Complete Canva Review - What Works and What Doesn't?

What is Canva?

Canva is a popular online graphic design platform that lets you create high-quality visuals easily. It provides an extensive range of ready-made templates for social media, posters, presentations, and marketing materials. Its simple drag-and-drop interface makes it accessible to beginners with no prior design experience. The platform also offers team collaboration features, making it suitable for businesses and educators. Canva is available on both mobile and the web, making design easier for personal, academic, and professional use.

Key features of Canva

• Drag-and-Drop Editor: Canva's user-friendly drag-and-drop interface lets users place, move, and resize elements without prior design knowledge, making design creation quick and effortless.
• Ready-Made Templates: The platform offers thousands of professionally designed templates for various projects, so you don't have to start from scratch.
• Canva Elements and Assets: It includes millions of photos, illustrations, icons, and stickers that you can add to designs, giving you greater creative flexibility.
• Text, Fonts, and Typography: Canva provides an extensive library of fonts and text styles, with adjustable size, color, spacing, and effects, enabling users to create attractive typography for different projects.
• Photo and Video Editing Tools: You can access built-in tools for cropping, resizing, applying filters, adding animations, and trimming videos, all within Canva.

Canva's AI-powered tools

• Magic Eraser: The Magic Eraser tool lets you quickly remove unwanted objects or backgrounds from photos with a single click, saving plenty of time on manual editing.
• Magic Resize: Automatically resize the design to fit various formats, such as Instagram posts, stories, flyers, or banners, without losing any quality.
• Magic Morph: This tool enables you to create smooth transitions and animations between slides or design elements, adding professional motion effects with ease.
• Magic Grab: Extract specific objects or elements from an image, so you can reuse them in other designs without any manual cropping.
• Magic Expand: Seamlessly extend your images or designs by generating additional backgrounds to fit larger layouts.
• Magic Animate: This tool lets you add dynamic animations to text, graphics, or entire slides, making the design more interactive and eye-catching.
• Magic Write: This AI-powered text generator enables you to create copy, captions, and written content directly within your design project.
• Magic Media: This tool lets you generate relevant images, videos, and audio content with AI, enriching designs without external resources.
• Magic Charts: Automatically create attractive charts and graphs from your data, making complex information quite easy to understand.
• Highlights: The Highlights feature summarizes long designs or documents, extracting key points to save time and improve content clarity.

Who is Canva best for?

Canva is ideal for students creating presentations and projects, as well as for teachers designing classroom materials. Marketers and small business owners can instantly create branded graphics and social media content. Freelancers and creators benefit from its various templates and AI tools for professional-grade designs. Plus, non-profit organizations can also benefit from Canva to create attractive visuals without any design skills.

Canva pros and cons

Canva has established itself as a versatile design tool for both novice and experienced users, streamlining the creation of graphics, social media content, and more. To assist in evaluating its suitability for your workflow, we’ve compiled a concise analysis of its standout strengths and notable limitations. The table below details these aspects for easy reference.

This Canva AI review shows that although it is a great tool for AI designing, it has certain limitations, as mentioned in the cons. So, if you are seeking an AI-powered tool with deeper customization, Dreamina is the best choice, which is discussed in detail below.

Dreamina - The best alternative to Canva for AI design

Dreamina is a powerful AI-powered image editor that lets you create attractive images and videos with ease. It is also an excellent tool for AI design, offering features like AI Image, which lets you generate attractive photos from text prompts and reference images. It is powered by AI models, such as Image 5.0 by Seedream 5.0. You can further enhance the photo with a variety of AI-powered features, such as Inpaint, Expand, Remove, Retouch, and Upscale. So, get Dreamina today and bring your design ideas to life effortlessly.

How to use Dreamina for AI design

step 1
1. Access the "AI Image" feature

To begin, open Dreamina's official website and click on the "AI Image" feature present on the homepage. Next, click the "Upload" option and select a photo from your device to edit.

step 2
1. Generate the AI Image

Next, select the AI model, Image 5.0 Preview (by Seedream 5.0), and choose the appropriate resolution and size. After that, give clear instructions for creating the AI design in the provided dialogue box. Click the "Enter" button to create the image.

step 3
1. Edit the AI-generated (optional)

Once the image has been generated, you can edit or regenerate the prompt as you like. You can further enhance the photo with a variety of AI features, such as Inpaint, Expand, Retouch, and Upscale.

step 4
1. Download the AI-generated design

Once satisfied with the AI-generated design, click the "Download" option in the top-right corner to save it to your device.

List of Dreamina's AI tools

• Remove

Dreamina's "Remove" feature enables you to remove unwanted elements or objects from your designs. The AI naturally cleans the background, resulting in a natural appearance without leaving any traces. This is necessary for cleaning up diverse design visuals.

• Expand

The "Expand" feature lets you enlarge the images or designs beyond their original boundaries. The AI intelligently adds additional background content that blends seamlessly, making it perfect for extending promotional visuals or product photos.

• Retouch

Dreamina's "Retouch" feature improves the photos by correcting imperfections, adjusting colors, and refining textures. In this way, your product photos or design elements look polished and professional, with minimal effort.

• Inpaint

The "Inpaint" feature lets you fill in the missing areas or repair the damaged sections of a photo. The AI creates realistic content that matches the surrounding area, making it ideal for restoring visuals or completing creative designs.

Conclusion

In summary, this Canva review shows that Canva is a versatile, feature-rich platform, offering plans from Free to Pro and Teams. Its key features, such as a drag-and-drop editor, ready-made templates, and AI-powered tools, like Magic Eraser, Magic Write, and Magic Size, make design creation effortless for students, teachers, marketers, and small businesses. However, it has certain limitations, such as pricing for certain AI features and restrictions on text-to-image and text-to-video features. So, if you are looking for deeper customization, Dreamina is the best choice. Try Dreamina now and start creating your next AI-powered design.

FAQs

Is Canva worth it?

Canva is worth it for users looking for an intuitive design platform with a variety of templates and AI-powered tools. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and ready-made assets save plenty of time for beginners and professionals alike. However, certain AI-powered features require a subscription and have limitations, like no reference images for AI generation. For users seeking more advanced AI-powered features for free, Dreamina is the better choice.

What common complaints appear in Canva reviews in Reddit threads?

In Canva reviews, many Reddit users mention that, although Canva is intuitive, certain advanced features are locked behind the Pro or Teams subscription. Some reviewers have also stated that complex designs feel limited compared to professional software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. Occasional glitches and slow loading times are also highlighted. For advanced AI-powered tools with fewer restrictions, Dreamina is the best choice, which offers the "AI Image" feature, powered by Image 5.0 by Seedream 5.0, to design high-quality photos.

Why is Canva good for students with no design experience?

Canva offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that lets students create attractive posters, presentations, and social media content without any previous design experience. Its built-in assets and ready-made templates make it effortless to produce appealing work with minimal effort. Plus, students can also collaborate with other students and teachers and share their designs using team collaboration features.

Learn more details of Canva and dreamina for AI design:

Guide to Canva AI Generator

Guide to Canvas AI Image Generator

Understand AI Image Models