Canva Free vs. Canva Pro: Is It Worth Upgrading to Pro?

Is Canva's premium offering worth spending money on? What features do you unlock with Canva Pro? Here, we'll compare the free and paid plans.

Canva has taken the design world by storm in recent years, and for a good reason. It's an intuitive platform that makes design accessible to everyone, even those of us who may not consider ourselves to be all that creative.

While there's plenty to do with a free Canva account, to unlock Canva's full potential, you're encouraged to upgrade to Canva Pro. But is it actually worth it? Let's take a look.

What Do You Get With a Free Canva Account?

Unlike other design platforms that claim to have a free account option but are so restrictive, Canva actually provides a decent free offering and doesn't force you to upgrade.

With a free Canva account, you'll still have access to more than 250,000 templates, 200,000 photos, and 57,000 graphic elements. This is more than enough to get started with and will enable you to create a variety of different professional designs.

On top of access to thousands of free elements, you'll also get 5GB of storage space for your own assets and have the ability to create a couple of folders to organize your designs.

What's Included With Canva Pro?

If you think that a Canva free account sounds good, then wait until you hear about what's on offer with Canva Pro. Besides access to all of the above, you'll also be able to make use of Canva's Pro elements, giving you the choice of more than 450,000 templates, 75 million images, audios and videos, and 3000 different fonts.

If that isn't enough, with a Canva Pro account, you can also use additional image editing options, including Canva's background remover tool. Plus, you can create up to 100 brand kits, meaning that whatever you design, it will always be on-brand.

Your storage space will also be upgraded to 100GB, giving you plenty of room to upload your own media, and you can create as many folders as you need to organize all of your new designs.

Canva Free vs. Canva Pro: A Side-by-Side Comparison

We've created this table to make it easy for you to see how Canva Pro differs from a free Canva account.

Which Canva Plan Should You Choose?

Deciding which Canva plan is right for you will depend on how much you use the platform and what you use it for. If you're an individual looking to create a couple of cool posters, or business documents such as your own business cards, then Canva free is probably more than capable of bringing your ideas to life.

Related: Business Documents You Can Easily Create With Canva

If, however, you work in marketing or plan to use Canva as the primary design software for your business, then it's almost certainly worth upgrading to access the extra features.

Are you still unsure about paying for the service?

The great thing about Canva is that you can keep using it for free and upgrade to Canva Pro later when you decide to. And you can even purchase premium elements individually if you just want to use one or two in your designs. You can add Pro elements to your designs for just $1.

New Features Coming to Canva in 2022

If you're on the fence about upgrading, then perhaps Canva's newest features may be the thing to persuade you.

Those with eagle-eyes may have already noticed that Canva has started to move into the scheduling sphere, offering their customers the ability to directly publish their designs to various social platforms using Canva's content planner.

Read More: How to Use the Canva Content Planner to Schedule Social Media Posts

At present, this feature is still in its infancy, and there are a few quirks to iron out, but we fully expect Canva to add more scheduling features in the new year.

In addition to scheduling, we've also seen Canva leap into video editing, adding more than 25,000 royalty-free audio tracks to Canva Video and creating a video editing suite that allows anyone to create, edit and record professional-quality videos.

While we can't make any promises, we're hopeful that Canva will continue to expand its video editing suite by adding more cool features in the new year.

Is Canva Pro Worth It?

All things considered, Canva Pro is an extremely affordable option for those looking to take their creative designs to the next level. While we love a freebie, you can't argue with all the added features available with a Canva Pro account, not to mention that if Canva keeps innovating at the rate they already are, you can expect plenty more cool features to come.

At the end of the day, whether Canva Pro is worth the money or not will come down to what you use the platform for and how often you intend to use it.

About The Author