Canva vs. PicsArt

Founded by an Australian couple, Canva is the brainchild of Melanie Perkins, the CEO, who set out on a mission to make design accessible for everyone. A decade later, the company is worth $40B and used by over 100M consumers across the globe. By and far, they are the most valuable company in the graphic design space, competing head to toe with incumbents like Adobe that have been around for much longer.

Canva's strengths come into play through the sheer ease of starting and becoming a pro at the platform, which is in line with their mission. Similarly, at such a low cost, they've managed to provide tremendous value to users. It's a good fit for everyone: students, creators, freelancers, teachers, small businesses, and even large enterprise companies. However, it may not be a fit for professional designers who may want something more robust.

• Canva offers a free tier, one of the most powerful editing tools on the market.
• If you're ready to upgrade, they offer a free 30-day trial for Canva Pro, their premium product version.
• Despite being so powerful, the founders have always been committed to ensuring the product remains inexpensive.
• Canva is great for beginners with a very small learning curve.

• Canva is no Adobe Photoshop. Temper your expectations on what level of customizations you will be able to achieve with Canva.
• Canva lacks some customization for more complicated task - most professional designers might look down on Canva as a graphic design tool for the masses.
• While Canva is building out AI tools, the product seems to be shifting towards a more full suite of products like Canva Docs than purely focusing on design

$15 per month for a Canva Pro License

Canva might have some limitations as your design requirements become more complex, but Canva has become synonymous with design. Canva has made design accessible to consumers across the globe through a very simple, intuitive product. The company is worth over $40B and has seen such massive success because they've made design easy for the masses at such an accessible price.

For these and many reasons, we recommend most creators to try out Canva, especially given their free tier and a free trial for Canva Pro.

PicsArt is a mobile app for editing photos and videos. It offers popular features like background removal, removing objects, and cropping video clips. Founded in 2011 and with over 150 million users, PicsArt is a serious player in the graphic design space. The company has users in over 180 countries that create over 1B designers per month. That's serious scale and rivals that of the market leader, Canva. Similar to Canva, PicsArt has raised a significant amount of capital, almost $200M, which will allow it to continue competing in a saturated space.

PicsArt is best known for some of its key functionality. Below are some of the most common use cases for why creators and general users might want to use a photo editing or graphic design tool.

1. Remove and change the background of a picture
2. Remove objects in a picture
3. Add audio to a video
4. Crop video clips
5. Collage maker

PicsArt's pricing is very competitive at just $13 per month for their Plus plan and $15 for their Pro Plan.

Like Microsoft Designer, PicsArt is also leaning into AI with their new Spaces Product.

PicsArt is not as well-known or prominent as Canva. This means that if you get stuck or need support, you might have a harder time finding the answer.

$13 per month for Plus

$15 per month for Pro

PicsArt offers everything an average creator might want or need day to day. Like Canva, the product is affordable but powerful. PicsArt might be Canva's most legitimate head-to-head competitor. Since PicsArt is even slightly cheaper, we think you can't go wrong with choosing PicsArt as your go-to graphic design tool. Especially for social media posts, PicsArt offers a large template library.