For a lot of people, when it comes to designing graphics, using templates from Canva get the job done.
Many of us aren’t graphic designers. Canva is a very useful free resource because it provides templates for easily designing everything from social media designs to YouTube channel art, flyers, videos, infographics, logos and presentations.
While you could do a lot with a free Canva account, upgrading to Canva Pro unlocks a whole lot more resources including premium photos, elements and features.
Canva Pro even gives you a full 30 days to use these “pro only” features so even though you have access to free Canva, it is worth the try.
You’d have to supply your credit card info for a taste of Canva Pro but you can cancel anytime and continue your trial until it expires.
Signing Up For Canva Pro
To sign up for Canva Pro, you will first need to create a free Canva account.
You can easily create a Canva account by joining using your Facebook, Google or Apple account or you can join with your email address and a password.
Once inside Canva, you can start to design by choosing from thousands of templates across many categories depending on what you want to design.
Not all templates are totally free to use though. Some contain photos and elements that you may need to pay for and these are marked with a “$” sign. Others require an upgrade to Canva Pro to unlock and these are marked with a gold crown symbol.
You can simply click on any of these gold crown marked templates to start signing up to Canva Pro with a free trial.
Another way of unlocking Pro is to visit the Pro page and checking out everything you get then sign up from there.
Canva Pro costs $15/month for individuals or as low as $12/month when paid annually.
Canva vs. Canva Pro
If you just want to design the occasional blog post banner or make a one time YouTube channel cover, you can use Canva free for as long as you like.
Canva Pro, however, is great for businesses who would like to stay consistent with their branding efforts and has features designed to help with this.
Everything you’ll find in the free version of Canva is available in Canva Pro plus additional features and resources.
Here are the major differences between the two.
Canva Free
Free to use
250,000+ free templates
Hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics to use in designs.
Invite members to your team for easy collaboration
5 GB of cloud storage
Canva Pro
From $12/month (billed annually)
610,000+ free/pro templates
100+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics
Save designs as templates for your team to use
1 TB of cloud storage
100 Brand Kits to save your campaigns colors, logos and fonts
Magic Resize lets you instantly resize your design for different platforms
Remove image backgrounds with Background Remover
Access to Magic Studio which contains over 20 AI-powered tools to supercharge your creativity.
Schedule social media content to 8 platforms
Having access to brand kits is easily the best reason for upgrading to Canva Pro. Brand Kits let you save your brands colors, fonts and logo so you can have a consistent look and feel across all your designs.
The ability to resize your design is another great reason to have Canva Pro. I’ve had the problem where I would do a design and then it would get cut off when trying to fit it into an Instagram post. With Magic Resize, you can just generate the exact size you need for the new platform.
I also enjoy the AI-powered tools inside Magic Studio that let me do things that would have taken a lot of technical know-how or a lot of my time to do.
Canva Pro has other great features and more resources to make it worth the upgrade from free. The fact that you get a full 30-day free trial makes it even more worth the try. You can enjoy all these benefits for a full month before deciding whether or not you want to just keep using free Canva.
