Graphic designing is easy. Thanks to these evolving easy-to-use tools that just use drag and drop builder to create an entire design within a few minutes.
Since the advent of social media, the popularity of graphic design has increased dramatically due to its presence in the field of visual content. Whether you are a blogger or an influencer, you are compelled to design excellent graphics for your posts.
There are a lot of tools but Visme and Canva are two of the most popular and excellent graphic design tools.
In this blog post, we will go through a head-to-head comparison of these tools in detail to help you choose the one that suits your needs and niche.
Visme Vs Canva: An Introduction
Visme is a powerful online tool that helps you create professional-quality graphics in minutes. It was founded by Payman Taei in 2013 as a basic design software with plenty of tools to get the job done. Later on, the tool evolves into one of the leading web-based graphic design tools.
Visme allows you to easily create animated infographics, presentations, social media posts, and more with built-in templates. The software provides a user-friendly interface that lets you customize your content without having any hustle.
Similar to Visme, Canva is an excellent online graphic design tool that makes designing high-quality graphics an easy task.
Canva was founded a year before Visme was launched which is 2012 by Melanie Perkins Cameron Adams and Cliff Obrecht in Australia as a startup. Canva, then quickly grew to be one of the most successful startups and popular design tools on the internet. And till now, Canva tops the position with its evolving features and capabilities.
Visme and Canva are both wonderful graphic design tools, with many similarities and differences.
Let’s see and compare them with all the features that the tools can possibly offer.
Plans and Pricing
Let’s get started with the pricing plan because that is the most important aspect of any tool. On the prices mentioned below, I just talked about the pricing structure of the tools and not what the plans have actually included in their tier. Those will be mentioned when talking about the features in detail in the following sections including the features offered on the free plan.
Canva’s pricing
Canva offers a total of three plans to choose from and in them, the two are paid. They are Canva Pro and Canva for Teams costing $12.99 and $14.99 per month respectively. And a 16% discount is applied when paid yearly.
Only a $2 difference between both the plan, but you get a lot more advantages with the team plan if you work as a team.
Ultimately, both plans are extremely affordable and contain a ton of features such as premium graphic assets, a branding kit, AI background remover, cloud storage of 1 TB, and more. I will explain each of these features later in detail.
Canva’s team plan will support up to 5 users and the extra users can be added at additional cost. However, only one person is allowed on the pro plan.
Canva offers a free trial for both of their paid plans to test out features before paying out.
There are two more plans geared towards the teachers, students, and schools which can be claimed for free as well.
Do keep in mind that the free version has enough features for anyone who just wants to get started. And if you need more of them, you can opt for the paid plans.
Visme’s pricing
Visme provides 3 paid plans to choose from namely starter, pro, and teams, and out of them, two have fixed pricing which costs $12.25, and $24.75 respectively. To opt for the team plan, the sales should be contacted and the pricing is likely negotiable but still fixed price listed on the site is far better, in my opinion.
The Visme pricing is on the higher side compared to Canva. Moreover, the features and abilities you get for the pricing are also not tolerable when compared to Canva (More on that later when we talk about the features)
Unlike Canva, Visme doesn’t offer either a free trial of their plans or free plans dedicated to education.
Templates
Now, let’s talk about the templates. Templates eliminate the hustle of starting from scratch. Most of the users (including me) don’t like to start from scratch. They (and I) prefer to get started with pre-made templates and change a few of the text to suit their needs.
In this department, Canva is a clear winner. Canva has tons of pre-made templates to choose from for any type of design and niche.
On paper, it contains over 250,000 templates available for free and categorized into 100+ categories. Moreover, with the paid plan, you get a whopping 610,000 template designs crafted by professional designers.
The Canva library is regularly been updated with new designs and templates to keep the library fresh. This is simply not the case with Visme.
On the other hand, Visme has a much smaller library of templates compared to Canva. The great thing about Visme is that it’s designed specifically for creating presentations and infographics.
Vimse only contains about 10,000 templates including those that fall under premium plans. This is extremely low compared to Canva and will drastically reduce the number of templates you could possibly use on the free plan.
Template Search, availability, and categories
Both tools have a dedicated page for templates with a search bar to find out the exact templates you wish to start your design with.
If you have logged in while visiting the Canva template page, the page will include a section catered based on your recent design. It will be more personalized to your needs. Moreover, the page will also include sections such as the popular templates used by various users, a dynamic section that changes from time to time, and a dedicated section that includes all the new templates which are being added on a regular basis.
But with Visme, the template page will be pre-defined and presented to you with a static page (Even though you have logged in to your Visme account, the template page still shows you the option to log in). The sections will only be updated if a new template is added to that specific category, which is quite rare on Visme.
The left sidebar has a quick table of content to select desired categories for your designs on both of the tools.
With Canva, you can access the templates even after you start to design something using the left sidebar on the editor. This feature is not available on Visme.
Believe me, this is a lifesaver. It is extremely handy in many situations while designing.
Editing Tools
Editing tools are the core feature of any design tool. These are the ones that actually set these tools apart from other professional software. The editing tools should be as easy as possible for users to carry on the edit through their design.
Both, Canva and Visme have a variety of editing tools to tailor your design needs. The options and tools will vary depending on the element you’re trying to edit and most of the options are quite similar to both tools.
On Visme, the tools are grouped into two separate buttons that expand on clicking, namely the “edit” and “Action” buttons. The “action” button will remain the same for almost all the elements, while the general top “Edit” option will change depending on the component you have selected.
In Canva, the editing tools are stuck like a menu bar on top which varies depending on the selected element.
In both Canva and Visme, you get the following abilities
Text formatting — change font, color, size, and style.
Image editing — crop, resize and add effects to photos including AI background remover
Backgrounds — add a background image or pattern in any color
Group – Merge multiple elements into one to make it work the same
Animate – Add animation to an element with a lot of options to tweak it
Elements – Add certain shapes, graphics, stickers, charts, frames, grids, tables, characters, and more. Each element contains certain customizable options depending on the element.
Duplicate – Duplicate either an element or an entire page.
These are the common options that both of the tool shares. Canva gives the ability to upload your own font; whereas it is completely absent on Visme.
Photo Editing
Both of the tools come with the standard editor to enhance your photos. That includes editing brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, and more. Similarly, you can apply filters to change the tone of the images on these tools. However, Canva has a lot more styles and filters compared to Visme.
You can further flip images horizontally or vertically, add frames, and crop images as per your needs.
Background remover is also available on both tools, but with the paid plans.
The tools make it fairly simple to copy the style to other images and designs. Canva goes even future with an option to share it with other people using the filter code.
Video editing
Surprisingly, both tools provide a built-in video editor to create amazing videos. The editor works as slides or scenes that can be edited separately with animations and graphic elements.
On Visme, the slides are presented on the right side of the screen with the timeline at the bottom. The timeline is divided into two sections; Basic and Advanced. The basic literally contains only the option to select the length of the slide and the advanced section contains the option to select the elements individually and adjust their location and length.
However, only the basic section is available on the free plan.
Below the timeline, you can add the audio such as music or voice-overs either from your local computer or record it straight from the Visme itself. Additionally, fade-in or fade-out effects can be added to enhance the audio.
There are a lot of characters, shapes, illustrations, and gestures available on the sidebar waiting to be included in the video.
Each one will have different settings such as the characters will have the option to select animation as well as the poses.
This makes it extremely helpful to create animated videos in minutes.
With Canva, you don’t get a separate timeline but only the slides. The slides are placed at the bottom of the screen, with options to add transitions between them. You can also easily cut the slides with a press of a button.
The elements made for photos should be used on the videos too, as Canva doesn’t have them specially made for video. This makes Canva fall behind Visme, as Visme provides you with dedicated elements to include in the videos.
At the top, you can choose the animation and the duration of the clip.
Just like the photo editor, Canva provides sufficient tools to color grade the video footage that is uploaded to the Canva library. You get all the tools such as brightness, contrast, tint, warmth, and more.
Ultimately, video background remover completely eliminates the background even on the video. However, it is only available on the paid plan.
Charts and data
These elements are important aspects when creating professional presentations. That’s why I included them as a separate section.
In Visme, there is a dedicated tab called “data” on the left sidebar to access these tools. It contains the following data elements:
- Charts and graphs
- Diagrams
- Tables
- Maps
- Data widgets
- Dynamic fields
You can either enter the data using the data entry sidebar when selecting the element, or you can import the data from 3rd party services like Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Microsoft excels, and Survey monkey.
Data import from 3rd party sources can be really helpful in sharing your data directly into your design instead of manually entering them.
The maps section allows you to include a map in your design with a lot of options to customize it like highlighting specific countries.
Canva doesn’t have a standalone menu for charts and data but includes it directly in the element tab. Canva only contains charts and tables, and that too with fewer options. On Visme, you can select tables from grouped categories with premade templates, but on Canva, you can’t do that.
The data entry process is pretty much similar to Visme. Using the sidebar, new data can be entered or can be imported from 3rd party services. One thing you should keep in mind is that Canva only allows data import from CSV files or Google sheets.
User Experience
The main motive of these tools is to make designing as easy as possible. A beginner who is pretty much never used any designing software should be able to design a graphic, and these tools actually made that possible.
Both of them have a clean UI without confusing users. In Canva, you will be granted a clean UI. The top menu bar contains 5 drop-down menus. They are as follows
- Design spotlight – Contains links to premade templates of important aspects
- Business – All the options and links to use Canva for business such as brand management, collaboration, planning & schedule, and more.
- Education – Resource for students and teachers
- Plans and pricing – Links to pricing plans
- Learn – Links to the help center and resources to learn more about canva
The right side of the menu will provide you options to access your settings, account page, or create a new design.
The left sidebar contains a few important options to access the templates and your last created projects. There is a dedicated tools section that will include links to branding, Content Planner, and an option to discover all the Canva apps.
In the middle, there is a search bar that can be used to search for all the templates available on Canva or search for the projects you have created before.
After the search, a few template categories will be presented, followed by all your recent designs.
On Visme, you have options to create a new project from the left sidebar followed by options to view all the projects. And you have access to your files, content planner, branding, and data.
It also has a dedicated option called “Data” ‘that takes you to the analytics of your presentation. It opens up a new page that contains views, unique visits, average time, and average completion of your presentation.
In the middle, there is a search bar used to search for your projects. However, with Canva, the search bar can be used to search for templates as well as projects but with Visme, only projects are searchable through the home page.
App availability
Now, let’s talk about the apps. Having an app is very convenient to design anything on the go. The app must port as many options and features as possible from the web version.
Visme and Canva have Windows and Mac app that features all the options and settings that you would normally get while using the web browser version.
Moreover, Canva has a dedicated app for Android, iOS, and Chromebook but Visme only has an iOS app.
While you can actually emulate all the features for larger devices, it’s pretty difficult to do it for smaller devices like iOS and Android. Obviously, you can’t fit all the features and functionality of the web version to a small screen, but making it as close as possible is really important and that’s what these tools try to accomplish.
With both the app, you can
- Gain access to all the templates and libraries
- Edit each of them with almost all the options that you could find on the web
- Use 3rd party integrations
- Video editing capabilities
- Gain access to brand kit
- and more
Apart from these, some features may differ depending on the tool, such as Canva includes a social media scheduler that Visme doesn’t.
Speaking of rating, the Canva app on iOS has a total of 168K ratings with 4.8 stars, and on Android, the app has a whooping 10M reviews with 4.5 stars (As of now).
On the Visme end, the iOS app has a 5-star rating but from only 5 users (As of now). That’s an extremely low user count. Moreover, when I tested it out, the app is extremely slow and I ran into a bunch of bugs and glitches. For example, it took me two tries to connect my account and the app wouldn’t even start till three tries.
Team and collaboration
If you’re running a business or an agency, collaborating with your team is really important.
Canva and Visme have similar sort of features specially built for businesses and agencies to collaborate with their teams to improve their workflow.
With these tools, multiple team members can work on the same project at the same time. Other team members can tag others to give comments and feedback on the design.
This collaboration works by inviting others to the project by admins. While inviting, various options are available for the respective member to give access to the projects.
Both tools will allow or restrict the following access to other members
- View – Can only view the project
- Comment – Can view and comment on the project
- Edit – Can view, comment, and edit the project
While editing, there is always a version history of the project, which is used to revert back to any changes if the current one has any flaws. This can be helpful if a team member made a mistake or a design that doesn’t satisfy the admin and the admin wants to go back to the previous version.
When working with a brand, maintaining brand consistency is really important. To achieve this, the admin can lock the template to maintain the same design elements across various designs for the same brand. This feature is available on Canva but not with Visme. Visme still allows brand kits but restricting them down to specific elements for use by other members is not available.
The pricing structure for Canva is straightforward for branding, you can opt-in for the team plan which costs $149 per year ($14.99 per month) and supports up to 5 members.
On the other hand, Visme doesn’t really have a fixed pricing for the teams. Contacting the support will lead to revealing the cost which is indeed not fixed. Though the price might be negotiable, it is preferable to have fixed pricing listed on the site.
Branding Capabilities
Both tools allow you to store logos, fonts, and colors as a single template with the ability to reuse it later for the same brand.
However, Visme takes it even further with the auto-creation of the brand kit. With just the URL of the brand’s site, Visme can automatically pull suitable fonts and colors. This makes your job much easier for creating brand consistency.
Similarly, you can create folders to organize your brand assets in one place and that folder can be shared with other team members.
When it comes to the availability of this brand kit, Canva clearly wins. Not by the tools incorporated into the kit but with the pricing. You can get the Canva brand kit with the pro plan which costs just $12.99 per month (or $122 per year).
On the Visme side, you will be required to pay $59 per month to gain access to the brand kit. That’s a lot compared to Canva.
If you’re someone who will be working as a team and requires collaboration, Canva will be a good-to-go option due to its value-for-money pricing.
Presentation Tools
Both Canva and Visme provide sufficient tools to present your project. But Visme takes a slight lead due to its enhanced options. With both tools, you have dedicated options to present your project via a projector or just with a display.
In Canva, you will have 4 options to present your project.
- Present full screen – Simple presenter option that turns the project into fullscreen
- Presenter view – Two windows will be opened, one is for the audience and the other is for the presenter. The audience window only consists of the slides whereas the presenter window will show the presenting time, notes, and Canva live where you can directly interact with your audience
- Present and record – This option allows you to present as well as record yourself with the cam simultaneously.
- Autoplay – Plays all the slides automatically with time intervals set by you.
All of these options support Canva Live which lets you interact with your audience. One thing you should keep in mind is that some of the options such as the present and record only work on the Google Chrome browser.
Visme kind of has similar features that let you present yourself. However, Visme has a dedicated studio that contains a lot of options to record yourself while presenting. Though Canva too has a studio for recording, I don’t really call it a studio because it actually contains no option but a record button.
With Visme studio, you got a lot of options to customize your presentation. For instance, you can change the shape & size of the camera screen, add colorful backgrounds, hide it completely, or just mute the microphone.
However, with the free plan, you can only record up to 3 minutes.
Visme should be your choice if you would like more customization on your recordings. And of course, if you’re ready to pay for the paid plan. But Canva can be a great option if you just want to record yourself and the screen for free with minimal options.
Exporting
As you would expect, both of the design tools allow exporting files in various formats. While Visme focuses mainly on presentation formats, Canva focuses on graphic formats.
In Canva, you can export by the following export formats
- JPG
- PNG
- SVG
- MP4
- GIF
You should note the SVG format that Canva support. This one will allow you to directly import your Canva-designed image to Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator with editable layers supported by these professional tools.
This is a heck of a feature if in case you appoint a professional editor or you itself edit the file with professional-grade tools.
On the other hand, Visme supports the following export formats
- JPG
- PNG
- MP4
- GIF
- PPTX
- HTML 5
- Scorm
- xAPI
If you’re a tutor, the Scorm and xAPI formats will greatly benefit you in LMS. And HTML 5 will literally convert your design into a website.
Now, let’s talk about the pricing. Out of the 9 supported formats by Visme, only 3 formats are available for free and that is JPG, Scorm, and xAPI. At least, they should have included PNG.
But with Canva, only SVG is available on the paid plan and all the other options are completely free. However, transparent background is only available on the paid plans even though the PNG is free.
Website creation
Website creation can be off-topic but yeah, Canva does offer a complete website creation while Visme doesn’t. However, exporting the project into HTML5 will turn your design into an HTML file that can be used on the server to create a website. But there are no dedicated tools and settings for website creation on Visme.
Canva offers a ton of templates to get started with web design, or you could just start from scratch. The builder is fairly simple, and don’t expect it to act like a WordPress CMS. It lets you drag elements into the design, resize it and reposition it. Moreover, you can add a menu bar on top with working links to other pages.
The site can be published on the web either from the Canva subdomain, or your own domain. And also, Canva provides options to buy domains through their portal as well.
While polishing on Canva’s domain, you will get the ability to choose the URL slug. For example, the site will have a URL of blogginer.canva.com, and you can change that “Blogginer” as per your liking.
The tool has built-in analytics to monitor the site’s traffic. Don’t expect to provide you with the data like Google Analytics, but a fairly decent amount of data to keep track of the site.
The Canva analytics will provide you the following:
- Real-time views
- Country
- Device
- Engagement
Those metrics can be sorted by 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or all time.
The Canva website is free to use and allows up to 5 websites. Moreover, only the Canva domain can be used on the free plan and 5 custom domains can be linked with the pro plan. And the analytics are also available only on the paid plan.
Files, Folders, and Storage
Both tools allow you to create folders and organize them in a centralized location for easier access. You can add files, move them, and share them with others.
Canva’s free plans offer an unlimited amount of folder creation with a storage capacity of up to 5 GB. Canva’s pro and teams plan further expands the capacity to 1 TB. On the other hand, Visme doesn’t provide options to create folders on their free plan but offers 100 MB of storage to save the asset.
The paid plan from Visme lets you create folders and unlocks more storage capacity of up to 25 GB, on the highest plan that you can possibly subscribe to. To be more clear, you get 250 MB and 3 GB of storage on the starter and pro plans, which costs $29 and $59 respectively which is extremely low compared to Canva. Even Canva’s free offers more storage than Visme’s paid plans. On the high-end plan, the capacity is up to 25 GB.
Canva is very affordable with a lot higher capacity limit than Visme.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI tools are getting better day by day with immersive responses to user queries. Canva tries hard to utilize the capabilities of AI straight into its tool set.
Canva has built-in two AI tools that make your work a lot easier. They are
- Text to Image – Convert your text into images
- Magic Write – Generates texts based on your query.
Speaking of Visme, there is no such feature as of now that could benefit users using AI.
First, let’s talk about Text to image. This tool will work on any design and template on Canva. To access it, all you need to do is to go to apps on the left sidebar, and you can find the tool.
Enter your idea in the description section and choose the style of the image you would prefer as an output. If you just want an image without adding any style, you can simply skip this section, or you can choose “surprise” which will randomly pick a style for you. Finally, click “Generate Image”.
The AI will take some time and generate the result for you. The output is pretty decent but not up to the mark as DALL-E or mid-journey. They generate images way better than Canva does. I tested out with the same query, and Canva is behind those two AI image generators.
But still, it is integrated into the overall design workspace for easier access, and it’s likely to be improved with future updates.
Now, the Magic Write. The tool brilliantly generates text based on the query you give to the tool.
For example, this is what I get when I enter the query “Give me 5 subheadings on the topic graphic designing”.
With Magic Write, you can generate new content ideas, outline your doc, and even brainstorm new ideas. But just like Text to image, this is not as great as other dedicated AI tools. However, built-in integration is a good thing.
Magic Write will only work on docs and to access it, go to docs, click the + icon, and select Magic Write from the drop-down. Then enter your query and press enter.
3rd Party Integration
Both of the tools have integration with 3rd party apps to connect or import data from them. Depending on the app, you will get various advantages that can be utilized in your design.
Visme countably has 27 3rd party apps to be integrated with your projects. However, Visme mainly focuses on data-feeding apps.
On the other hand, Canva gives the option to integrate into a lot more apps compared to Visme. They even have a search bar that finds the perfect app depending on your search term.
Help and support
Help and support must be your #1 property when choosing a tool, besides features and other stuff because when something goes wrong or need help with anything, there should be a person or resource to assist you in sorting out the problem.
Both Visme and Canva have excellent support and help centers to assist you. However, Visme takes a slight lead since the tool provides an option to contact support via chat, which is simply not available on Canva.
Apart from the ability to chat with the support, both give the option to contact them via email. But, Visme takes the lead here too because of how simple you can actually contact the support.
For example, in Canva, you would go to the help center and then select “need help”. Next, you’d scroll all the way down and select “fix a problem”, and then choose “none of those answers my question” and then select an issue from a list of premade selections. This will finally open the wizard to contact support.
Though you can completely eliminate this hustle and just head over to the support page directly with a link, Canva doesn’t provide you it anywhere on the user interface.
But with Visme, you can just enter the contact page with just two clicks. A question mark that floats all the time will help you to open either the chat or email window.
When it comes to resources, both tools have a huge number of categorized articles and blogs to help you with tutorials but Canva has a lot of 3rd party resources to teach you about the tool.
For example, there are a lot of YouTube channels that give you tips and tricks about Canva. Some channels even go further and have dedicated themselves only to Canva.
Canva vs Visme: Final Verdict
Before I get to the conclusion, let me list why one tool is better than the other.
Why Canva is better than Visme?
- Canva offers a wide range of templates and design elements which is updated on a regular basis.
- Canva’s tool set consists of more streamlined and customization options on their editing tools.
- Canva provides many options and features on the free version compared to Visme. The same thing goes for the paid plan as well. You get a lot more compared to Visme in terms of features and ability, and even the storage space is 5 GB compared to Visme’s 100 MB on the free plan.
- Canva is more affordable compared to Visme. Even the top-most plan on Canva is decently priced.
- Canva has built-in AI apps such as Text to image and Magic write to boost your design capabilities.
- Canva offers apps for almost all platforms, while Visme only has support for iOS, Windows, and Mac.
- Canva has a wider audience and larger community of users, which means more resources and inspiration for design ideas.
- Canva has a wider range of export options targeting graphics, including SVG. On the other hand, Visme only focuses on presentations and includes export abilities such as PPTX.
- All the exports on Canva are free from the watermark, whereas Visme only provides watermark-free exports on its paid plan.
- Canva has a lot of 3rd party app integration compared to Visme.
Why Visme is better than Canva?
- Visme focuses on design presentations and infographics with more detailed analytics and tracking capabilities.
- Visme contains more interactive graphics and advanced animations in its design tools.
- Visme focuses on design presentation, so the tool offers a large variety of presentation templates and layouts.
- Since Visme primarily targets infographics and presentations, the tool has good integrations with external data sources such as Google Analytics.
- Visme has a wider range of export options that target presentations such as PPTX.
- The video editor on Visme is far superior to Canva in terms of graphic elements because the tool has dedicated elements specially made for videos such as characters with different animations.
While both these tools have their pros and cons, it is likely that Canva will be the more popular option for a variety of reasons like the features and abilities that the tool could offer, the variety of resources available online to master the tool, and much more.
However, Visme can be used to create professional-looking infographics with advanced data acquisition and 3D animations. And video editing elements on Visme are better than Canva.
And well, don’t forget the app. Canva has an app for all the platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Chromebook whereas the Visme app is only available on Windows, Mac, and iOS.
