Envato vs Canva in 2023: Which Design Resource Is Better For You?

If you are a designer or a beginner who needs a reliable resource to create beautiful designs, you’ve definitely heard of Envato and Canva.

They are both fantastic design tools, but their offers are very different.

More importantly, they are suitable for different users.

In this post, you will find a detailed comparison of Envato vs Canva: features, pricing, and who should use which tool.

Dig in!

Envato vs Canva – Quick Summary

Envato is an online design marketplace where you can buy premade design elements such as graphics, stock images, video elements, audio clips, fonts, and more.

You can even find pre-designed website templates for WordPress and other CMS.

However, you have to use your own design tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Apple Motion, DaVinci Resolve, WordPress, Shopify, and others, to edit the design elements you buy on Envato. Mostly, professional designers and users with sufficient design understanding would buy Envato elements.

Canva is an online drag-and-drop graphic design tool where you can create your own designs from scratch or by customizing premade templates. You can use resources from Canva’s stock library of images, graphics, videos, fonts, and more to customize your designs and you can also upload your own.

You can edit all designs and templates you access from Canva within Canva and don’t need any external tool. Anyone with even zero experience can use Canva to create various types of designs.

Envato Overview

Envato was launched in 2006 to help designers get access to high-quality templates and design creators make money by selling their designs.

Like any marketplace, their mission is to serve the designers who sell their products in the marketplace, by providing an easy, user-friendly platform for end users to buy those design products.

Envato has three primary products:

• Envato Market
• Envato Elements
• Envato Placeit

Envato Market

Envato Market is a digital marketplace where you can buy and download almost any kind of design asset, from web templates and plugins to audio files, photos, and more.

The designs and templates offered are most suited for professional designers who know how to work with these design elements and which tools to use for editing them.

Here are a few of the designs you can find on Envato Market:

• Web Themes and Templates: Website themes, templates, and CMS products online that are easy to customize.
• Graphics: Over 786,000 fonts, logos, and presentations starting at $2
• Photos: Royalty-free stock photos to use in your designs
• Video: Over 4,800,000 royalty-free stock videos and templates
• Audio: Over 1,800,000 audio tracks and sound effects
• 3D assets: Print models and CG textures

It also has codes and scripts for PHP, e-commerce, and more, to help you build a website.

On Envato Market, every item has a separate price and you pay for the design you buy.

For example, here are some web templates available on Envato Market, with varied prices.

Envato Elements

Envato Elements operates under the same principle of a design marketplace as Envato Market.

You can access design resources like:

• Photos
• Graphic Templates
• Graphics
• Video Templates
• Stock Videos
• Music
• Sound Effects
• Web Templates
• CMS Templates
• Fonts

Placeit by Envato

Placeit was a Mexican design company that was acquired by Envato in 2018.

Like its name, Placeit is primarily a mockup design tool where you can apply your online designs on thousands of mockup templates to create beautiful product shots.

Needless to say, Placeit would be used more by brands than individuals.

Now, Placeit also offers other tools like designing logos, flyers, posters, Youtube video covers, social media graphics, gaming designs, and even videos.

Here is a quick snapshot of the three Envato products.

Design marketplace, pay for each design separately	Design marketplace, download unlimited designs for a fixed price	Mockup generator and online graphic design tool

Canva Overview

Canva was launched in 2016 and has become one of the most popular graphic design tools with its wide range of features and giant stock library, all available at an affordable price.

You can design logos, business cards, presentations, social media content, videos, and more, even without any design experience or knowledge.

While Canva can be used by professionals, it is most often used by individuals and business owners/ managers who have limited design experience and who want to create their own designs but don’t want to pay a professional designer.

One of the best features of Canva is that it offers over 600,000 premade templates which you can quickly customize to create your own design that matches your brand story and brand imagery.

So you barely ever need to create anything from scratch. Once you create your design, you can download it in various file formats.

Envato vs Canva – Features and design assets

Envato and Canva both offer a wide collection of creative assets to help you create beautiful designs.

Canva lets you create the designs as well with this drag-and-drop builder.

However, since Envato doesn’t let you do that, since it’s only a marketplace, a better comparison of their features would mean comparing the designs and elements you can download from both.

Content collection

Canva offers 100+ million stock content including photos, graphic elements, videos, audio, and presentation templates that you can use to create your own designs.

Envato Elements offers 69,000+ video templates, 125,000+ graphic elements, 220,000+ graphic templates, 87,000+ presentation templates, 7+ million photos, and 120,000+ royalty-free audio.

Envato also offers 3D graphics, sound effects, and WordPress templates that are not offered by Canva.

Photos

Envato photos and Canva photos are both very high-quality and excellent to use in designs.

What I do like about Canva is that you can filter the photos into lots of categories which helps you narrow down your search.

Just choose the photo you like and use it in a design within Canva.

Envato only lets you filter by color, people, orientation, and background, which is a bit limiting.

That being said, you can easily search the Envato Elements marketplace for the photos you want.

Fonts

Canva Pro offers 3,000 fonts while Envato Elements offers 33,000+.

Canva categorizes its fonts into different categories:

• Handwriting
• Corporate
• Headings
• Paragraph
• Vintage
• Serif
• Sans Serif
• Rounded
• Modern
• Bold Elegant
• Retro
• Calligraphy
• Minimal

When you are creating and editing your designs, just add a text and search for the category in the font dropdown menu.

You can filter Envato Elements fonts by type and output quality.

The filter categories are spacing, optimum size, and web fonts. These categories are well-suited to how designers search for fonts, so it makes sense that Envato organizes its font like this.

Videos

Envato offers both stock video footage that you can download and directly use for your brand as well as video templates that you can edit with a video editing tool.

Canva Videos also include both stock footage and video template files, but they are much more basic and simple compared to Envato Elements videos.

For example, in Canva, your video templates can be simple animation ones or a few clips joined together with basic video transitions. You can simply customize them within Canva itself to get your customized videos.

The video quality in Envato is more sophisticated and if you need to edit Envato videos, you need to have experience with video editing software like Premier Pro or DaVinci Resolve.

Envato vs Canva – External tools

The elements and templates you download from Envato need other external tools to be edited.

For example:

Graphics: You can get graphic elements to be edited in Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer

Video templates: Video templates from Envato can be edited in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Apple Motion, Final Cut Pro, or Da Vinci Resolve.

CMS Templates: Envato offers WordPress elements like themes, templates, and plugins, as well as templates for other CMS like Shopify. You will need the CMS to use the templates you download from Envato.

Canva elements are self-contained, so you don’t need any external app to customize your templates and elements.

Once you have your design, you can, of course, download them in different file formats and sometimes be able to edit it with different tools. However, that editing is quite limited as most of it is done on Canva.

Canva on the other hand allows integrations with other apps and tools, which makes it easier for you to create and share your designs.

Some of the types of apps you can use are:

Storage: You can access and import files from Google, social media tools, OneDrive, and more

Business: You can integrate Canva with apps like Hubspot and Mailchimp to use your designs for marketing

Photo Editing: You can use apps like Background Remover to remove the backgrounds of images or SmartMockups to apply your designs on mockups.

Envato vs Canva – User-friendliness

Envato and Canva both have excellent interfaces and offer great experiences to the user accessing them.

Canva is great for beginners to design with limited experience, and thus the Canva interface, as we saw before, is very simple and easy-to-use.

For example, you can search for content and fonts within categories, the language is simple, the menus are clear and easy to understand, and the platform is very easy to navigate.

There are also lots of tutorials if you need help at any point.

Envato, on the other hand, uses language that could be understood better by those with some understanding or experience in design.

If you are a designer, for example, you might want to search for and filter the creative assets by some technical terms, that Envato offers.

Envato intuitively understands the way designers work and thus its interface is very user-friendly for designers, whereas Canva is better for beginners.

Envato vs Canva – Pricing

Envato offers different pricing structures for different products and for the number of users, and Canva offers different pricing only by the number of users.

Envato Pricing

• Envato Market: Pay-as-you-go pricing model, buy every item individually
• Envato Placeit: Subscription-based pricing to download unlimited assets, costs $7.47 per month
• Envato Elements: Subscription-based pricing, costs $16.50 for single users and $10.75 per user for a team of 5 members.

In Envato Elements, you can also get different prices depending on the number of users, and the price per user reduces as the number of users increase.

For instance, the price is $14.40 per user when you have two members with access to the Envato account, and for 5 members the price is $10.75 per user.

So for 2 users, the monthly price would be $28.80, and for 5 users would be $53.75.

If you are a student, you also enjoy a 30% discount on Envato Elements.

Canva Pricing

Canva offers primary three kinds of pricing.

• Canva free: A free account that you can keep forever but the features are limited.
• Canva Pro: Subscription-based pricing for Canva’s premium features and content, costs $12.99 per month for monthly subscriptions
• Canva for Teams: Subscription-based pricing for Canva Pro, costs $14.99 per month for all users together, for monthly subscriptions

If you are in the education sector or nonprofit sector, you can get Canva Pro and Canva for Teams for free.

Envato vs Canva – Free trial

Envato and Canva both offer free trials on their platforms.

Envato Elements offers a 7-day free trial to use the tool and download unlimited resources.

Envato Market and Envato Placeit don’t offer any free trials.

Canva offers a 30-day free trial to access all its premium features and content library.

Envato vs Canva for design creators

While in most of the above comparison elements we have looked at Envato vs Canva from the standpoint of a design user, it is also important to look at them from the POV of a design creator.

Envato is the world’s biggest design marketplace where you can become an author and sell your designs as your primary or additional source of income.

You can sell any kind of design including photography, videos, web templates and code, graphics, and audio files.

You can create your designs on any of the tools approved by Envato, and the designs you sell have to be your own.

You get a 50% share of the net revenue from every subscription.

It can take 14 days for you to get approved for the Envato Authors program.

One of the biggest advantages of Envato is the huge community of creators with whom you can collaborate and also ask questions.

Canva also launched its Canva Creators program in 2022 where you can publish your self-designed templates, graphics, and photos.

You can design templates for social media content, videos, t-shirts, posters, presentations, and more.

Elements can include graphics, illustrations, icons, stickers, and more.

Teachers can also become Canva Creators by creating educational resources and templates.

Your earnings in Canva depend on the performance of your content, i.e., how much your content is being used.

You can also connect with the Canva Creators Ambassadors who are Canva Creators that already have great performances within the program. They can help you in your Canva Creators journey.

The Envato Authors program has been around for much longer and is thus more well-known and popular, whereas Canva Creators is very recent.

A full comparison of the two programs can only be made after the Canva Creators program picks up more momentum.

Envato vs Canva – Who should use which?

Envato and Canva are both great design resources, but they are used in different ways and offer different features.

So it only follows that they would have different users.

You should use Canva if:

• You have limited design experience and want to create beautiful graphic designs easily and quickly
• You want to create designs from premade templates with simple customizations
• You are not familiar with external, advanced design tools and want a drag-and-drop editor to create your designs
• You want to brainstorm ideas with whiteboards or collaborate on designs with team members who may also have limited design experience
• You are a small business that needs brand and business designs regularly but doesn’t want to pay high designer fees
• You want to use a free graphic design tool with basic features and stock content to create simple graphics
• You are in the education or nonprofit industry and want to use a premium graphic design tool for free

You should use Envato if:

• You’re a professional designer who needs high-quality and advanced graphics, videos, and templates
• You are comfortable with using advanced design tools to edit complex design assets from Envato
• You need resources like web templates, themes, and code, to help you design a professional website
• You want access to 33,000 fonts that you can download and use across your brand designs
• You need special design assets like 3D graphics, sound effects, and vector graphic templates

If you are only looking for high-quality photos, you can use either Canva or Envato (or other photo sites like Adobe Stock, for that matter).

If you want thousands of mockup templates to showcase your designs you should get Placeit by Envato. If simple mockups are enough for you, Canva’s SmartMockups, which is included in a Canva Pro subscription, should be enough for you.

Envato vs Canva – Conclusion

Here is a brief side-by-side recap of Envato vs Canva.

Type of platform	Online design marketplace	Graphic design tlatform + marketplace
Designing & editing tool	Varied	Canva (self-contained)
Stock content	12+ million	100+ million
Fonts	33,000	3,000
Website Templates
3D Graphics
Ideal Users	Designers who can use advanced design tools	Anyone
Beginner-friendly
Earn money with designs
Pricing methods	Pay as you go + Fixed pricing	Fixed pricing
Fixed pricing for single user	$16.50 for monthly payments in Envato Elements	$12.99 for monthly payments
Fixed pricing for 5 users	$10.75 per user for monthly payments in Envato Elements	$14.99 per user for monthly payments
Free version	Only with Placeit, but designs will have watermarks	Yes, with limited features and content access
Pricing of premium resources for the educational sector	30% off for students	Free
Pricing of premium resources for nonprofits	Same as regular plans	Free
Free trial	7 days for Envato Elements	30 days for Canva Pro
Activate trial	Elements 7-Day Trial	Canva 30-Day Trial

The difference between Envato and Canva lies in the user, editing tool, number of assets, and pricing.

Bottom line, if you need advanced design files along with stock media and pay a higher price for them, you should use Envato.

If you want simple editable designs along with stock media for free or for a low price, you should use Canva.

Have you used Envato or Canva for your design needs? Which tool do you prefer? Share in the comments!