation slide deck, or whatever else it is.

Regardless of whether you’re on a free Canva plan or the Pro subscription, there will be a lot of similarities across all Canva accounts in terms of how you save and share your designs.

All Canva users have the ability to export their designs in a variety of formats, including as JPG, PNG and PDF files. And you can also download MP4 and GIF files on all plans.

Here’s what to expect in terms of the key differences between free and Pro, and you’ll notice that most of them are related to the downloading options available to you.

The downloading options will differ, depending on the type of file format you’re looking to save…

If you’re saving a design as a JPG image, then you’ll have these options, and you’ll notice that the ability to change the download size and the quality of the download are both Pro features.

Also, Canva has introduced an option to limit the downloaded file size when you’re downloading a single page of a design as an image.

If you’re saving a design as a PNG file, it’ll be a similar scenario, with both the download size and the option of compressing the file being available only on a Pro plan.

And again, the option to limit the download size of a single image design.

So, when might you want to download your design at a different size?

As an example, if you use Canva to create a header for your email newsletters and you often find that header image looking blurry, it is very useful to have the the ability to download your header design at 2 or 3 times the design size to get a more clear looking image.

But perhaps more importantly than those other download features, you also won’t be able to download a design with a transparent background if you don’t have the Pro plan.

You’ll need that transparent background option anytime you want to download an image without a white or other colour square behind it.

So for example, if you’re creating an icon or illustration that you want to blend seamlessly on your website.

Or if you are using Canva to create a logo, this will be important as well.

There’s also a third image download format here, and that’s an SVG file; this format option is only going to be available on Pro.

Your PDF downloading options will be pretty much the same whether you’re on a free or Pro plan, with the one exception being that if you’re preparing a design to be print ready, you will only be able to select this CMYK colour profile option if you’re on a Canva Pro account.

And finally, you’ll be looking at downloading a design as an MP4 or GIF if the design is a video or animation. If that’s your situation, as with images, you’ll only be able to adjust the download size on a Pro plan, plus you need that paid subscription if you want to download a video design as separate files.

For example, if you had multiple animations or videos contained within a single design and you wanted to be able to download them as individual videos, rather than as multiple pages of a single design, then you’ll need to be on Canva Pro.

So those are the differences in the options for saving your designs, but there’s also a key difference if you’re looking to *share* your designs.

For the most part, your sharing options will be the same, whether you want to share a link to view or edit a design, or share it as a template so that folks can make a copy of the design into their own Canva account.

But if you want to save a design as a brand template within your own Canva account, you’ll need to be on Pro to do so.

Saving a design as a brand template can streamline your design workflow by giving you the option of creating a master template as a starting point for any social graphics, client materials, or other designs that you are creating repeatedly.

For example, you could have a brand template for a client proposal design, or an onboarding guide, or an Instagram carousel design, and so on.

You might have a master presentation slide deck design that you use as a starting point for all of your presentations. I do this for my presentation topics that I give repeatedly, and that template contains all the variations of the slides that I might need. Then I can just hop into the grid view mode and delete the pages I don’t need. It’s so much more efficient than piecemealing together a presentation.

Or another example…. in the past I ran a website development company and one of the services we offered was a WordPress health checkup. Those reports were created in Canva, but to streamline my process, I didn’t create a brand new design every time.

While I no longer have a brand template setup for this design because that business isn’t in operation, at that time, I had a template already set up and then I could simply click on the template to generate a new report layout for a client.

Plus, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally leaving in another client’s name, which could be a risk if I had copied a previous client’s report to start with. This is something that can easily happen if you’re copying a proposal design or something else that has been customized for a specific client.

In other words, there’s a lot of benefits to being able to create internal brand templates:

• It helps ensure brand consistency
• It can save a lot of time
• It can help you not miss components that require customization, and then on the flip side,
• It can help you prevent inadvertent changes to your original designs that might occur if you just duplicate past files to create new designs.

The Brand Kit

The ability to setup and use the Canva brand kit feature is probably one of, if not *the* biggest reason, why I encourage anyone using Canva to support a business to upgrade from the free Canva plan to Canva Pro.

Having a visual brand kit is essential for any business and it’s going to help to ensure the consistency of your marketing, which in turn will foster recognition and a sense of trust among your customers.

When you set up the brand kit feature in Canva, it enables you to have quick and easy access to all your brand logos, colours, fonts, photos, graphics and icons so that as you design graphics and content for your business, you can effortlessly apply your brand and ensure consistency across all your marketing assets.

You’ll also have the ability to set brand guidelines, ensuring any team members always stay on brand, plus if you work with multiple brands, for example, if you have multiple clients or more than one business, then you’ll also be able to create and manage up to 1000 separate brand kits, all in one convenient location inside your Canva account.

I want to answer two questions that often come up when talking about this particular reason to maintain a Pro subscription:

1. Is there a workaround on the free plan?
2. And what happens to my brand kit if I downgrade to a free plan in the future?

First let’s tackle the workaround question.

Yes, to some extent you could create a bit of a workaround for the brand kit. You could create a custom folder to house your brand assets with subfolders for your logos and your various brand imagery.

And yes, you could create a design that contains your colour palette hex code values so you can copy them when you need to know your specific colour codes.

However, neither of those options will be as reliably quick or streamlined when it comes to actually apply your branding to your designs, and I’m always going to champion for the most efficient solution. In this case, that means using a feature that consolidates all of your required brand assets into one spot in the Canva editor, and that’s exactly what the brand kit is going to do for you.

Additionally, there is no workaround when it comes to your fonts. If your brand fonts are not already on the free Canva plan and are only available as part of Canva’s pro fonts, or if your fonts aren’t available on Canva at all and you need to upload custom fonts, then you’re going to need to have a Pro subscription in order to have access to your brand fonts so you can use them in your designs. Full stop.

So for example, my brand fonts are Cinzel for my headings, Baskerville for my subheadings and then Raleway for body copy. And it turns out that all of those are actually available on the free Canva plan! But if one of my fonts was, for example, Calgary, then you can see the crown icon there which means it’s only available as part of Canva Pro’s fonts.

Or if I wanted to use Aurellia Script, that is not included in Canva’s fonts at all, and I had to upload that one to get it into my Canva account… and like I said, uploading fonts will only be possible on a paid Canva subscription.

Now onto the other question.

What happens if you set up your brand kit but you decide either to not upgrade after the trial or you do upgrade but you want to downgrade again in the future?

When you return to a free Canva plan, you will not be able to access any of the brand kit features but your brand kit should be preserved behind the scenes. Which means that if you do decide to upgrade again in the future, your brand kit should be happily awaiting your return and you won’t have to re-create it again.

Magic Studio

Magic Studio is Canva’s collection of AI powered tools designed to help you edit your images and designs in a variety of ways.

In full transparency, I don’t use a lot of these features myself, but every Canva user is going to be different in terms of needs and goals when it comes to design capabilities, so hopefully this video will help you to assess which of Canva’s Magic Studio components add value to your design workflow.

So to that end, I’m going to provide a quick description of Canva’s AI options and highlight if it’s included in the free version of Canva, including any usage limitations to be aware of.

Let’s start with the features that are only available on Canva Pro, with no access on a free account, and those include:

Magic Eraser, which enables you to entirely remove unwanted items from your photos.

For example, let’s say I wanted to remove this pillow from this chair.

Magic Eraser is a tool that could help you do that.

Then there is Resize & Magic Switch.

While Magic Switch enables you to transform Canva designs into other document types or to translate them into other languages, for me the most important aspect of this feature is that you can quickly resize a design into new dimensions.

You would use this if you wanted to quickly repurpose a design into multiple different sizes for different social platforms. 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.

Magic Grab allows you to select and separate the subject of your photo so that you can edit, reposition, or resize it.

For example, if I wanted to separate my photo from the background in one of my headshots.

Magic Expand enables you to extend a photo in any direction. For example, when you’re designing an Instagram story, you’ll often require a tall image, but obviously not all photos are taken in that aspect ratio.

With Magic Expand, you can take a square or horizontally-oriented image and extend it vertically to fit the dimensions of an Instagram Story design.

While all Canva users have access to animation effects for their designs, Magic Animate is a tool that will assist you in choosing your animations and transitions for your project.

Using AI, Magic Animate analyzes your design and then chooses the motion effects that it believes will match your content and other design components.

If you decide you would prefer to have more control over how animations are applied to your designs, you can always do it manually, and like I said, you’ll have access to all of Canva’s animation styles regardless of the plan you’re on.

However, I’ll flag that some of the variations and controls on those animations will be Pro only features.

For example, you may have access to a particular animation style but not be able to change the direction or speed of the animation, whereas you do have that capability on a paid plan.

With the Magic Morph feature, you can quickly apply effects to text or a shape (and some elements as well). For example, if you wanted to take a shape and transform it to look like a foil balloon, or a “velvet pillow”… Magic Morph is the tool you’d want to use to do that.

For me, this is unlikely to be a tool that I would use very often, but it’s an interesting design option to have in your toolbox.

And finally, Background Remover, which is kind of the OG of Canva’s AI tools, which is why I’m including it here, and honestly, of all the AI powered features in Canva, Background Remover and Resize are really the ones that I use on a regular basis.

So those are all the AI features that you won’t be able to experiment with unless you have a Pro account but then we have a variety of tools you *can* access on a free Canva account, but with limited usage.

Starting with Magic Media, which includes the “Text to Image,” “Text to Graphics,” and “Text to Video” options.

Essentially Magic Media takes your text prompts and then turns them into AI created images or videos.

On a free Canva plan, you’ll have 50 total uses of Text to Image and only 5 total uses of Text to Video. So those aren’t monthly allowances, that’s total uses ever. Whereas on a Canva Pro account, you’ll have 500 uses per month of Text to Image and 50 uses per month of Text to Video.

Magic Design is supposed to enable you to turn your text prompts and media into customizable designs that match the content and context you need. For example, typing in your idea and seeing a presentation topic, outline and sample content automatically generate.

In theory, it sounds amazing and I’m hoping that we’ll get to the point that this tool is a massive time saver and source of inspiration. In execution, I don’t feel the results are at the level yet that I would confidently sing its praises. When that changes, I’ll be among the first to shout it from the rooftops.

On Canva’s free plan you’ll have 10 usage tokens total but on a Pro subscription, this feature is just included as needed.

Then we have Magic Edit, and just like with Magic Eraser, you can brush over an area of your image but instead of Canva simply removing a specified element from the image, with Magic Edit, you can add an image that wasn’t previously there, or you can replace an existing image with something new.

With this particular feature, there is no difference between the free and Pro plans: you’ll have 100 uses daily on both.

Then we come to Magic Write, which is essentially Canva’s version of ChatGPT. Magic Write is powered by OpenAI and it’s an AI text generator that you can provide a prompt to help with your content creation, whether that’s copy, blog outlines, lists, social captions or something else.

You’ll have 50 total uses of Magic Write with a free Canva plan, whereas Canva Pro gives you a usage allowance of 500 uses per month.

Then we have Translate, and with Canva’s AI-powered online translator, you can translate the written copy in any design into over 100+ languages.

Canva Free users can translate up to 50 pages total and if you’re on a paid subscription, you’ll be able to translate up to 500 pages each and every month, with it resetting at the beginning of each billing month.

Translate can be selected through the Resize & Magic Switch feature but also directly from the Apps area of Canva.

Finally there’s Beat Sync, which is not technically part of Magic Studio, but it is an AI powered tool, so it feels appropriate to include here.

If you’re on a free Canva plan, you’ll need to manually sync your video footage to your soundtrack, whereas with Canva Pro, Beat Sync will automatically sync your video to your audio.

Storage & Organization

At one time, there used to be a big difference in terms of custom folders, specifically you could only have two custom folders on the free Canva plan whereas you could have unlimited folders on Canva Pro.

As someone who focuses so heavily on teaching how to get organized in Canva, this feature difference alone was worth upgrading and staying on a Pro.

But fortunately for Canva users, this difference was dropped quite a long time ago and you can now create unlimited folders on *both* the free and paid subscriptions of Canva, and you can also create subfolders that are nested 10 levels deep on Canva Free and Canva Pro.

But let’s talk about the couple of organization differences that *do* exist and those are specifically the number of items you can store in a folder, and the total storage space allotted to your account.

On a free plan, you will only have 5 GB of storage space for your designs and media while Pro 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.

Note that media in the trash folder does not count towards your storage totals at this time.

In terms of creating custom folders, like I said, you can create an unlimited number of folders on all plans, but free users can store a maximum of 200 items in a folder whereas Pro users can store up to 1000 designs or images in a folder.

Otherwise, your experience using and moving content into folders should be the same regardless of which plan you’re on.

Finally, one more difference worth noting is that Design & Media Tagging is only available on a paid subscription.

You can access tagging by hovering over a design, image or video and clicking on the 3 dots. Then you’ll see here that you have an option to add keyword tags which will make it much easier for you to search for content in your Canva account in the future.

Teaching business owners how to get organized in Canva is my primary area of focus, so if you do decide that you want more guidance and support in this area, I’d invite you to check out my Canva organization courses and services.

Final Thoughts

So, those are the major differences between Canva’s free plan and Canva Pro. Whether or not the upgrade is worth it for you really depends on your design needs and how often you use Canva’s features.

If having access to a wider range of elements, the brand kit, advanced tools, and extra storage would streamline your workflow and give you more creative freedom, Canva Pro might be the right fit.