Why Canva Pro Is Worth It (It’s not what you expect)

Here at Wave, you’ll hear us talk about why we love working with and supporting mission-forward businesses. There is no greater feeling than knowing you’re working with someone who looks at the bigger picture. That’s why we love Canva! Today we’re breaking down why Canva is so much more than an online design studio, how they are creating ripple effects of good, and why Canva Pro is totally worth it!

Disclosure: Wave Social is part of the affiliate network for some of these online tools, so we may receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase through any of our links.

What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design tool that can be used by teachers, businesses, marketers, students, designers, photographers, and nonprofits to eliminate the need for multiple graphic design and video editing apps. Custom Canva templates make it a breeze for anyone to create marketing materials, T-shirts, flyers, posters, and more. Canva provides its subscribers with a wide range of designs, illustrations, shapes, photos, and icons. With Canva you can create alone or design with a team. Share designs with anyone, including the ability to share outside the platform. You can even get your designs professionally printed.

How much does Canva Cost?

You can subscribe to Canva for free! While you don’t get access to all of our favorite Canva Pro features, you can still create a whole lot of incredible assets for your brand or business. If you want access to all of the features we rave about below, you’ll need to sign up for a Canva Pro plan. The Canva Pro subscription starts at just $12.99 for up to a team of 5. If you’re curious what Canva Pro is all about, use this link to try Canva Pro FREE for 30 days now!

Designing for Change

Did you know that Canva Pro may be free for your non-profit organization? That’s right, Canva gives back by providing hundreds of nonprofits with Wave’s favorite tools inside their Canva Pro plan, all you have to do is apply here. 

Canva doesn’t stop there! Canva has templates to help anyone create waves of change with templates for nonprofits. You can select from beautifully designed templates, with themes for Human Rights, Animal Protection, Disaster Relief, Welfare, Diversity, Arts, Education, Health, and Environment. This makes designing for good a whole lot easier! 

Sustainability

At Wave, we are all about sustainability. Protecting our planet is important to us and we are proud to use a tool like Canva Pro wherein 2021 their global operations will be carbon neutral. Need to print up some flyers? Skip your local print shop and print with Canva instead! At Canva, they source their paper from sustainable sources and their packaging is made with Post Consumer Waste. Bonus, when possible they even print your orders locally too!

Supporting Creator Diversity

We’ve all heard of the TikTok Creators Fund, but did you know that Canva has a Creators Fund of their own? They sure do! Canva is using its platform to support and amplify diverse creators by giving creators around the world a place to create content that represents unique cultures from every corner of the globe. Want to design for Canva? All you need is an online portfolio then head over and apply to Canva’s Diverse Creators Fund here.

Now that you know why we support Canva, let’s get into why we love Canva Pro. 

Canva’s Free Plan

As of September 2021, this is how Canva Free and Canva Pro plans stack up:

Canva has really been stepping up their game in every direction lately. We love that they are beta testing new features all of the time. One of our favorites is the ability to import and edit PDFs. Yes, you read that right, Canva users can now import a pdf and Canva’s amazing system will recognize each section and make them editable for you! This is a feature their community has been asking for and they totally delivered on this one!

Are you a video creator or ready to get your toes wet in the video content world? Check out the new Canva video editor (BETA). We love this video editor because as social media managers we often include video in our content plan. Usually, videos must be edited on other platforms, saved, and then uploaded to Canva so that we can drop them into our designs. It can often be a long process, taking up a lot of time and computer space. With Canva’s new video editor the need for a separate editor is eliminated. You can easily trim video, create transitions, add multiple music tracks, drop-in animations, and more! 

➡️ Don’t have Canva? Try it out for free! No credit card is required.

In addition to the features above, Canva’s Free Plan also includes:

• 250,000+ free templates
• 100+ design types (social media posts, presentations, letters, and more)
• Hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics
• Invite members to your team
• Collaborate with your team on each design with comments in real-time
• 5GB of cloud storage 

➡️ Subscribe to Canva’s Free plan here.

Then check out our Pinterest Board dedicated to our favorite Canva and Canva Pro hacks here.

What is Canva Pro?

And is Canva Pro worth it? Canva Pro includes everything in the Free Plan with the addition of all of the features we explain below. The Canva Pro features will help you easily uplevel your branding, marketing, and impact of any design or campaign. With Canva Pro’s features, you have a better and easier version of “photoshop” at your fingertips! After seeing our comparison of Cava vs Canva Pro, you’ll be ready to subscribe to Canva Pro today! Bonus, you can try Canva Pro for FREE for 30 days.

Canva Pro Features

100+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio, and graphics

Why it’s worth it: 

• While there are a lot of great free stock photo websites out there, we love Canva Pro’s stock image, video, music, and graphics gallery because of how targeted you can search. 
• For example, let’s say you need a stock photo of an office set up, but you want that photo to stay on brand with your color palette. You can actually search through all of Canva Pro’s assets by using any of your brand color’s hex codes. This will bring up thousands of Canva Pro’s stock photos, videos, and graphics that are the exact color you need(or very close to it). 
• It doesn’t stop there! Canva has made it so easy to find assets that match your brand and vision, you can also search by the orientation you need (vertical, square, horizontal), in addition to if you want your asset to be static or animated. This feature right here could save you hours of searching for the perfect image, graphic, or animation among millions of stock photos. Canva brings exactly what you need to the top of the search.

610,000+ premium Canva Pro Templates with new designs daily

Why it’s worth it: 

• If you’re someone who struggles with creativity and needs a starting point before those creative juices really get flowing, start out with a Canva Pro template! Sure, Canva’s Free plan offers 250,000+ templates, but with Canva Pro you get access to more than double the template options.
• This means with the addition of your brand colors, fonts, and a few hand-selected graphics, your design will be completely unique to you and much less like a graphic you’ve seen 10x before. 
• Bonus, they have just started creating Idea Pin templates for Pinterest!

Easily save and apply your brand or campaign’s colors, logos, and fonts with up to 100 Brand Kits. 

Why it’s worth it: 

• This is arguably one of our favorite Canva Pro features, you won’t believe how much time this saves and how easy it is to create a cohesive brand across all social media platforms and brand assets.
• This is especially helpful for those of us managing multiple niches or brands. With Canva Pro you can upload up to 100 brand kits, this saves you from having to type in your brand’s color code, upload your brand’s logo, or search for your brand’s fonts each time you’re creating a design. Talk about a total time saver!
• Bonus, if you’re new to branding, using Canva’s Brand Kit feature ensures that you have total cohesiveness and integrity throughout your brand. This means when your community sees your graphics, they know, before even seeing your logo that it’s YOU. Your brand is so much more than a color palette and fonts, it’s your image, it’s your message. It’s the feeling your ideal customer gets when seeing your branding. Canva Pro’s team has created this feature with the marketer in mind. We absolutely love it!

Access to Canva’s Background Remover tool.

Why it’s worth it: 

• Finally, say goodbye to masking in photoshop. Canva Pro offers a tool to easily remove image backgrounds instantly without the need for another app. We don’t know how Canva pulled off this function so well, but we rave about it all the time.
• Any graphic designer knows that removing the background can be tricky, especially when it comes to hair, but somehow Canva’s Background Remover does it well almost every single time. We’re not lying about how easy this is either, now anyone with a Canva Pro subscription can remove the background of a photo with the click of a button. You can then use that photo in your design or save and download the photo with a transparent background.

Amped up storage

Why it’s worth it: 

• One of the huge benefits of Canva Pro is that it is not just a design tool, it’s a major storage hub too. 100GB of cloud storage to be exact. As a social media expert and someone who loves to keep things organized, this is where Canva shines! Gone are the days of saving all of your designs on your computer and bogging down all the space. Simply design in Canva and publish to a handful of platforms directly from your design or through the Canva Pro Content Planner and Scheduler. You read that right, publish your Pinterest Pins, directly to Pinterest without ever having to download them onto your computer.

Access to Canva’s Magic Resize tool. 

Why it’s worth it: 

• This means you can design one Pinterest graphic and easily resize it for all social platforms. Have an e-book? You can even turn your pin design into a book cover at the same time! Did you create a really great infographic in Canva? If you have Canva Pro you can use the Magic Resize tool to make that infographic the size of a Pinterest pin in one click! It doesn’t stop there, choose from various other perfectly sized templates to get more done in the blink of an eye than ever!

Can you make money with Canva Pro?

One of our other favorite Canva Pro features not mentioned above is that with Canva Pro, the ‘template’ feature allows creators to design their own beautiful templates with the ability to sell those templates to other Canva creators. Meaning you can easily monetize your craft with Canva Pro.

So, is it worth it to pay for Canva Pro?

We’ve only mentioned just some of the amazing things you can do with Canva Pro, and trust us there are so many more! So we have to say, it truly is worth it to take the plunge and upgrade to Canva Pro.

Canva Pro Pricing

Canva Pro subscriptions start at just $12.99 and go up from there depending on the size of your organization. 

➡️ Use this link to try Canva Pro FREE for 30 days now!

Whether you’re a purpose-driven brand, e-commerce retailer, or just getting started in the business world, Canva Pro can totally change the game by saving you time, creative energy, and providing streamlined storage space and workflow process. 

➡️ Already have Canva Pro? Check out our 7 Must-Have Online Tools for New Business Owners.