Is Canva Pro Worth It? 2023 Canva Pro Pricing Review

Any business function, especially digital marketing, is heavily reliant on graphic design.

Presentations, brochures, and social media graphics, all need to be designed fast and look good. But like most business owners, you may not be trained in design concepts and tools or afford to hire a designer.

Enter Canva, a graphic design platform with both free and paid options.

What is Canva?

Canva is an online tool that allows you to create almost any kind of graphic design in minutes, with its simple user interface, drag-and-drop builder, and libraries of templates, fonts, and photos.

The basic features that are included in both free and paid versions of Canva are:

• Drag-and-drop editor
• Prebuilt templates for different design needs
• Image libraries: stock photos, graphic elements, backgrounds
• Fonts
• Audio and video libraries
• Integration with apps like Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, Google Maps, Pexels, Pixabay, Hubspot, and many more

What is Canva Pro? 

Canva Pro is the premium version of Canva which includes all of the features of the free version, plus more advanced features and tools.

Canva Pro benefits

There are various advantages of Canva Pro:

• Get access to exclusive templates and use premium fonts and photos
• Create cohesive branding across all of your marketing materials
• Collaborate with team members
• Schedule your social media content

If you’re a business owner who needs to create high-quality visuals on a regular basis, Canva Pro is a great option.

Canva Pro was earlier called Canva for Work.

What is Canva for Teams?

Canva for Teams is Canva Pro access for more than one team member and is designed for businesses that need to collaborate on design projects.

It includes all the features of Canva Pro, plus additional features like branded templates and team management so multiple users can easily work on the same project.

Canva for Teams has workflows and project management functions already integrated within the software, so working with others on your designs is smooth and efficient.

When you invite team members to your Canva Pro account, and the person accepts your invite, Canva Pro converts to Canva for Teams, which includes access for up to 5 team members.

How much does Canva cost?

Canva offers three layers of pricing, with one free version and two premium options with more features. The paid versions options include Canva Pro starting at $9.99 monthly, and Canva for Teams starting at $12.49 monthly.

The Canva pricing also depends on whether you sign up for an annual subscription or a monthly subscription.

The advantage of a monthly plan is that you can cancel it any time.

Here are the details of the Canva cost depending on the type of plan and subscription.

Free version of Canva 

Canva Free, as the name suggests, is completely free of charge, forever. You can just create an account with an email address and you can start using Canva to create your designs. 

This is especially helpful for really small businesses with limited budgets. 

Here is a snapshot of what you can get with the free version of Canva:

• Create your own designs using templates or by starting from scratch
• Access to 250,000 design templates and 1 million stock content like images and graphics
• 2 folders and 5GB storage to save your work
• Create custom designs for your business website, social media posts, and marketing materials

While it offers a lot, Canva free also has certain limits on features. 

For example, you don’t have access to the entire premium content and graphic library of Canva, you have limited storage and folders, you can’t use advanced editing features like background removal and transparent backgrounds.

Check out all the detailed features of the Canva free version.

Canva Pro pricing

The Canva Pro pricing for a yearly plan is $119.99, which would be $9.99 a month. A monthly plan is slightly higher, at $12.99/ month. So with an annual subscription, you save $36 a year, every year.

Canva for Teams Pricing

Canva for Teams has a variable pricing structure, which means that the price depends on the number of users. 

The Canva for Teams pricing for 5 members starts at $149.90 annually, or $12.49 per month if you sign up for an annual payment. It provides access to all the Canva Pro features for a maximum of 5 team members.

If you pay monthly, the price is $14.99 per month. So with an annual subscription, you save at least $30 a year. 

If you have a bigger business and need access for more than 5 team members, you pay additional charges depending on the number of team members.

However, the cost of Canva for Teams is not limited to these structures. You can also enter a custom number of team members, and you will see how much Canva for Teams costs exactly.

Check out the Canva for Teams pricing calculator.

The way that Canva for Teams works is that you sign up for a Canva for Teams account, and send invites to your team members to join your team in Canva Pro. 

Now if you are a really small business with less than 5 team members, you may be thinking, what if your team members use the same email address to use the same Canva Pro account? Why get Canva for Teams?

This is because Canva for Teams provides a lot of tools for real-time collaboration, including brainstorming, sharing feedback and comments, workflow management, and brand control, that makes the process of design creation for business very efficient. 

Let’s look at them in more detail.

Canva for Teams features

The Canva for Teams features can be split into  major categories:

• Design collaboration
• Brand management
• Design storage
• Support

Design collaboration

Canva for Teams lets you collaborate on designs and have more control over your team’s access to Canva.

Your team would be able to share comments on designs created by other members, instead of taking time to discuss them one-on-one.

You can also assign people to be ‘approvers’ for projects.

These approvers would be able to review designs made by all design creators, give feedback, and approve them.

Brand management

Canva for Teams helps you ensure that all your design are always on brand, with features like:

• 300 brand kits instead of 100 in Canva Pro
• Branded templates that can be easily reused to create new designs
• Brand controls to ensure that only brand colors and fonts are used in your designs

While these features may not be very necessary if your team has less than 5 members, it becomes very helpful when you have many internal team members or freelancers creating your business designs.

Design storage

Canva for Teams lets each of your team members have 1TB (1000 GB) of storage. Canva Free gives you only 5Gb of storage and Canva Pro gives you 1TB for one user. 

So if have 7 team members, for example, you have 7TB storage in total.

Support

If you have a Canva Pro subscription, and you have questions, you might have to wait up to 24 hours for a response. With Canva Pro, you get an answer within 2 hours.

Is Canva Pro worth it? 

Canva Pro is worth it if you are a small business owner, freelancer, blogger, marketeer, or anyone who needs to create a lot of unique, high-quality designs, graphics, videos, and animations, for work, posting on social media, or personal projects.

However, if you are a professional designer or someone who relies on design tools for your livelihood, then Canva Pro may be a bit limited in comparison to more advanced tools such as those offered by Adobe.

Pros and cons of Canva Pro

Here’s a detailed look at the benefits of Canva Pro and especially the benefits of Canva for business, to help you answer the question: Is the paid version of Canva worth it for small businesses?

Pros of Canva Pro

1. High benefit-cost-ratio

For just $10 per month, you get access to millions of high-quality photos, illustrations, and templates to create designs for your small business website, blog, or social media.

2. Maintain brand consistency

You can upload your own brand kit, and create an unlimited number of designs. You can quickly resize designs, remove image backgrounds, and create animations and videos.

3. Save money and time

The ability to save designs as templates, create custom fonts, and access over 1 million high-quality images, have helped me save a lot of time and energy when creating designs.

4. Efficient design collaboration

Work with your team to create designs for your small business brand quickly and more efficiently.

Cons of Canva Pro

1. Image keyword search is not very intuitive

Looking for the perfect image for your design may need a bit of trial and error as the keyword search is not very optimized. You have to try different versions of the keyword to get the image you want.

2. Photo editing is limited

As mentioned earlier, Canva is not an image editing software like Photoshop. So while you can add some basic filters, crop, and resize images, you can’t do heavy-duty image editing in Canva.

But on the flip side, the Canva photo library is huge, so you have more chances of finding the perfect image which doesn’t need much work.

3. Canva Pro cannot be used offline

Canva Pro doesn’t have an offline mode, so you’ll need to be connected to the internet in order to use it.

It’s a great tool for creating social media images, flyers, and even business cards. And since it’s online, you can access your designs from any computer or mobile device.

Read more about this in my full post on Can you use Canva offline?

How much is Canva Pro for students?

Canva Pro is absolutely free for students, teachers, and all academic professionals of primary and secondary education (referred to in the US as K-12 schools).

Educators and teachers only need to sign up for Canva for Education with a .edu email address, and  access all the features of Canva Pro for free.

If you are a student, your teacher needs to sign up for an account and invite you to join it.

Canva for Education also has special educational templates and assignment-sharing features.

How much is Canva Pro for nonprofits?

Canva Pro for nonprofits is 100% free for organizations with less than 50 members. All the 50 members will have access to the Canva Pro account and features. 

If you have more than 50 members, the additional members can get 50% discount. 

You just have to fill out the application for Canva for Nonprofits. The Canva team will need to verify your eligibility, and once that’s done, you can access Canva Pro for free. 

Here are the eligibility guidelines.

How to get Canva Pro for free?

You can get Canva Pro for free if you are signing up for a free trial of Canva Pro, or if you are in the educational sector (K-12 schools) or nonprofit sector.

1. Canva Pro free trial

You can get all the features of Canva Pro free for 30 days.

1. Go to canva.com, and create a free account

2. Select the Pro plan, and click ‘Try for free’.

3. Enter your credit card details, and get started with your free Canva Pro account!

Don’t worry. Your card will only be charged after 30 days.

If you don’t think it helps you, then just cancel your trial and account at any time.

2. Canva Pro for Education

Here’s how to get Canva Pro for free with Canva for Education.

1. Go to Canva for Education

2. Sign up with a .edu email address

3. Access Canva Pro for free

3. Canva Pro for Nonprofits

Here’s how to get Canva Pro for free with Canva for Nonprofits.

1. Go to Canva for Nonprofit

2. Fill out the application form

3. Complete the verification process with Canva

4. Access Canva Pro for free

Is Canva Pro worth it for small businesses?

Now for my detailed Canva Pro pricing review.

If you need to be conservative about your business expenses, you might wonder if Canva Pro is a tool you really need.

That’s why to decide if Canva Pro is worth it, it’s relevant to look at the ways that Canva Pro can help your branding and marketing needs.

Some of the biggest challenges of small business owners that Canva addresses are:

• Limited budget (always, right!)
• Limited skills (not everyone has design skills!)
• Limited time (there is never enough!)

1. Canva Pro helps you create unlimited designs with limited budgets

Designing premium-looking, branded graphics, especially social media posts, would normally require the following resources:

1. An offline designing software like Adobe.

Price/ month: $21 (for individuals, for only one software. For businesses or multiple apps, the price is much higher). Or an online design software (more on this below in Canva Pro alternatives), which would also be a minimum of $8-$9/ month, to get similar features as Canva.

2. A library of premium images from a photo library like Shutterstock.

Price/ month: $29 (10 images only)

Of course, it’s possible to use free images from websites like pexels.com or unsplash.com. But millions of other businesses are also using the same free images, so would be difficult to differentiate your brand and positioning.

3. A social media scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Price/ month: $15

Total cost per month: $43 – $55.

Canva Pro is a one-stop solution for all the above needs. Canva Pro price per month is $9.95, and Canva for Teams is $12.49 per month.

It is safe to say that the Canva Pro pricing is quite affordable if you want to use Canva for your business.

2. Canva Pro can be used by anyone, even with limited skills

Sometimes small business owners have to work on all aspects of their business themselves, including SEO, messaging, and design.

Even if you do have the software installed to create your own designs, you may not have the right skills or knowledge to actually do them yourself.

And if you have to hire an external designer to create your graphics as you are not familiar with designing software, then the cost is much higher, of course.

With Canva Pro, you don’t need any special skills. It doesn’t matter whether you can use other graphic designing tools or not.

You just open Canva Pro, and the onboard instructions will help you get through the basics. Plus, there are tons of tutorial videos online that’ll help you if you get stuck.

Sometimes all you have to do is change the colors and fonts in a prebuilt template and your design is ready in a few minutes. That’s very helpful when you have to create multiple social media posts.

So economically, it makes a lot of sense to get Canva Pro. But only if you need to design lots of graphics, quickly and easily. Not sure how it actually works?

3. Canva Pro helps you create designs even when you have limited time

While with Canva Pro you will have to shell out that extra $10/ month, in the end, you save so much time on creating your graphics, that it’s definitely worth it.

Even if you have a friend/ partner who is helping you to design the graphics, Canva Pro can help. I have a design background myself, I have Photoshop & Illustrator installed on my PC, and yet most of the designs on my website and social media are designed on Canva.

This is how Canva Pro saves me a HUGE amount of time:

1. Quick resizing of images

In Canva free, I would want to resize an image while working on it, but I couldn’t. I had to create a fresh design from start.

THAT was frustrating. I also had to look up the latest dimensions for each type of social media post first, and then create separate designs, one by one. I had to set aside at least a few days a month, for creating social media graphics!! Waste of my precious time.

Canva Pro’s Magic Resize option offers you the latest dimensions specifically for different social media platforms.

For example, you’ll find sizes labeled as ‘Facebook Post’, ‘Instagram Post’, ‘Facebook Cover Photo’. You can just choose the one you want, and it will instantly resize your design.

2. Organizational efficiency

Because I create so many images on Canva, having 3 folders was a bit limiting as my past designs would get lost somewhere and I would have to hunt for them. Now all my designs are neatly organized, and I can find any in a jiffy. Just like on my PC.

3. Social media posting

With the content planner, it is so handy to create my social media graphics and post them directly from the software! I don’t have to spend time downloading them on my laptop and then uploading them again on Hootsuite.

Save time on creating brand graphics.

Who should use Canva Pro?

The library of templates, photos, and fonts included in the Canva Pro pricing, as well as the ease of use, are unmatched by any other tool.

Canva Pro is perfect for non-designers who want to create beautiful, branded, graphic designs easily and quickly. Hardly any design skills are required to use Canva, which makes it perfect for diy graphic design.

You can just choose a template out of 610,000, change the font and colors, and you’re good to go!

Here are some examples of people who can use Canva:

• Marketers
• Small businesses
• Freelancers
• Bloggers
• Academic professionals
• Students

Which Canva plan should you choose?

Now we’ve covered all the important aspects of Canva prices and memberships. You can decide which of the 3 Canva plans is best for you: Canva Free, Canva Pro, and Canva for Teams. 

My recommendation would be this:

• If you are new to Canva and want to explore and want to create some designs occasionally, go for Canva Free.
• If you are a solopreneur and need a graphic design tools to create brand designs quickly and post them on social, go for Canva Pro. You can start with a 30-day free trial.
• If you have a small business team or work with agencies and freelancers to create your designs, use Canva for Teams.
• If you are a design agency with multiple clients, also go for Canva for Teams

Canva Pro alternatives

Of course, Canva is not the only design software you can consider. Among the online marketing design tools, the most popular ones are Picmonkey, Crello, Pictochart, and Adobe Express.

Whereas for offline, Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator are the key alternatives to Canva.

My experience and honest review of Canva Pro pricing

Canva Pro is an amazing design tool that has helped me create stunning designs for my blog and social media platforms. I would definitely, emphatically, recommend every small business to use Canva for all your branding needs.

Now the question is whether Canva Pro is worth it. Earlier we talked about limited budgets and limited time.

These have definitely proven true for me, especially in saving time. I can use Photoshop and Illustrator easily, but I still prefer using Canva as it’s so much more convenient.

In a nutshell, if you want to occasionally create a few designs then Canva Free will be enough for you. If you’re a photographer/ artist/ graphic designer, then you know already, Canva is not as powerful as the Adobe Creative suite.

If you’re a business that needs to create a lot of high-quality designs, quickly, for example, for content promotion, then Canva Pro is definitely worth the investment.

Whether you get Canva Pro for just yourself or Canva for Teams for yourself plus your team members, virtual assistants, and other professionals you work with, Canva Pro would be the perfect way to create and post your small business designs.

Pro Tip:

How does Canva work? What can you do with Canva?

You can use Canva free or Canva Pro to create almost all kinds of graphic design, for business use (presentations, business cards, invoices, letterheads), or marketing (social media posts, ebooks, workbooks, ads).

These are the most basic elements that you can create, but there are also more. There are prebuilt templates for all kinds of designs, and you can also create your own with different tools.

You can use Canva to create any design for all your small business marketing needs.

Here is a snapshot of some of the designs that can be created.

How to use Canva?

You can create a design in Canva in two ways:

• Customize a template
• Start from scratch

1. Customize a template

• Create an account on Canva by signing up for a 30-day free trial.
• Choose a template from the template section or search for one in the search bar.
• Edit the colors, fonts, and text as you want.

2. Start from scratch

• Create an account on Canva by signing up for a 30-day free trial.
• On your dashboard, click on ‘Create a Design’.
• Choose the size of your image.
• Drag and drop elements from the left-hand panel to create your graphic. You can choose photos, illustrations, stickers, backgrounds, text, audio, and videos.

Download the image as a PNG or JPEG file. Check out this video tutorial if you have not used Canva before and want quick training on how to work with this software.

Canva Pro Pricing and Review – Conclusion

For me, Canva has been a real game-changer. I save so much time on getting so much done, exactly how I want it for my brand! I really wouldn’t know what to do without it anymore.

Yes, I am an affiliate for Canva, but that is only because I adore it so much. If you haven’t done so yet, I really recommend that you give it a try.

Have you tried Canva Pro yet? What has your experience been? Do you think the Canva Pro pricing is worth it?

Did you continue with the paid Canva Pro account or stop after the free trial? Share in the comments below!

But before you go, do just check out all the FAQ related to Canva and if Canva Pro is worth it for small businesses.