There are now multiple free and premium options for designing graphics with ease. We’ve covered a few of them in the past, including VistaCreate (previously called Crello) and Canva when discussing how to set up a graphic design side hustle business. The graphic design space is competitive and ever-evolving.
Today, we'll look at two of the most popular graphic design tools: Canva and VistaCreate. Both platforms have added powerful new features, with Canva's 2024 update incorporating AI-powered tools such as Magic Studio and Visual Suite, making it easier than ever to create professional-quality graphics in minutes. While the pricing has changed, these tools remain extremely competitive, providing features previously only found in high-end software. Even in 2024, you don't have to spend a fortune to create unique designs.
While industry heavyweights like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator still dominate the professional design space, tools like Canva and VistaCreate have shaped the landscape by offering affordable, AI-powered design features that are accessible to non-designers. Canva’s AI Magic Eraser and Magic Edit improve the creation process, making complex edits as simple as a few clicks, ensuring value for both beginners and pros alike. Meanwhile, VistaCreate continues to offer exceptional stock image access and customization options at a lower price point, appealing to budget-conscious users.
These tools are designed for bloggers, small business owners, and solopreneurs. They’re easy to use and affordable. The recent price increase by Canva, driven by the integration of AI features, might appeal to users who want more advanced automation in their design workflows. But if you don’t need all those fancy features, VistaCreate is still a more affordable option with excellent features and prices, especially for those on a tight budget.
| Canva | Crello / VistaCreate | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ✅ | |
| Features | ✅ | |
| Ease of Use | ✅ | |
| Integrations | ✅ | |
| Free plan features | ✅ | |
| Infographics | ✅ | |
| Value | ✅ | |
| Canva | VistaCreate |
Canva's 2024 Price Update: Impact on Solopreneurs
Canva has implemented significant pricing changes in 2024, primarily due to the introduction of advanced AI-powered features. Here's what solopreneurs need to know:
- AI Integration: Canva has added new tools like Magic Studio and Visual Suite, enhancing functionality but driving up costs.
- Teams Pricing Increase: The Canva Teams subscription has increased from $120/year to $500/year. A temporary first-year discount brings it to $300, but this still represents a substantial rise.
- Individual Plans Unchanged: Canva Pro for individuals remains at $12.99/month or $119.99/year.
- Market Positioning: This pricing shift aligns Canva more closely with premium tools like Adobe, which may not suit solopreneur budgets.
- Alternatives Available: For those who don't require advanced AI features, alternatives like VistaCreate offer competitive pricing and robust free options.
Key Consideration: Solopreneurs should evaluate whether Canva's new features justify the increased cost. If not, consider maintaining the free plan or exploring more cost-effective alternatives like VistaCreate.
Background Info (So you know who you're dealing with)
Canva is an Australian company founded over a decade ago by Melanie Perkins and her business partners. As of 2024, Canva has approximately 185 million monthly active users. And it facilitates the creation of 200 designs every second. Canva employs around 4,500 staff members and has a global presence in multiple countries. The company has secured over $500 million in funding from notable investors like Blackbird Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
VistaCreate claims a user base of approximately 15 million users. The platform has seen over 100 million designs created since its inception. Operated by a team of roughly 200 employees, VistaCreate benefits from the backing of VistaPrint, though specific investment figures are not avaolable to the public. VistaPrint's established printing services and resources support VistaCreate's operations and development.
Both tools offer powerful design tool experiences to their users, with clean, easy-to-use interfaces, access to millions of free photos and design elements to use in their projects, and both free and paid plans. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Pricing
Canva and VistaCreate both offer generous free accounts, but they also offer paid memberships with access to different features, including features for teams and social accounts. Here's more information about their pricing models.
With its recent updates, Canva has raised its Teams subscription price from $120 to $500 per year, although a temporary discount offers the first year at $300. Individual plans remain at $12.99/month or $119.99/year, but the value added by AI tools like Magic Studio might justify the increase for heavy users.
Meanwhile, VistaCreate continues to offer excellent value at a lower price point. The Pro Plan costs just $9.99 per month, making it a cost-effective choice for solopreneurs who don’t require Canva’s AI tools but still want access to a robust design platform.
Features on Free Plans
VistaCreate and Canva are both known for excellent features and user-friendly environments. The features included in the free accounts were inconceivable only a few years ago.
Let’s see how they compare.
VistaCreate
VistaCreate offers users of their free plan access to over 180 million stock media files on Depositphotos and 650,000 premium stock images on Lightfield Productions, along with over 32,000 full HD clips and animations.
Users of the free version have five design downloads monthly. They can also access 30,000 VistaCreate customizable templates, both static and animated. For me, VistaCreate offers more imaginative and better-designed templates than Canva. New beautiful designs arrive every week. It seems more like a case of quality over quantity.
Certain users also have access to hundreds of unique fonts in VistaCreate's library. These fonts include both standard and decorative options.
Design on desktop or the user-friendly mobile app.
Canva
Canva offers 250,000 customizable templates for free users. It also presents more than 100 design types, including letters, resumes, presentation templates, websites, and social platform posts.
Canva users on the free plan have access to hundreds of unique fonts in Canva’s font library.
Features on Paid Plans
Canva and VistaCreate both offer users an abundance of features on their free plans, but they have even more for their paid, pro members to use.
VistaCreate Pro users can download an unlimited number of designs. VistaCreate Pro gives paid account users access to more than 30,000 graphic design template choices and over 180 million stock photos and videos from Depositphotos, a royalty-free content marketplace.
Further, users can access more detailed image background removal tools — even the trickiest photos have more creative edits. VistaCreate Pro users can unlock their creativity with unlimited file uploads and more than 32,000 video clips and animations in full HD.
The pro version makes it easy to collaborate. You can invite up to 10 team members at once to collaborate on projects in the paid version. As a paid member, you'll get access to priority tech help for any issues that arise.
One important point is that VisaCreate gives you unlimited storage so you will never come up against a hard limit for saving your projects. Canva offers 1TB, which sounds like a lot, but can be restrictive for some people.
Canva Pro users have access to more than 420,000 graphic design templates at no extra cost. They can access over 75 million stock photos, videos, audio, and graphics to include in their designs.
Canva Pro has one-click background removal, while VistaCreate offers background removal for more complicated pictures, Canva lets you do this with one click.
Canva Pro is a good choice for social media managers and teams or avid social media users. The paid service allows you to schedule posts that you've created in Canva to seven different platforms. You can save your designs with 1TB of cloud storage.
Integrations
Integrations are a powerful tool for social media professionals and marketers to pull in content from outside sources, especially media sources, and upload their designs to new places like social media platforms and forms for customers.
This is one area where Canva is light-years ahead of VistaCreate, offering integrations with Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google Drive, Google Maps, Giphy, Typeform, and Flickr, among other services.
These integrations allow users to bring content from any of those services directly to Canva to create new designs or import their designs into those services.
For example, you can post your Canva design to your Instagram feed or use your project to make a new form design in Typeform.
Ease of Use
Overall, the two products have similar user interfaces and experiences. They both have a central design space with popouts on the left side where designers can pick different fonts, photos, and objects to use in their creations.
Canva's designers created the program with ease of use in mind. When founder and CEO Melanie Perkins noticed that people were having trouble using tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, she got the idea to create Canva, which would make it easy for anyone to design.
Overall, the services are primarily point-and-click, making it very easy to create your own designs. They also make extensive use of clickable menus, dropdowns, and drag and drop. Users from complete beginners all the way to design professionals will have no trouble.
Both interfaces look almost the same, with tabs for elements, text, background, templates, and uploads. VistaCreate offers additional animation and video tabs. Both interfaces are easy to navigate and intuitive. The range of free stock photos and stock videos is extensive. Canva's videos are sorted into categories. VistaCreate's videos are in two buckets: Videos and Backgrounds. The background video elements are great quality and perfect for creating ads and marketing materials.
It's easy to search for images, select them, and add them to a design while working with all the other interface features. You can also start with a template in either program and make some changes to customize them or start from scratch with your design. If you want more than free photos, you'll need a pro plan subscription but it's still cheaper than paying for a subscription to a service like Envato Elements (great service, by the way, but a bit more expensive)
Both tools offer an easy way to invite and on-board team members (Pro plans only)
Customer Support
With such a huge user base, it's no surprise that neither product offers chat-based customer support. Certainly, there's no way to call a helpdesk. Bith Canva and VistaCreate rely on an intuitive user interface and extensive help files to remove friction and guide people to the answers to their questions.
The customer support team for both products is excellent and generally sorts out any problems. I've found VistaCreate to offer a much faster turnaround though. If you need fast answers to your questions or you're a beginner designer, VistaCreate might suit you better.
Main Differences
The two services have a few main differences, including third-party integrations, stock media access, social network interaction, and team features. These distinctions may only make a difference depending on the designs you want to make and how you want to collaborate.
VistaCreate wins out in its offering of stock media access, with millions of files to use thanks to Depositphotos and Lightfield Productions. These photos and other file formats are equally available to use on both free and paid accounts and are royalty-free.
Canva, however, has better features for teams with its ability to schedule posting and a variety of team collaboration tools. Canva is geared more towards people looking to work collaboratively, based on both its pricing model and team collaboration tools.
In terms of infographic creation, VistaCreate offers a better experience. In fact, Canva's infographic templates are far less impressive than VistaCreate's templates.
Outstanding Features
Canva has a few different outstanding features. It allows users to schedule Canva-created posts to seven social media platforms. It also offers dozens of third-party integrations, allowing users to import media directly to Canva or export their designs to other apps.
Canva offers a brand kit for teams and companies to create distinctive and unique voices for their public images and product lineups.
You and your team can store brand colors to easily make designs that fit your aesthetic and keep your logo on hand to add to your projects. You can set specific fonts to stay within your brand guidelines easily, upload your own custom fonts, and access brand templates to get inspiration.
Both VistaCreate and Canva offers extensive online resources for designers — both those looking to get started with graphic design projects and professionals looking to up their skills. These services have tutorials on how to use their products, design tips, and project ideas.
Both platforms offer easy graphic animation tools and editing effects to create overlays or animated social media images. Save these files as gifs or video files.
Both VistaCreate and Canva feature background removal tools. You can easily remove any photo's background — but this feature is only available for Pro users on both services.
Paid memberships allow users to remove backgrounds with one click. These features use machine learning and neural networks that detect where the image ends and the surroundings begin, allowing it to cut out the unwanted sections in one easy step.
Finally, both services also offer free, dedicated logo-making tools that allow you to pick fonts, colors, design objects, and the overall design for a fresh logo in minutes — or however long you'd like to spend designing with a variety of features.
AI Features in 2024
Canva’s AI-Powered Updates
In 2024, Canva introduced several AI-powered tools aimed at boosting productivity and efficiency for its users. These include:
• Magic Studio: Automates the creation of social posts, presentations, and videos, reducing the time between ideation and execution.
• Magic Eraser & Edit: These AI tools allow users to remove or edit elements from images effortlessly, offering professional-grade design capabilities.
• Visual Suite: A suite of tools designed for businesses to produce AI-driven content across various formats, enhancing marketing, sales, and design tasks.
However, with these new features comes a notable price increase, especially for team subscriptions. Solopreneurs should weigh the benefits of these features against the cost.
Best Value for Solopreneurs
For solopreneurs, Canva’s pricing shift may not be ideal if you’re primarily creating basic graphics without needing advanced AI features. However, for those leveraging multiple designs across different formats or needing collaboration tools, the investment might be worth it. VistaCreate remains a solid choice for users who want powerful features without the steep price tag.
These updates make the blog more current and informative, reflecting the latest developments in Canva and VistaCreate’s offerings, particularly with respect to AI and pricing changes.
Alternatives
- Figma is a robust, pro-level, cloud-based design tool. It's a solid Canva alternative for those who need more control, real real-time collaboration features, an intuitive interface, and versatile design functionalities. Figma caters to various design needs and fosters efficient workflows for freelancers.
- Adobe Express is backed by the huge knowledge and resources of the Adobe company and the smart people behond some of the most iconic graphic design software ever created. Adobe Express is an excellent way to get started with graphic design, whether it’s your first time or you’re an experienced designer looking to explore new software. It’s quite easy to use, especially if you're used to Canva or a similar tool. It offers a wide range of features for most skill levels. Use its font libraries from more than 20,000 licensed fonts—and start with formatted templates featuring popular styles like curved type and grid lines.
- Visme‘s intuitive interface and unique features have made me a huge fan. With the ability to directly post to social media from the social media Content Planner, it's a well-rounded and versatile addition to a content marketing toolkit. The brand assets area in Visme is much more developed than those in Canva and VistaCreate. In addition, Visme offers better infographics and charts/graphs features. There's a free plan that offers most of the paid plan templates and you get 100MB of storage. Try Visme's free plan.
| Feature | Canva | VistaCreate |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan? | yes | yes |
| Pricing per month in USD | 12.99 | 9.99 |
| Yearly pricing in USD | 119.99 | 95.88 |
| Upload custom fonts in free version | no | yes |
| Image resizing in free version | no | yes |
| Customer support | ||
| Resizing in free version | no | yes |
| Saving transparent background in free version | no | yes |
| Remove backgrounds | yes | yes |
| Easy access to support | no | yes |
| Folders in Uploads | no | yes |
| Multiple pages per design | yes | yes |
| Number of free stock images in Pro Plan | 75,000,000 | 650,000 |
| Number of free templates in Pro Plan | 420,000 | 30,000 |
| Cloud Storage in GB | 1TB | Unlimited |
| Downloads per month (free plan) | Unlimited | 5 |
| Unlimited Downloads (Pro) | yes | yes |
| Schedule to social media platforms | yes (7 platforms) | yes (1 platform) |
| Send to Facebook Ads Manager | no | yes |
| Share designs as links or embeds | yes | yes |
| Save to Google Drive | yes | no |
| Save to Dropbox | yes | no |
| Save to Microsoft OneDrive | yes | no |
| Share to Facebook Groups | yes | no |
| Text shadows & effects | yes | no |
| Infographics | yes | yes |
| Mobile App | yes | yes |
| Brand Kit | yes | yes |
| Team access | yes | yes |
| Download formats | 7 | 7 |
| Presentation Mode | yes | yes |
| record while talking over presentation | yes | no |
Conclusion
I used to dislike Canva. It felt clunky and it was easy to spot the designs anywhere on the web or in social media posts. But the company has taken the platform from a basic online graphic editing platform to a design powerhouse. It’s fast, easy to use, and offers endless possibilities for creativity.
But there are alternatives and these tools are still very popular for many reasons. VistaCreate might be right for you if you have a lower budget and want better access to stock media. Adobe Express is a good choice if you want a free option backed by Adobe's know-how and design software skills.
If you’re a social media professional or marketer, you’ll likely be more interested in Canva’s integration with social platforms, team collaboration, and large storage availability. Being a graphic designer doesn't mean spending a lot of money on software. It's easy to create visual content these days. Once you get comfortable with your tool of choice, you can create stunning designs in minutes.
Note that both of the main tools in this comparison have a weakness when it comes to manipulating and processing photos. If you're interested in editing photos and creating beautiful images from your photography, neither tool is suitable. VistaCreate and Canva do not possess great tools for editing digital photography. I recommend Photoshop or Luminar Neo for these kinds of specialized tasks.
