Canva

Avantages

1. Develop almost all of your creatives required - all by yourself & without any need of hiring an expensive professional designer.
2. Easy to use for most of the simple social media creatives.
3. The free version is good enough for most tasks - but the paid version adds a few features that will make it really good.
4. The new presentations feature is good - make a big push to visually appealing presentation decks - but may not be serious competition to Microsoft PowerPoint - but has features that are not there in PowerPoint.
5. Great Editing features from photo editors, logo makers, etc are very useful and take simple designs a long way.
6. The templates available are there for most of your requirements - they make life very easy and makes your designs look professional.

Inconvénients

1. Good for beginners and intermediate users - the experts will see a lot of missing features - especially when compared to Photoshop (Illustrator and Corel Draw are way above & are for experts only) which has most design features & has a similar price per month as well.
2. Video editing capability is missing - although they have a GIF capability which can be downloaded as a video file, you can't stake stock videos and edit them o add them to your videos. This is a serious feature missing as video content is the mainstay of most businesses & highly in demand by everybody.
3. There is a learning curve here - this may not be to use the software tool - but for design & creativity itself and the resources available on Canva are limited in this aspect.
4. Limited images available - even the paid ones are not that good - not sure why there is no tie-up with a Shutterstock & the ilk.
5. Sizes for banner ads are very limited - like there are so many ad sizes say for Google Ads which can be made standard (there is a custom dimension - but each time you will have to look up the specs and then create your dimensions).

Avantages

For many, including me, Canva can be a divine sign or really the savior of the motherland. It features a huge variety of formats, layouts and tools, for basically any graphic material you might think of doing. Social media, work presentations, logos, cards, invitations, posters, ads, photo albums, ebooks and even resume! You can create all of this and more using Canva. And the best is the ease of use. You only have to choose a layout and customize it however you want. You can change the color of the text and some vectors, change fonts and more. It's a great software to exercise your creativity - even when you're not on a very creative day, because the software already gives you the almost ready work, you only need to adjust it according to your ultimate goal.

Canva presents a great image bank that covers several categories, making it really easy for you to choose the right image for your project without having to leave the page. Some images are free and very good, but there are the paid pictures also. They are great and the price is affordable - you might not mind paying, depending on your project.

It's really hard to find defects in Canva.

Inconvénients

Even with those beautiful designs presented, some of the best ones are not totally free. Sometimes the complete design comes with a price, and other times some of the images used on it come with a price. If you can pay for them, this clearly does not prove to be a problem. If you can not afford it, there are the free images – but maybe some images do not show the best quality after download. Depending on the project you are designing, this can be a problem. For me, in the case of creating content for social networks (because the measures of these networks do not require a giant resolution), this has never been a problem. I can create beautiful arts for social media without any problem. And finally there's a Canva "problem" that I really LOVE to have: the variety of layouts it presents is soooo great that sometimes it takes me too long to pick one, hahahaha.

Avantages

Canva is an incredible online graphics tool that let people create their designs easily. Canva have a lot of advantages that will blow your mind.

First: Canva is the easiest graphics tool I have ever used. Canva is easy to learn and user friendly, even for a starter. No complicated tool to learn unlike other graphic design software. Customization is as simple as ABC, and can be mastered within minutes.

Second: The designs on Canva are just incredible. This in particular makes me use Canva more often than expected. There are varieties of predesigned materials on any project you want, be it Logo, Book & Album Covers, Business Cards, Flyers and lot more.

Third: Not only did you get beautiful templates, Canva also allow users to modify those templates to their satisfaction. On the platform, you can edit the image, change colors as wished, you can resize files and do all sort of editing without any heavy software.

Forth: Canva is Free to Use, although they have a paid service that offers more beautiful templates and other features. However, free users also get to have access to some of their great designs, can edit these designs and export to their preferred format.

Fifth: Free 1GB storage to store your credentials. Canva goes out of their way to satisfy users, the free space is most helpful; I can easily store my designs on the platform which can be modify and access when needed.

Lastly, the customer support is very responsive and helpful.

Inconvénients

Canva is really helpful, have a lot of advantages but yet some shortcomings that makes their platform a second choice.

First: Canva is an online only platform, everything Canva offers can only be access on the Internet, no offline feature. This is the advantage the software has over Canva, if you’re in a location with poor connections, Canva won’t be an option to use.

Second: Paid users get more beautiful templates. Although the advantage of paying for their service is to get more premium designs, however, free users are very much limited when it comes to templates; the paid designs are shown to free users but watermarked.

Third: Even paid users don’t have full access; there are some other materials that you’ll still need to purchase.

Lastly, Canva has a mobile app to make their platform mobile friendly. This would have been an advantage if only the app will just work as expected. The app is really buggy and frustrating to use, totally not the Canva I’m use to on PC, I have to get rid of it.

Avantages

One of the best attributes that Canva offers is its ease of use. Relative to other layout and design software, designing marketing material, info-graphics, presentations, etc. becomes very painless as Canva offers a variety of templates for you to choose.

Along with these are the ready stock photos, vector graphics, and shapes that you can bring to your design by click-and-dragging it to where you want it to be, that way you do not need to switch to another webpage to search for images.

Canva is also very useful for prototyping designs as you can quickly iterate through your design ideas because of how quick and convenient it is to create a design.

You are also able to share your design to others online and work on it collaboratively. This is useful for team projects or simply showing others your design for comments.

You do not have to worry about the risk of losing your work because all your designs are saved to the cloud. It also makes it easy for you to hop in and out of your work.

Canva is also free to use but the paid version offers quality of life improvements such as allowing to change the size of your design, removing the watermarks for most of the stock photos and graphics, better organization of designs, and the most important feature for me is being able to save my designs with a transparent background.

My takeaway here is that Canva allows you to make artistic professional looking design in mere seconds with no artistic background experience needed.

Inconvénients

Although Canva allows you to create professional looking designs rapidly, it does come with some trade-offs.

Canva loses the flexibility and functionality that other graphic design software have. Users of professional graphic design software would understand what I am referring to. Features such as warping, filters, space selection, etc. are absent. but one could say that this is a good thing to keep things simple.

Although you could collaborate on a design, unfortunately this feature is not yet real time and would require you to refresh the web page to see the work of other be reflected on the design.

The free version of the application unfortunately does not download the design in the best quality and it is sometimes obvious when presenting it in high definition.

And also, as my tasks became more demanding, the watermark on the stock photos became more and more annoying which made me opt for the paid version.

Avantages

I love almost everything about Canva. First, it is incredibly easy to use. Although I have a background that includes design, I was able to teach my sister to use it within about 5 minutes. The tool is incredibly user-friendly and very intuitive, so it's almost like you're guided through the design process.

Second, I love that I can have a different folder for every client, and then designs within that folder. For example, Client A has a folder, and within that is a file for Instagram posts, for in-store flyers, and for hand-out postcards. Client B has a folder, and within it is a file for video thumbnails, Instagram posts, and website featured images. It helps to keep me organized, and each one has its own branding.

Third, with the ability to resize for different outlets, it's easy for me to create every post I need in every size I need, with some small adjustments. Amazing.

Fourth, Canva has great templates for all kinds of designs. The templates are completely adjustable to your branding; in fact, sometimes, I just use them for inspiration.

Finally, Canva has a plethora of free (and paid) images and icons that make designs pop or just add that little something extra that you need.

Overall, Canva has saved me so much time over the past three years that I've been using it. What would have taken me an hour in QuarkXPress now takes me about 15 minutes in Canva, because it's all right there, and it's so easy to use.

Inconvénients

I have only a few complaints with Canva. The first is probably on their product roadmap—I wish that I could merge files. At this point, I can move any design into a folder. But I can't move a design in File A to File B, even if they're the same size. Here's why I find this is problematic: Let's say I have a file of Instagram designs (1080x1080) for Client A, and I want to convert just the first of the designs into a video thumbnail (1920x1080). And I already have a file of video thumbnails for Client A. So, I either need to recreate the Instagram image into my file of video thumbnails, which is silly and duplicates work. Or I need to copy and resize the whole Instagram designs file, delete everything but the first page, and then make the small adjustments to get it the right size. Ideally, I would be able to then take this newly designed image and merge it into my Video Thumbnails file. But I can't do that. So now I have a handful of random files, which becomes slightly cumbersome. Nit picky, yes, but it would be so helpful to do and a real time-saver.

Second, and this is probably on the roadmap too, I would love to be able to copy an element/text/style from one design and paste it into another that is in a different file.

Finally, also probably on the roadmap, is to be able to bulk delete pages in a file. I can bulk download them but not bulk delete. Would be another big time-saver.