Visual content has become the most prominent form of online marketing in the past few years. So much so that a designer of any level of expertise can’t avoid using it. Hard to believe? These statistics might just be able to convince you:
– According to Hubspot’s 2020 ‘State of Marketing Report’, 70% of surveyed companies invest in visual content. The number rises to 80% in the social media market.
– According to Venngage’s 2020 Report, all surveyed organizations project to use about 25% of their budget to create and organize high-quality graphics in 2020.
– Buffer’s State of Social report 2019, the percentage of companies that use do not use video content, went down from 20% to 14%.
Clearly, these companies understand the importance of visual content!
The industry needs more creative designers and content creators than ever before. Are
you a budding designer looking to learn stuff? Maybe you are a small business owner
who wants to create their own graphics.
Creating beautiful visuals and graphics has never been easier. There are far too many easy to use graphic design tools on the online market now. This is a problem on its own! There are far too many options for a beginner to choose from.
Two of the most popular online web-based design tools are Canva and Snappa. Besides Canva vs Snappa, you should check out our complete reviews for Canva and Snappa. We have worked really hard to point out all sides of these beautiful online graphic design tools.
Canva: A Dead-Simple Graphic Design Online Tool
Snappa Review- Better than Canva and Stencil?
They are both great software on their own, but which one is better? We’ll compare them side by side in this article. Alright, let’s dive into Canva vs Snappa and make it easy for you choose between.
The target audience for both Canva and Snappa are predominantly non-designers and beginners. The never before seen rise in the need for visual content has created a market for ‘Design tools for Dummies’. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom etc are too complicated and require practice and patience to master.
However, a large portion of the community wanted a simpler and easier way to design graphics. These users wanted less complexity and more user-friendliness.
Canva was one of the pioneers of this market. Snappa was aimed at local small businesses that wanted to make their own designs as easily as possible. A more experienced designer would, however, appreciate Canva more, owing to the bigger feature set.
Snappa wins for simplicity and elegance.
Although both Snappa and Canva are aimed at a similar audience, Snappa prioritises clarity and ease of use over everything else. Snappa has an extremely intuitive and basic UI that appeals to non-designers unlike any other.
Canva has a slightly confusing feature set. They cannot be presented as abstractly as Snappa does. But, Canva lets you sign in directly with your Google, Facebook or Apple accounts without explicit signup.
Snappa wins for simplicity and elegance.
Snappa has the most basic and intuitive UI possible for a design tool. You can simply create an account and start creating designs in a couple of minutes.
No confusing navigation buttons, no exploration feature and no confusing suggestions. It Offers a seamless user experience even for the non-tech-savvy.
Pro: Ease of Use
Con: Too simple for complex designs
Canva has a great UI too. It has a search feature that Snappa doesn’t. It makes searching for resources simple and easy. Paired with a recommendation feed, Canva overwhelms you with templates tailored to your needs based on your recent designs. However, doesn’t group all its paid and non-paid resources in a way that is convenient for free-tier users.
Pro: Addition features
Con: Too much information for new users
Canva has a slightly confusing feature set. They cannot be presented as abstractly as Snappa does. But, Canva lets you sign in directly with your Google, Facebook or Apple accounts without explicit signup.
Canva wins hands down.
Snappa has over 6000 templates. It is available to all subscriptions including the free-tier without limitations. Most of Snappa’s designs are simple and elegant. They come in subtle and delicate colours that are pleasant to the eye. Most templates are structured for
Pro: No access limitation for free users
Con: Limited collection
Canva has over 60,000 plus templates in its database. That is 10 times more than Snappa! Of this, over 8000 are available for free in the free-tier plan. You must either pay for individual templates or go for a paid subscription that gives you access to the whole collection for free.
Canva templates are beautiful, extremely diverse but more often have a crude color palette. Offers more variety and options such as:
Pro: Sheer amount and variety of available templates
Con: Limitation based on subscription
Canva wins.
Snappa’s web tool is only supported in English.
Canva supports multiple languages. Actually over 30 languages! From Afrikaans to Hindi. This is one of the reasons Canva is increasingly popular around the world. You can change it by navigating to account settings > preferred languages.
Canva Pro wins. Snappa Free wins.
Snappa has a collection of over 4 million HD photos and graphics. It is free across all subscriptions. However, it does not have other forms of multimedia resources like stock music or videos. All resources are royalty-free.
Canva has about over 60 million stock images, photos, videos, and graphics in its data. Yes, 60 Million! But free users only get access to a ‘few hundred thousand images’ according to Canva. Additionally, Canva has an assortment of various kinds of music and stock video footage. This makes it easier to create more engaging visual content with Canva (Pro). And yes, all resources are royalty-free.
Canva is better. Relatively.
Compared to classical design tools like Adobe Photoshop, both Snappa and Canva are not as powerful or versatile. Canva, however, is has a bigger feature set than Snappa.
Making Canva more appealing to more experienced designers who want to make more unique content. Snappa sticks with the most basic features for simplicity’s sake.
You can add clip art, frames, music, animation, charts and videos with Canva. Snappa does not have the above features.
Canva wins.
Are you looking to buy your design team an online web tool subscription? Then you might want to consider Canva over Snappa. Here is why.
Sharing of designs that are in progress with anyone is not possible with Snappa. The only way to collaborate in Snappa to buy a Snappa Team subscription. Even then each team can only have up to 5 members.
Some features of Snappa’s Team Plan are
Canva however, lets users share designs via links at no cost. All you have to do is click on the get shareable link from the ‘your designs’ section. The link can be used by anyone to edit or patch up your design. Or there is a ‘share’ button on the editing page. This lets you share the graphic in the following manner
The real advantage is that Canva also has a free team feature. Team members can be added via email invitations or invitation links. The team owner can selectively promote members to admin to give them extra privileges. The free teams feature lets you create 20 teams with up to 3000 members. The pro subscription brings a few additional features to teams like
Canva wins.
Both Snappa and Canva allow you to integrate social media accounts. Snappa lets you link to these social media accounts directly
Other social media accounts except Facebook and Twitter are not directly supported. Snappa does, however, support Buffer. Buffer is a social media management application that lets users schedule posts to social media accounts. It supports – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Canva supports more direct integrations than Snappa.
The designs can also be stored with cloud services with just a click. Some of the supported services are
Other forms of downloads include printing posters, cards, flyers and tags. Further, you can embed and create websites with the designs. All these in just a few clicks.
Snappa only operates as a web-based design tool.
Canva, in addition to the browser-based tool, also has mobile versions. It has desktop clients (for both Mac and Windows) plus also supports iOS and Android.
Also, keep in mind that all Canva Pro features from the web client are not available in the iOS and Android apps.
Both Snappa and Canva have a one-click resize feature. It is free in Snappa but not in Canva.
Removing an image’s background in one-click is a great feature. It comes as a feature with both Snappa Pro/Team and Canva Pro/Enterprise.
Snappa lets you download the design in the following multiple formats:
Canva lets you download in the following formats
With Pro/Enterprise subscription you can select the size and quality of the download using sliders.
Snappa does not have a photo editing tool with the design tool.
Canva graphics creator has an all-purpose simplistic photo editor. The editor is completely free. It has a range of filters that enhance the image in just a single click. It also does not leave a watermark after an image is edited. The tool is completely browser-based and requires no additional downloads or plugins.
It is a paid feature in both Snappa (Pro/Team) and Canva(Pro/Enterprise). It lets users upload fonts in formats of .ttf, .otf and .wolf and edit graphics with them. Additionally, it also supports foreign character sets via custom upload.
Both Snappa and Canva have beautiful blogs. The Canva blog is bigger and has more articles. It also has a more fancy UI. Both let you keep track of all the latest updates in the design world. There are a variety of articles from the latest design trends to updates of popular social media platforms.
Snappa cannot be accessed or used from other 3rd party websites.
Canva Button is a relatively new feature that lets 3rd party websites use Canva’s design tool remotely. The designs made with Canva button from 3rd party websites will however not be accessible on the user’s design folder. Only limited functionality will be available from these remote sites.
Snappa’s documentation is simple. They are over a dozen video tutorials walking absolute beginners through the design tool UI. This is followed by a series of FAQs and basic features documentation.
Canva has a much more informative knowledge base. It has of sections explaining all kinds of features step by step. There is also API documentation for HTML and JavaScript to use Canva Button.
It’s a Tie.
Snappa | Canva | |
Free | – | – |
Pro | $10/month (paid annually) $15/month (paid monthly) | $10/month (paid annually) $12.25/month (paid monthly) |
Team/Enterprise | $20/month (paid annually) $30/month (paid monthly) | $30/month (paid annually) |
Snappa Pricing Plan
Snappa offers 3 types of subscriptions – Free, Pro, Team. They cost $0, $10, and $20 respectively. Snappa’s team collaboration feature is limited to Snappa Team subscribers and each team is limited to a maximum of 5 members.
Snappa also restricts the number of free downloads per month for free-users to 3. It, however, does not restrict the resources such as stock photos available for any user.
Pro: Resources evenly available across subscriptions
Con: Paid collaboration feature and limited downloads
Canva Pricing Plan
Canva also offers 3 types of subscriptions – Free, Pro, Enterprise. They cost $0, $9.95, and $30 respectively. On the other hand, Canva free plan allows unlimited downloads. You can keep using Canva for free, forever! Canva also allows free team collaboration.
The huge collection of resources is however not free for everyone to use. Only Canva Pro/Enterprise users have access to the complete collection. Canva has other plans like Education and Non-profit purposes that give pro features for free if you meet their eligibility criteria.
Pro: Unlimited free downloads and free team collaboration.
Con: Limitation in access to resources for free-tier users.
If you are looking to explore your options beyond Snappa and Canva, you should check out these apps in town
PicMonkey | FotoJet | Stencil |
4/5
| 3/5
| 3.5/5
|
1. PicMonkey is an online image editing tool, that provides features simplified from Adobe
Photoshop and Illustrator.
2. It’s got a great pricing plan. The pro plan costs $6/month (billed annually) and $8/month (paid monthly)
3. But it does not have an unlimited free-tier plan.
1. FotoJet aims to bring together image editing, designing and making collages.
2.It does not require a registration for the free features. And the pro plan has a 7-day trial period.
3. It is very cheap. $3.33/month (billed annually) and $7/month (billed monthly).
4. Separate collage making feature.
1. Stencil comes with a huge database of 2,300,000+ stock photos, icons and graphics.
2. Compatible with Google Fonts and has a collection of 100,000+ quotes.
3. Auto creates bit.ly links for graphics.
4. Stencil also comes as a browser extension and a WordPress plugin.
Asra Nafees is a Language Student and a young, enthusiastic content creator at Bytevarsity. Asra writes unique and research-driven content about language, education, and technology.
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