The 6 Best Canva Alternatives Compared (There Are Free Options Too)

Canva revolutionized the design world by providing simple graphic design tools for all skill levels to create beautiful designs. Non-designers and absolute beginners can create amazing graphics with Canva. However, it has some drawbacks, which is why some users are opting for Canva alternatives.

In general, Canva offers a wonderful space for designing things like presentations and blog images, as well as basic social media posts and basic photo editing options, but since it was acquired by Atlassian we’ve seen price changes, feature limitations, and attempts to upsell customers.

You can still create free digital assets the do-it-yourself way with Canva. However, since the introduction of these types of designers, we’ve seen an onslaught of Canva alternatives, some completely free, while others have cleaner interfaces or unique features that you either have to pay for or can’t find on Canva. Of course, we’re not talking about options like Adobe Photoshop, since you’ll have to pay quite a bit for them. Let’s leave that to professional designers.

You can still create free digital assets with Canva, but since the introduction of these types of designers, we’ve seen an onslaught of Canva alternatives, some completely free, while others have cleaner interfaces or unique features that you either have to pay for Find for or not on Canva.

Whether you’re looking for a cheaper option or want to try a new interface, the top Canva alternatives below should help.

👉 Read our full Canva review to compare it to our alternatives below.

The absolute best Canva alternatives

All of our Canva alternatives start with a free plan. Some offer totally free tools with watermarks or ads within the UI.

Regardless, you can at least test all of these Canva alternatives before committing to one of the premium versions. Business owners will surely appreciate the opportunity to dip their toes in the water before going all out and purchasing one of the plans.

1.Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark offers an impressive array of features that make it an ideal Canva alternative. It’s part of the Adobe suite, but you don’t need to own anything like Photoshop or InDesign to use it. In fact, one of the plans is completely free, with additional premium plans cheaper than Canva.

The free version is a bit limited, but you can choose from thousands of free icons and images. There are also no limits to creating social media and marketing designs as long as you agree to the Adobe Spark watermark.

⚙️ Features:

• A full library of templates for unique designs, including options for social media graphics, presentations, a collage maker, and more.
• Ready-made templates for different occasions like holidays and special offers.
• A branding feature that allows you to insert your logo, color scheme, and font into any theme in Spark.
• Sharing tools to send your design to others or instantly move it to another program in Adobe Creative Cloud.
• A large collection of backgrounds, icons, photos and other digital assets.
• A quick download button to generate PNG, JPG or PNG.
• A direct integration with Google Drive to store all designs.
• An instant resize tool that changes the dimensions of a previous design for specific applications such as Facebook or Instagram.

💵 Prices:

• Starter – $0 for unlimited designs and thousands of icons and images. All downloads have the Adobe Spark watermark.
• Individually – $9.99 per month for all features in the free plan, plus asset sharing, collaboration, premium templates, branded templates, personalization, Adobe CC sharing, and watermark removal.
• team – $19.99 per month for everything in the previous plan, along with options to manage multiple accounts.

Both Pro plans have annual payment options to save a little money.

2. Visme

Visme is a bit more expensive than other Canva alternatives, but that’s because it focuses on complicated designs like infographics and marketing documents. It’s great for creating charts and widgets that you can share across your organization and work with your entire team using collaboration tools. People like social media marketers will find these features particularly useful.

⚙️ Features:

• Beautiful templates with ready-to-use layouts to create anything from infographics to charts.
• A branding kit to keep your color scheme and logo the same.
• Import and export for PowerPoint.
• Privacy controls on some plans.
• A large library of images, audio, video, illustrations, GIFs and more.
• Team collaboration with comments, annotations, user types and folder permissions.
• Organizational tools like a file manager, analytics, and sharing with other team members.

💵 Prices:

• For free – $0 for up to five projects, limited templates, JPG downloads, limited charts, and public projects. This plan has the Visme branding.
• default – $25 per month for 15 projects, more storage, all assets, no branding, PDF downloads and all charts. You also get premium support.
• company – $49 per month for unlimited projects, advanced download formats, folders, privacy controls, analytics and more. This one also has a collaboration.
• company – Everything in the previous plans, more storage, improved analytics, onboarding and more.

3. Crello

Crello has an interface similar to Canva, with a quick search bar to find thousands of templates and preset dimensions for specific designs like Facebook posts. Crello offers a free plan like Canva, but you’re limited to five design downloads per month. You can add objects, set color palettes with the branding kit, and drag and drop elements like objects and text boxes anywhere in the design module.

⚙️ Features:

• 30,000+ design templates for things like blogging, headers, social media, business cards, and marketing.
• A quick image cropping tool to cut out any section.
• Beautiful photo filters to instantly change the look and feel of a design.
• Image rotation and mirroring.
• Instant background removal faster than most editors.
• Interesting effects like frames and speech bubbles.
• Elegant design elements like shapes, stickers and badges.
• Audio editing tools to add music to images and audio to videos.

💵 Prices:

• Starter – $0 for the basic plan with 30,000+ templates, 650,000+ beautiful stock images, five design downloads per month, and 32,000+ video clips and animations.
• professional – $9.99 per month for unlimited downloads, all assets on the free plan, team collaboration, priority support, and background removal tools.

The paid plan offers annual payment options if you want to save a little money.

4. Template

This is an easy-to-use and elegant designer that generates high-resolution images without using complicated software like Photoshop. This photo editor is ideal for small businesses that don’t need advanced features for their visual content.

This is an easy-to-use, elegant designer that generates high-resolution images without using complicated software like Photoshop.

⚙️ Features:

• Unique design features like a color picker, live preview and safe areas.
• An Instagram SMS feature that sends designs directly to Instagram.
• Social sharing on all common platforms.
• Access millions of photos, thousands of templates, and various other useful items such as quotes, fonts, icons, and graphics.
• 100+ preset sizes to ensure your photos fit places like social media and presentations.
• Connect with Buffer to schedule your social media images directly from Stencil.

💵 Prices:

• For free – $0 for up to 10 images, 10 collections and 10 Instagram shares per month.
• professional – $15 per month for everything in the previous plan, millions of photos and icons, beautiful templates, logos, watermarks, font uploads, premium support, and increases in limits such as images per month and Instagram shares.
• Unlimited – $20 per month for everything in the previous plan, unlimited images and collections, and up to 100 Instagram shares.

The two premium plans get a little cheaper (much closer to Canva prices) if you pay annually.

5. Snappa

Good for creating graphics for social media and profile pages, Snappa offers excellent options for bloggers. The templates come in handy for getting the perfect dimensions, while the millions of free, high-resolution photos ensure a fast design process. Snappa prices are a bit higher than Canva, but you get some unique editing features.

⚙️ Features:

• An elegant designer with thousands of free templates.
• Access millions of free photos and graphics.
• Links to Social Media Accounts and Buffers.
• Font uploads.
• Potential for collaboration and multi-user accounts.
• Quick background removal tools.

💵 Prices:

• Starter – $0 for one user, 6,000+ templates, millions of photos, and three downloads per month.
• professional – $15 per month for unlimited monthly downloads, all templates and photos, social integrations, font uploads and image background removal.
• team – $30 per month for everything in the previous plans, plus support for five users and team collaboration.

The annual plans cost less per month than if you pay monthly.

6. Pixel X

Pixlr offers an online Photoshop alternative and a Canva alternative, making it one of the top design software on this list because you can create more complex designs in Pixlr E while speeding up the design process in Pixlr X. Overall Pixlr X is a solid choice that’s also cheaper than Canva or other tools like PicMonkey.

⚙️ Features:

• Access to both an advanced photo editing tool and graphic editor, as well as a simpler Canva alternative.
• Thousands of stock images, overlays and stickers.
• An AI CutOut tool to eliminate parts of your design.
• Access to thousands of text, symbols and other assets.
• Beautiful templates and preset dimensions.
• One of the more advanced image editing tools, especially when compared to Canva and most of the options on this list.

💵 Prices:

• For free – $0 for full access to Pixlr’s basic editing tools, along with limited access to overlays and stickers. This version is supported by ads.
• bonus – $7.99 per month for more overlays, icons and stickers. You also get video tutorials, templates, and more assets, not to mention an ad-free environment.
• creative pack – $29.99 per month for the largest collection of templates, assets, overlays and stickers.

Annual plans are cheaper in the long run.

Which of the Best Canva Alternatives is Right for You?

Much of your choice should really come down to the user interface, as it’s one of the most important considerations with these simple design tools. Luckily, they all offer a free version, so you can try the ones you find the most interesting and choose the one you think is the most intuitive.

If you feel unsatisfied after trying these Canva alternatives, there are other tools that are not covered in this article. Easil, Fotor, Piktochart, BeFunky, DesignBold, Desygner and Venngage to name a few. However, we cannot guarantee that all of them will offer free versions so you can try them first before committing to a long-term commitment.

No matter which tool you choose, you’ll need images and illustrations to use in your designs. To help you find these, we have some great posts for you: