Canva may be the most popular graphic design platform for non-designers, but even it has its flaws.
In this guide, let’s look at 13 top Canva alternatives sorted according to their use case, best features, potential limitations, and pricing.
Table of Contents hide
Affordable alternatives to Canva for your business
1. Best for Adobe users: Adobe Express
2. Best for quick creation: Picmaker
3. Best for professional charts and graphs: Piktochart
4. Best for social media marketing: Snappa
5. Most ideal for WordPress users: Stencil
6. Best for small business branding: Wepik
7. Best for real-time collaboration: Venngage
8. Best for photo editing: PicMonkey
9. Best for teams: Easil
10. All-in-one: Visme
11. Best for launches: Trakto
12. Best for vector graphics: Drawtify
13. Best for display banners: QwikBanners
14. Ideal for automation: Switchboard Canvas
Canva overview
Canva is one of the most widely-used DIY design tools.
It boasts a massive library of beautiful templates and layouts to create images for your website, presentations, and social media channels.
But no software is completely flawless.
Users looking for Canva alternatives cite reasons like poor print quality and overused templates that seemingly appear everywhere.
Affordable alternatives to Canva for your business
AppSumo brings you lifetime deals on the latest graphic design tools for your business. Just pay once and they’re yours—for life.
Top Canva alternatives
1. Best for Adobe users: Adobe Express
Source: Adobe
Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is your trusted design sidekick.
Users get to enjoy the entire royalty-free stock photo and font collection and thousands of gorgeous templates. Since this design app is part of the Adobe ecosystem, you can seamlessly use Photoshop and Premiere within one platform.
Best features:
- Adobe ecosystem: Reverse your videos and convert them to GIFs using Premiere and convert your JPG files to PNG via Photoshop without leaving the Adobe ecosystem
- Templates: Adobe actively adds new templates to support more local events and seasonal moments
Limitations:
- Templates are still limited compared to competitors
- Image background removal tool doesn’t always work
- Software occasionally glitches which makes it difficult to save your work
Free trial: 30 days
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with basic editing and effects, 2GB storage, thousands of templates, and more
- Premium: $9.99/month with everything in Free + 100GB storage, premium templates, and more
2. Best for quick creation: Picmaker
Source: Picmaker
Picmaker is an AI-based graphic design platform that lets you create eye-catching designs across 70+ categories, including YouTube thumbnails, Instagram posts, and Twitter ads.
It has tons of ready-made design templates, 100 million stock images, 100,000+ icons, a custom brand kit, and many other powerful features.
It enables even non-designers to effortlessly create social media designs, logos, memes, flyers, posters, invitations, and certificates in minutes!
Finally, its artificial intelligence-based MAD button lets you choose from a staggering mix of templates, colors, fonts, and pictures.
Best features:
- MAD Button: Automatically create unique designs in a click
- Online Sticker Maker: Convert your custom pictures or stock photos into stickers
- Online Background Remover: Remove image backgrounds based on AI-powered layers and elements suggestions
- Value for money: Canva charges you for what Picmaker gives for free (e.g., remove background, customer support)
Limitations:
- No video or MP4 integrations—Picmaker requires users to use its sister tool, Animaker, to create animations and live action videos
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with 10,000+ premium templates, 2GB of cloud storage, and more
- Starter: $9.95/month with everything in Free + one-click background removal, 15GB of cloud storage, and more
- Pro: $25/month with everything in Starter + custom branded templates, 30GB of cloud storage, and more
- Enterprise: Custom with everything in Pro + 24/7 support, unlimited storage, and more
3. Best for professional charts and graphs: Piktochart
Source: YouTube
Piktochart’s specialty is helping you create your own charts, graphics, and infographics with its library of data visualization templates.
This graphic design tool’s niche is easy-to-use data visualization tools, but it also offers templates for creating your own social media images and presentation slides.
Granted, it doesn’t offer all of the same capabilities as Canva, but there are more professional data visualization templates and capabilities if that’s the kind of visual content you create most often.
Best features:
- Templates & Assets: Piktochart offers unlimited professional templates, stock photos, illustrations, and icons even for free users
- Piktochart Video: Automatically transcribes your videos and adds subtitles in over 60 languages
- Data Visualization & Analytics: Piktochart also provides unlimited charts and maps and traffic data in all plans
Limitations:
- Only 100MB cloud storage in free plan
- Only five projects and one folder in free plan, which can get expensive and unsustainable for budget-strapped businesses
- Limited chart and map designs
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with watermark removal, 100MB of cloud storage, and more
- Pro: $19/user per month when billed annually with everything in Free + custom team templates, 100 GB of cloud storage, and more
- Enterprise: Custom with personalized onboarding, 200GB of cloud storage, and more
4. Best for social media marketing: Snappa
Source: Snappa
Snappa is an intuitive graphic design tool that offers plenty of design templates, royalty-free images, and the ability to upload your own branded images to include in your designs.
One key feature that sets Snappa apart from many Canva alternatives is the ability to share your designs directly to social media without leaving the platform.
Best features:
- Intuitive: Snappa is incredibly easy to use, so much so that it’s a favorite among top marketers like Sujan Patel (Mailshake) and Olga Andrienko (SEMrush)
- Integration with Buffer: Schedule your social media posts within the graphics editor, thanks to its tight Buffer integration
- Photos and templates: Snappa often adds over a thousand new photos daily and new templates every week
Limitations:
- Free plan lacks many features (e.g., three downloads per month and unable to share images on social media)
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Starter: $0 with 3 downloads per month
- Pro: $15/month with unlimited downloads, custom font uploads, social media integrations, and more
- Team: $30/month with everything in Pro + 5 users and team collaboration
5. Most ideal for WordPress users: Stencil
Source: Stencil
Stencil is a lightweight Canva alternative that makes it easy to create images for your website or social channels on the fly.
It has different browser extensions so you can easily highlight text or capture an image to pull it into your design creations, and it boasts more than 100,000 different quotes you can choose from to add to social media graphics.
But its best feature, hands down, is its WordPress plugin that allows you to edit your photos without leaving the blogging platform.
Best features:
- Browser extensions: Right-click any image and highlight text from the web and pull it instantly on Stencil using the Chrome or Firefox extension
- Facebook Ad Grid: Check if your Facebook Ad image has less than 20% text directly on Stencil before publishing it
- WordPress plugin: Edit visuals as you write your blog posts or pages without leaving the platform
Limitations:
- Only 1,350+ templates available, which is a stark difference from other Canva alternatives like Picmaker
- Limited fonts
- Interface can run slow when highlighting longer text
Free trial: No, but there’s a 7-day money back guarantee
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with up to 10 images saving per month and more
- Pro: $15/month with up to 50 images saving per month, logos/watermarks, and more
- Unlimited: $20/month with everything in Pro + unlimited imaging savings per month and more
6. Best for small business branding: Wepik
Source: Wepik
Wepik by Freepik is the perfect partner for your small business’s easy branding.
Thousands of ready-to-use templates that users can personalize, thanks to a very intuitive editing tool. Menus for restaurants, invoices for companies, and images for all social media platforms are just a click away!
Wepik’s variety of content has been curated and produced by professionals, which translates into unmatched quality for both designers and editors alike. With limitless use of templates, a library of icons, a stock photo collection, and a diverse variety of fonts and typefaces. The archive of this editor is growing at a rapid pace.
It also has its own free mobile app, available for Android as well as iOS, including the same features and functionality as the desktop editor.
Best features:
- Easy to use: With a few clicks, you’ll have picked, edited, and downloaded a professional design.
- Freepik and Flaticon API connection: The vast majority of Wepik’s content is original, but many of Freepik and Flaticon’s resources can now be edited without any advanced graphic design knowledge or software, thanks to the online editor.
- Background Remover: The star of all features, Wepik is one of the few editors that offer background removal easy and effortlessly, and above all, it’s free!
Limitations:
- Only available in English
- Template variety is still limited
- No videos or animated content is currently available
Pricing: All features are available for free! Wepik doesn’t have a Premium version yet, meaning that it’s time to take full advantage of the free version.
7. Best for real-time collaboration: Venngage
Source: Venngage
Venngage boasts a wide array of different templates for users to choose from.
Between social media images, cards and postcards, and reports and presentations, this Canva alternative is a great option for anyone with a wide variety of visual design needs.
Similar to Piktochart, Venngage’s primary use case is for data visualization and infographic content creation, so users will find limited templates in other content formats with plenty of infographic templates to choose from.
What sets both tools apart is that Venngage offers real-time collaboration.
Best features:
- Real-Time Collaboration: Edit infographics with your team in real-time collaboration and gather feedback easily
- Content: Venngage doesn’t use the Lorem Ipsum filler in its templates—it uses actual content which helps you visualize what information you need to include
- Smart Features and Templates: Automatically generate slide layouts from text blocks, which saves time in rearranging your content
Limitations:
- Limited free plan that requires you to upgrade to one of its most expensive plans (e.g., you need to get the Business plan to access real-time collaboration)
- Occasional slow performance when arranging elements
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with 5 designs and more
- Premium: $19/user per month with unlimited designs, PNG and high-res PNG exporting, and more
- Business: $49/user per month with everything in Premium + real-time collaboration, brand kit, and more
- Enterprise: $499+/month when billed annually for 10+ seats with everything in Business + multi-factor authentication, custom built features, and more
8. Best for photo editing: PicMonkey
Source: Picmonkey
PicMonkey offers robust photo editing capabilities and allows users to do cool things with their images, including advanced editing, effects and filters, and making collages.
Because PicMonkey’s original use case was for photo editing, it’s not the best alternative to Canva if you plan to use it for creating images specifically for web and social media. But it offers some templates and design assets to use for that purpose.
Looking for a PickMonkey alternative? Check them out here.
Best features:
- Smart Resize: Realign the elements in your images to fit the target dimensions without distorting your photo and text
- Color Changer: Change the color of any object in your photos, whether it’s a t-shirt, hair, or nails
Limitations:
- Basic plan lacks many features (e.g., no premium stock photo library and one-click background removal)
- Editor not as robust as Canva
- Unintutive user interface that requires a bit of digging to locate specific tools (e.g., Smart Resize is located at the top, not in the Edits menu)
Free trial: 7 days (excluding downloads and shares)
Pricing:
- Basic: $7.99/monthly with 1GB of cloud storage, templates, touch up tools, and more
- Pro: $12.99/monthly with everything in Basic + unlimited cloud storage, one brand kit, and more
- Business: $23/monthly with everything in Pro + multiple brand kits, real-time co-editing, and more
9. Best for teams: Easil
Source: Easil
Easil offers some of the most advanced image editing capabilities among the Canva alternatives.
Users can upload their brand assets and make their own templates for other team members to create their own branded images, and print images from directly within the tool if needed.
This graphic design platform also offers excellent brand restrictions tools.
Best features:
- Brand Restrictions: Control which parts of the design you want edited, which fonts to be used, and what images you want added, swapped, or removed
- Brand Kit: Build a unique brand kit for every sub-team
- Easil Edge Design Guarantee: Request a premium designed template and receive it within 21 days
Limitations:
- Searching for specific designs might take a long time
Free trial: 30 days
Pricing:
- Basic: $0 with 2,500+ templates, text effects, 1 million free stock images, and more
- Plus: $7.50/user per month with everything in Basic + 10,000+ templates, design restrictions, and more
- Edge: $59/user per month with everything in Plus + 20,000+ templates, priority support, and more
- Enterprise: Custom with everything in Edge + custom branded portal, print production and distribution, and more
10. All-in-one: Visme
Source: YouTube
Visme is among the most versatile of Canva alternatives. It allows users to create engaging presentations, infographics, documents, videos, graphics and everything in between.
The tool unifies the content creation process and provides easy-to-use templates, millions of images and thousands of icons, and over 50 charts and data widgets.
Plus you can add video or audio and embed most external content like WuFoo forms, slides from SlideShare, and Spotify. Editing and customization are a breeze, too.
Best features:
- Video Maker: Visme’s all-in-one video maker includes royalty-free stock videos and animated assets and custom animation capabilities
- Mockup Generator: Create mock-ups for brochures, mobile apps, paper bag packagings, postcards, polo shirts, and more
- Collaboration: Resolve comments, circle on any part of the design to leave feedback, and tag teammates within Visme
- Presentation: Create presentations and record yourself presenting with your notes on the left sidebar
- Animation Interactivity: You can also create clickable menus and incorporate hover effects to boost engagement
Limitations:
- Only 100MB storage in free plan
- Templates can get complex and difficult to customize
- Odd glitches (e.g., logs you out at random)
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Basic: $0 with 100MB storage, regular support, and more
- Personal: $29/monthly with everything in Basic + 250GB storage, 24/7 email and chat support, full access to templates and assets, and more
- Business: $59/user monthly with everything in Personal + 3GB storage, privacy controls, and more
- Enterprise: Custom with everything in Business + 25GB storage, custom sub-domain, and more
11. Best for launches: Trakto
Source: YouTube
Trakto is a beginner-friendly design editor that helps you create marketing and sales materials like presentations, social posts, ebooks, business cards, and GIFs.
Its best feature is the custom mini site builder, which builds a functional website with an automatically-generated QR code at the click of a button.
If you want to quickly build landing pages for exclusion promotions or product launches, check it out.
Best features:
- Links: Create custom mini sites with subdomains and automatically-generated QR codes
- Format: Create a document with multiple page formats without keeping track of a gazillion different files
Limitations:
- Some parts of the website are in Brazilian which creates a language barrier
- Asset uploading can be slow
- Only 50MB storage for free users
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with 5 designs, 50MB storage, templates and fonts, and more
- Premium: $9 (R$47) monthly with unlimited designs, 100GB storage, unlimited background removals, and more
Canva alternatives on AppSumo
12. Best for vector graphics: Drawtify
Source: Drawtify
Drawtify is more than a Canva alternative for graphic design. Not only can you use it to create marketing graphics and social media content, but its vector editor also lets you create custom vector logos, infographics, and more.
Best features:
- Vector editor: Drawtify’s CorelDRAW-eque editor lets you create SVG, illustrations, vector logos, icons, unique fonts, and more
- Motions graphics editor: Create eye-catching motions like blink, rotate, and fade in
Limitations:
- Occasional inconsistent performance (e.g., slow exporting, screen glitches)
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with 100% vector editor, built-in barcode generator, special effects, and more
- Monthly: $14.99.month with everything in Free + design templates, watermark removal, and more
Grab the Drawtify lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $79.90.
13. Best for display banners: QwikBanners
QwikBanners is the quickest banner maker for your display campaigns. It lets you generate multiple sizes of banners in seconds.
Not a designer? Fret not.
QwikBanners comes with a vast—and ever-growing—collection of high-converting templates that help you speed up your design. With QwikBanners, you also have access to millions of high-resolution stock images completely free for your use.
Best features:
- Multi-banner generator: Generate ten sizes with a click, without using any coding or design skills
- Unlimited downloads: Convert your banner into multiple variations with zero download restrictions
Limitations:
- Fewer templates than Canva
- No free plan and the free trial is only for one day
Free trial: 1 day with unlimited downloads
Pricing:
- Lite: $10/month with 1 user login and unlimited downloads
- Enterprise: Custom with everything in Lite + multi-user logins and more
Grab the QwikBanners lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $59.
14. Ideal for automation: Switchboard Canvas
Switchboard Canvas is a powerful bulk image automation tool.
Once you add this must-have tool in your tech stack, you no longer need to perform manual tasks. Switchboard Canvas helps you to resize your images without ruining the formatting. This also means that you can hide specific elements or show them at certain sizes.
Best features:
- Batch processing: Create multiple sets of images at one go
- Responsive images: Resize your images without ruining the format of the elements
- Translator: Switchboard Canvas currently supports over 70 languages
- Integrations: Offers integrations with tools like Airtable, Zapier, and Pabbly to automate your content creation
Limitations:
- Unable to automate videos, though this could be in the works according to its roadmap
- Downloads only in PNG
- No free plan
Free trial: 14 days
Pricing:
- Creator: $19/month with 1,000 API calls, QR codes, and more
- Agency: $79/month with everything in Creator + 10,000 API calls, 3 sizes per call, and more
- Enterprise: $299/month with everything in Agency + 100,000 API calls, 5 sizes per call, and more
Grab the Switchboard Canvas lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $69.
Get these top Canva alternatives at a steal
No matter what your goals are with creating visual content, one of these DIY design tools will help you save time and headaches when creating graphics for your business.
If you’re a content creator, marketer, or founder looking for more tools to grow your brand, check out AppSumo for affordable business tools.
FAQs
1. What is a free alternative to Canva?
Adobe Express, Picmaker, and Snappa, are a few free alternatives.
Most of the Canva alternatives in this list are free. Sign up for their free trial or free plan to see which fits your unique needs.
2. Is Canva or PicMonkey better?
Depends on your needs. If you need advanced photo editing capabilities, Picmonkey might be the better choice.
3. Is Canva bad for designers?
Designers often need to create custom assets from scratch, which makes Canva unsuitable for their needs. You should only use Canva if you have zero design skills and want access to pre-made templates.
