Canva Alternatives: Free and Paid Tools For Graphic Designs

Canva is an online graphic design platform that is used for creating designs even without any prior design experience. It offers a wide range of templates, elements, and tools that are customizable and can to create professional-looking designs. Canva is used by individuals, businesses, and organizations of all sizes to create a variety of designs, including social media graphics, presentations and marketing materials.

The following are the top free and paid Canva alternatives available in the market that you can use. Even professional designers can use them as graphic design tools.

Table of Contents

• Adobe Express
• Fotor
• VistaCreate
• Piktochart
• Snappa

1. Adobe Express

This is one of the best free Canva alternatives that you can find in the market. This is a great alternative for designing as it allows you to choose pre-made templates or to create designs from scratch. 

There are several other features that you can explore in order to optimise the tool’s capabilities.

2. Creating and Using Creative Cloud Libraries: This feature allows users to create and manage libraries in Adobe Express, helping them to organize and access their assets more efficiently. These libraries can store a variety of asset formats including JPG, PNG, SVG, GIF, PSD, and AI files. It facilitates the easy sharing of assets across various Adobe applications.
3. Using Custom Fonts: Adobe Express provides the functionality to use custom fonts, enabling users to add personal touch to the projects using fonts that are not available in the default font library. This feature supports .otf and .ttf font files that are under 10 MB. Users can manage brand and style guidelines more efficiently by incorporating their own fonts into Adobe Express. This feature can be particularly useful for branding and creating unique designs.
4. Generative AI with Adobe Firefly: It makes the process of creating social media posts, videos, images, PDFs, flyers, logos, and more, fast, easy, and fun. This Generative AI editor integrates various Adobe tools, making tasks like creating social video content, editing images, and designing layouts quick and straightforward. It supports prompts in over 100 languages, allowing users to generate high-quality images and create stunning text effects.
5. Animation Features: Adobe Express offers features to animate texts and photos easily and quickly. Users can select text components or photos in their project and choose from a range of creative animation options to enhance their designs

2. Fotor

Fotor is another Canva alternative photo editing tool that has several features:

1. Tilt-Shift Effect: This feature allows users to create tilt-shift photography online for free. It helps in giving photos a miniature effect by blurring parts of the image and keeping a specific area in focus.
2. Color Splash Effect: This is a free online feature that enables users to apply a color splash effect to their photos, where a particular color is highlighted while the rest of the image is converted to grayscale.
3. HDR Software: Fotor helps in enhancing the quality of photos using free online HDR photography software. It performs this function by adjusting the light and shadow details, giving a more dynamic look to the images.
4. Background Changer: This feature allows users to change the background of their images online for free, which can be useful for creating professional-looking photos or removing unwanted backgrounds. It also has a background-removing tool.
5. AI Object Remover: Fotor provides a tool to remove objects from photos using Artificial Intelligence technology, which can be handy for cleaning up images or removing unwanted elements.
6. Blemish Remover: This tool helps in removing blemishes from photos, which can be useful for portrait photography and enhancing the appearance of subjects in the images.

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3. VistaCreate

It has the following features: 

• Wide Range of Templates: Vista Create offers a vast library of customizable templates and designs for social media graphic posts, presentations, flyers, and more.
• Easy-to-Use Editor: The platform features a user-friendly editor that allows users to easily customize templates, add text, and incorporate various design elements.
• Media Library: Users have access to a rich media library that contains a wide range of images, videos, and illustrations that are used in their designs.
• Animation and Video Editing: Vista Create offers tools for creating animated graphics and editing videos, allowing users to create dynamic content.
• Brand Kit: Users can create a brand kit that contains their brand’s logos, colors, and fonts, to maintain consistent brand identity across various designs.
• Collaboration Tools: The platform offers tools to collaborate thus allowing users to work together on projects and share feedback in real-time.
• Integration with VistaPrint: Users can easily order physical copies of their designs through integration with VistaPrint, a platform for printing custom marketing materials.

4. Piktochart

It has the following features: 

1. Piktochart Video: This feature allows users to easily record screens, transcribe videos to text, and crop videos for social media. It is optimized for content repurposing, enabling users to crop videos into various orientations with one click, facilitating the easy repurposing of webinars, virtual events, and Zoom recordings into short clips without frame-by-frame editing. It also offers fast editing and creation of videos, allowing users to create visual content in minutes. 
2. Text Document-like Video Editing: Piktochart Video allows users to edit videos like editing a text document. It automatically transcribes videos in over 60 languages and enables users to easily cut out filler words by editing the audio transcript. Users can share videos with captions or export only the subtitles in various formats. This feature simplifies the video editing process, making it accessible even to those who have no experience with video editing.
3. Integration with Zoom and Google Drive: Piktochart Video integrates with Zoom and Google Drive, allowing users to import selected Zoom recordings or videos from cloud-based file storage directly into the video editor. This integration significantly speeds up the video creation and editing process.
4. Online Graph Maker: Piktochart offers an online graph maker that helps users create visually appealing graphs in minutes. It allows users to connect their graphs to Google Sheets, enabling the automatic update of charts when the data changes. Users can also keep their graphs on-brand by easily incorporating their brand colours and fonts. The graph maker offers a range of customization options, allowing users to easily switch between different chart types and add graphs to various formats, including reports, presentations, and infographics.

5. Snappa

Snappa is one of the popular Canva alternatives. It is an easy-to-use online graphic design tool that allows users to create visuals and graphics for various purposes with speed and simplicity. This tool offers a range of pre-loaded templates that can be easily customization.

Following are the editing features of Snappa:

• Fast and Free Online Photo Editor: Users can upload photos or choose from over 5 million free high-resolution stock photos. They can add text and graphics, apply filters, and resize and repurpose images easily.
• Easy User Interface: The photo editing software is designed to be easy to use, not requiring the steep learning curve often associated with tools like Photoshop.
• Customizable Image Sizes: Snappa allows users to customize the size of their photos or choose from preset image sizes optimized for various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This ensures that photos display perfectly regardless of where they are posted.
• Professional Templates: Snappa offers professionally designed, customizable templates that are free to use. Users can also create their own templates.
• Background Image Remover: Snappa features a background remover tool that enables users to remove the background from an image quickly and easily.
• Text, Graphics, and Shapes: Users can personalize their graphics with over 200 fonts and 100,000 vectors and shapes available in Snappa’s library.

Comparing The Canva Alternatives

The following table compares the above-discussed Canva alternatives.

Which One is a Better Canva Alternative?

Here is a brief overview of each tool’s strengths and weaknesses:

• Adobe Express: This a powerful tool with a wide range of features. It is best for users who need a comprehensive design solution with professional-grade results. However, it can be more expensive than some of the other options.
• Fotor: This user-friendly tool with a large library of templates and elements. It is a good option for beginners or casual users who want to create simple designs quickly. However, it lacks some of the more advanced features found in other tools.
• VistaCreate: This is one of the newer Canva alternatives that is gaining popularity. It offers a good balance of features and affordability. It is a good option for users who want a multipurpose tool that can be used for a variety of projects.
• Piktochart: It is a specialized tool for creating infographics. It offers several features to create visually appealing infographics. However, it is not as versatile as some of the other tools on this list.
• Snappa: It is a simple and easy-to-use tool for creating social media graphics. It is a good option for businesses and individuals who need to create quick and effective social media posts. However, it lacks some of the more advanced features found in other tools.