Canva is an easy-to-use graphic program that lets you design to your heart’s content, whether you’re a beginner or a design expert. With its drag-and-drop capabilities, lots of templates to start with, and stock resources like photos and graphics, Canva can help you DIY your own graphics, and Canva Pro has even more resources.
Here’s my honest Canva Pro review plus 6 reasons why it’s worth the upgrade!
Table of Contents
Canva Pro Review
Canva Pro vs. Free
To start, you might be wondering what the difference even is between Canva Pro and the free version. If you’re already a Canva user, you might be thinking that it’s pretty cool and you don’t need to upgrade. However, there are several pretty sweet features that I think makes the upgrade well worth your money!
According to Canva, here are some of the benefits of upgrading to Canva Pro:
- Access to exclusive premium templates, plus a LOT more of them
- Access to over 100 million premium photos, videos, audios, and elements for designing
- Brand Kits to save your business’s colors, fonts, and branding (plus save it for your clients too!)
- The Magic Resize tool to turn your designs into any other size / proportion you’d like
- The Background Remover tool so you can remove pesky backgrounds without any other outside programs
- Save your designs with a transparent background
- Ability to schedule social media posts directly from Canva
- A massive 100 GB of storage!
? Sign up now for a 30 day trial of Canva Pro! ?
6 Reasons To Upgrade To Canva Pro
In this section, I’ll go into more detail about what additional features you get in the pro version and why I think it’s well worth the cost to upgrade.
1. Access to Additional Templates and Premium Graphics, Photos, and Elements
One of the main reasons to upgrade to Canva Pro is simply that on the free version, you’re limited to only certain templates, free stock photos, and free elements, but upgrading to pro opens up hundreds of thousands of additional premium options.
Right now, Canva Pro boasts a total of over 100 million premium templates, photos, elements, video, and more to help you create amazing designs.
If you’d like some extra free styled stock photos to add to your designs, be sure to check out our photos below!
2. Create and Use Your Brand Kit.. Including Your Own Uploaded Fonts
Another cool feature that sets Canva apart is their brand kit. With Canva Pro you can set up a brand kit to save your brand’s colors, fonts, and font sizes.
You can set up a bunch of different brand kits for yourself or clients so that when you create a new design, you have access to the exact colors and fonts that you need for each website. This makes it a lot easier to keep things straight if you’re a social media manager creating graphics for multiple clients with different brand styles.
In addition, Canva Pro gives you access to thousands of premium fonts and the ability to upload your own fonts. If you or your clients use certain fonts in your branding, you can upload the font to Canva and add it right to your brand kit. Easy peasy!
3. Magically Resize Images For Every Platform
Canva’s Magic Resize Tool is another great benefit of Canva Pro.
Basically this tool lets you design one graphic, then click a button and automatically (magically!) resize your design into the perfect dimensions for another platform without even needing to know what dimensions the other sites are using.
For example, you might start with a vertical Pinterest pin design and realize that you want to share it on Instagram and Facebook as well, so with one click of the Magic Resize tool, you can have it in the exact proportions and dimensions that you want (you may need to do a litttttllleeee bit of tweaking to get all the elements to look just right).
Related: Ideas for What to Post on Social Media
4. Easily Animate Your Designs or Create Videos
Easily the most underrated feature of Canva is the ability to animate designs and ALSO to edit simple videos, including using premium audio.
You can use a number of basic animations in the free version of Canva, but the pro version unlocks new animations for your text and overall design, plus you can also add motion to your projects through editing videos. I’ve used Canva many times to create slideshow videos, Youtube introductions, Youtube thumbnails, and animated Youtube outros.
Plus, with their integration with Epidemic Sound, you can get access to premium commercial music for your Youtube channel without having to pay for an additional subscription – it’s all part of your Canva Pro account.
5. More Space, Storage, and Organization
With a free Canva account, you only get 5GB of storage space (and I’ve definitely run out of storage space before!). But with Canva Pro, you get a whopping 100 GB of space. That’s a whole lot of designs!
In addition, if you upgrade to Canva Pro you also get to create an unlimited number of folders to organize all your designs just the way you like.
Is it embarassing to admit that I didn’t put anything into folders for the first few years that I used Canva? Yep, I just had hundreds of designs piled into the same space… but now, I’ve finally broken out the folders and created shortcuts to the ones I use the most often.
It’s so much easier to find the designs you want when they’re organized into neat folders. 🙂
6. You Can Schedule Social Media Posts Directly from Canva
Ok, this feature of Canva Pro is just plain COOL. If you don’t want to download your graphics, upload them to another scheduler (that you’re likely paying for as well), and then schedule your social media posts from there, you can simply connect your social media accounts to Canva and schedule directly from there.
So.. Is Canva Pro Worth It?
In conclusion, if you’re regularly creating graphics for your business and want the benefit of the extra features, templates, and graphics, then Canva Pro is well worth your money.
And if you want to go next level, then you can combine it with styled stock photography or premade templates from yours truly. ?
? Sign up now for your free 30 day trial of Canva Pro! ?
