Canva has become a must-have for a large majority of online business owners. In fact, paying for Canva Pro has become pretty commonplace. But is it necessary? Let’s chat about it!
Episode Highlights:
The Benefits of Canva Pro
What I Don’t Love About Canva Pro
When Free Canva Might Be Enough
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Transcripts
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[00:00:37] If you're new to the podcast, this is when we take a closer look at popular budget line items in the online marketing space, you know the things that everyone seems to be spending money on. And we take a closer look at the benefits and drawbacks of these expenses so that you can decide if they're worth it or if your marketing dollars are better spent elsewhere.
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[00:01:18] So that's why I thought I would just take a slightly different approach with this episode because I know you either use and are familiar with Canva or you know that you can easily just go online and look at the breakdown of the free versus paid features for Canva. So rather than just list all of the different features, I thought for this episode, I would share the things that I use the most in Canva Pro and then also talk about the things that I don't use and that I don't feel are necessary, at least in my business, because I thought you might be interested in hearing why
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[00:02:21] So there are a lot of things that I love about Canva. But I did wanna just keep this list pretty short and I'm going to share my most favorite features of Canva Pro that I use all the time. And so first, I cannot live without the brand kit that is only available in Canva Pro. I have a feeling that was strategic on their part. Because I have multiple clients and then I also have multiple websites of my own.
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[00:03:17] and I really do love the way that Canva does this for their users. The second feature of Canva Pro that I use all of the time is the background remover. It's so helpful to be able to quickly remove the background from images in order to stack different elements in a design. I know that there are a lot of different free tools online that you can use to remove backgrounds from your images.
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[00:04:15] Again, I could probably download them and then take them over to a background remover tool online. But again, I work in bulk and I want to save time whenever I can. But honestly, that's pretty much it. I was surprised when I was getting ready for this episode and I realized how many features are available in Free Canva that I thought were pro features. But like I mentioned, the time I save with the few pro features that I do use is a hundred percent worth it to me in this season of my business.
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[00:05:07] What a great feature. And if you're not familiar with it, basically let's say you created an Instagram post and then you can resize it to another ratio, like for a Facebook post. And you don't have to start from scratch.
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[00:05:56] If that is a feature that you use all the time, then it could be worth it. But for me. Not really worth it. So another thing that people seem to enjoy about the pro version is that they have a higher usage limit for the AI tools. And I actually thought initially that AI tools were reserved just for Canva
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[00:06:50] You know, is it a main feature or just a little bit of an accent? What's the line there? Can you use pro elements in your business logo? I'm grateful though that they seem to realize that it's been a little bit fuzzy for users and they have taken some strides to make the terms of use just a little bit easier to understand.
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[00:07:36] graphic, , I'm assuming, because they don't want you to take those graphics and use them elsewhere. But anyway, that's just one example of how I think they're trying to make their terms of use a little bit more clear and I am grateful for that, but it's still, I don't know, I always feel like I'm doing things wrong when I use things from Canva.
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[00:08:20] so I prefer to have like the background remover tool right there in Canva. Second, if you're not trying to juggle a bunch of different brand kits you can probably survive without storing your branding information within Canva. What I like to do, even with Canva Pro, is I like to create one page at the beginning of like my pin designs with just the branding elements because the watermarks are right there at the size I want them, and I can just copy them
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[00:09:23] And then finally, if you're just getting started with Canva, you've never used it before, you're learning the ropes, I would suggest skipping Pro. Once you've learned kind of the ins and outs of Canva and you discover what features you're truly missing out on, you can always upgrade. But who knows? You might discover that you don't need those features all that much anyway.
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[00:10:10] So in preparation for this episode, I signed up for Canva with a different email and then I declined the free preview of Pro just so that I could get a feel for what you can do with just the regular Canva account these days. And I was really pleasantly surprised. It's a lot. And another thing that I noticed is that
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[00:10:50] Like the only things that were available were the free elements. And you can correct me if I'm wrong but I think that's a really positive change for Canva users that just wanna use the regular version. All I know is that after doing this little experiment for myself, if my client work situation ever changes, or I need to strip down my business expenses to the absolute essentials, I'm not so sure that Canva Pro would make the cut.
