Posted by Canva has become the go-to tool for small businesses and startups but there are Canva alternatives out there that offer more functionality without taking a bit out of your digital marketing budget.
We look at five of the best Canva alternatives, as well as the features they give, and their pricing plans, so you can decide which platform works best for you.
Venngage
One of the best alternatives for Canva is Venngage, a design software that offers a variety of options for B2C and B2B businesses, freelancers, classrooms, and nonprofits.
Venngage began life as a free infographic maker, but has since gone on to offer more data visualization templates with a variety of charts and graphs.
You can also create presentations, reports, proposals, cards, brochures, social media posts, and posters, among many others.
Features
Venngage has an intuitive user interface—along with pop-up instructions—so you can craft designs that will convert. Here are a few more features to consider:
- 1000s of attractive templates for infographics, presentations, mind maps, reports, social media graphics, and more
- Drag and drop elements into your chosen template
- Swap elements with the ‘replace’ option
- ‘My Brand Kit’ option—add logos, brand colors, and fonts to be applied across designs
- Team collaboration
- Stock photos sourced from top sites
- Upload your own images in premium and business versions
- Export designs as PNGs for web and print
- Chat, phone, and email support
Target Audience
Venngage is ideal for small business owners trying to make attractive visuals on a budget that will improve their marketing metrics, as well as consultants, freelancers, and educators.
Pricing
Venngage has a number of plans suited to a variety of audiences:
- A free plan, offering 5 branded infographic templates
- $19 per month premium plan offering premium templates, charts, and support
- $10 per month nonprofit plan with all premium benefits
- $29 per month education plan with all premium benefits
- $49 per month business plan with all templates, exporting, brand kit, and support
- $25 per month nonprofit plan with all business benefits
Lucidpress
Another popular alternative to Canva is Lucidpress, which offers over 650 templates for banners, ebooks, infographics, social posts, and presentations.
The site is more geared towards printed materials, but also has digital materials available for marketers.
With a user interface similar to Photoshop, Lucidpress looks more suitable for advanced users but it essentially has a drag-and-drop interface.
Features
Lucidpress has a variety of attractive features which make it suitable for marketing teams:
- Cloud-based templates
- Design from scratch or customize templates
- Brand asset manager
- Team sharing
- Document analytics
Target Audience
Lucidpress is geared towards medium to large businesses with bigger budgets.
Pricing
Lucidpress offers individual, education, business, and print plans:
- Free plan offering 3 pages per document and 25 MB of storage
- Free education plan with a limit of 10 documents and 100 MB storage
- $12.95 per month pro plan with unlimited documents and custom fonts
- Premium education with unlimited users, documents, and storage
- Business plan offering brand management and direct support
- Print plan—varies depending on the item to be printed
Piktochart
Piktochart was created with non-designers in mind. The site has a simple interface that is intuitive and easy to use.
Like the many Canva alternatives on our list, Piktochart also offers over 800 templates including infographics, presentations, flyers, posters, and reports, which can also be printed.
With a user interface very similar to Canva, Piktochart is a suitable alternative for marketers without design skills.
Features
Piktochart is a popular B2B design site and offers the following features:
- Password-protect designs
- Templates for marketing, HR, finance, and healthcare
- Simple user interface
- Single dashboard for team and brand assets collaboration
- Animated icons
- Project sharing
Target Audience
According to Piktochart’s website, their software is aimed at ‘marketers, small business owners, nonprofit managers, and educators’.
Pricing
Aside from its free plan, Piktochart also offers pricing packages for businesses, education, and nonprofits:
- $24 per month pro plan with unlimited visuals, 1GB uploads, and design export
- $39.99 per month nonprofit and education pro plans
- $82.50 per month pro team plan with additional storage, and team collaboration
- $199.95 per month nonprofit and education pro team plans
Visme
With over 500 templates and colour schemes, Visme is another major contender as a Canva alternative.
Visme gives you the option to customize templates for presentations, newsletters, infographics, charts, reports, social graphics, and banner ads.
Features
The Visme user interface isn’t as intuitive as the other sites listed here—you will find yourself relying on the video tutorials to get by. But the site does offer a number of attractive features:
- Privately share your designs
- Add interactive elements
- Organize designs and projects into folders
- ‘My Brand’ option to upload logos, fonts and colours
- Team collaboration
Target Audience
Visme’s audience includes executives of larger businesses, marketers, and educators from larger institutions, as it is a bit on the expensive side.
Pricing
Visme’s pricing plans are categorized for individuals, businesses, and educational institutions:
- The free plan for individuals allows up to 5 projects, and JPG downloads
- $14 per month standard plan ups the project limit to 15, with premium templates
- $25 complete monthly plan gives the user unlimited projects, and HTML5 downloads
- Also for $25 per month is the single business plan including the brand kit option
- $75 team plan allows user management and project sharing
- Visme offers an enterprise package with premium support
- Students can enjoy a standard account for $30 per month
- Educators can enjoy a similar package for $60 per month
- Schools have access to an enterprise-like package
PicMonkey
With photo editing abilities and 3000 available graphics and templates, PicMonkey is another great alternative to designers looking to create attractive graphics without relying on Canva.
Unlike the other sites listed here, PicMonkey places a strong focus on photo manipulation and not just designing.
There are plenty of photo editing options in its clean and clear user interface, alongside the customizable templates the site offers.
Features
PicMonkey will appeal to the design-minded marketer, which makes it more suitable for those with design experience. But it also has a variety of interesting features, including:
- Variety of photo effects and filters that can be added to uploaded images
- Add texture to graphics and text
- Layers palette allows designers to move elements around the template
- Library with hundreds of fonts
Target Audience
PicMonkey is ideal for designers and small to medium businesses.
Pricing
PicMonkey offers a 7-day free trial but not a free plan. Below are the plans it does offer:
- $7.99 per month basic plan with shareable folders, and 1GB cloud storage
- $12.99 per month pro plan with unlimited storage, brand fonts, and priority email support
- $33.99 per month team plan with all of the pro features plus team management
Summing Up
For marketers looking for alternatives to Canva, we have outlined some excellent options that are fairly easy to use and not as hard on the pocket either.
If you are still confused about which works best for you, here’s a handy graphic to explain which sites have the most templates, the best pricing, customer support, and great UX.
With the above guide in hand, you are now well-placed to make a decision for your Canva alternative, so you can design to your heart’s content.
Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, an infographic and design platform. She regularly writes about digital marketing, improving productivity, pop culture, and diversity.
Twitter: @Venngage
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