Designbold vs. Canva Review: Which Online Design Software Is Best?

People respond better to visual information than to written content.

Companies, startups, bloggers, SMEs and SMBs, and students need to have a tool available that can create the visual impact necessary to reach their audience.

For those of us who don’t have professional design software or a graphic designer to rely upon, designbold and Canva are two of the best tools available to quickly and easily mock-up designs for virtually anything that comes to mind.

Both platforms are aimed at helping you to create graphic content to be used in your work, school projects, or for personal purposes online and with complete freedom of choice.

The software of both designbold and Canva allows for intuitive use and makes use of similar templates, formats, tools, and features.

How do they compare to each other?

Let’s look at each of these platforms individually.

When I first started, Canva was what was recommended to me as the holy grail of easy to use design options, and I must confess that I haven’t even considered Photoshop since.

The speed and convenience of Canva surpassed anything that I’ve known of previously, and I very quickly fell in love with the way it enabled me to achieve professional results.

The multitude of templates and the simplicity of its features make it incredibly easy to create eye-catching artwork even if you have no design experience or technical know-how. 

The drag-and-drop interface of Canva gives you access to hundreds of templates and design layouts, which can be used to create any number of distinct presentations, social media graphics, posters, flyers, invitations, and more. 

The templates can be customized to suit your every need with the flexibility and adaptability being virtually limitless.

This allows you to be as creative as you wish to be in getting those flyers, pamphlets, and email invitations done.

With Canva, you can create your logos and banners as well as presenting your marketing team with visually appealing charts, diagrams, and full-on media-kits.

Canva provides you with a stock library that gives you access to over a million photographs, images, icons, and shapes that you can incorporate in your design. Uploading your pictures is a simple matter and is the best way of ensuring that your plan is original and that it stands out from the rest.

The photo editing suite of Canva allows you to make use of preset photo filters and advanced editing tools with which you can remove the background, slice the image or manipulate it in any number of different ways to achieve your winning graphic vision.

As one would expect, Canva allows you to choose from a substantial selection of different fonts to help you get the most out of your design, and there are numerous combination suggestions available to you for inspiration.

Collaboration

With Canva, you can share your design with others online and work on it collaboratively.

This makes it easy to work on team projects, and it is also an excellent way for you to show your design to colleagues and get input and comments on your work while you are still in the creative process.

There is also no risk of losing your work, since Canva saves all your work to the cloud, making it possible for you to return to your action whenever you want and edit your designs as you please.

These are all great features and excellent reasons why Canva is such a popular choice when it comes to design platforms.

As I’ve said at the beginning, I have been using Canva myself for, some time and I have very little to complain about it in general, but there are a few things that I feel that Canva should look at if they want to remain the top performer in their field.

I will be addressing these shortly, but let’s first take a closer look at designbold.

Designbold is, in many ways, very similar to Canva.

They are, after all, both online design platforms, but anyone who is used to Canva will instantly recognize and be familiar with the workspace on designbold.

But designbold is by no means a mere imitation of Canva. For starters, Designbold boasts a greater variety of templates than Canva, giving it an edge right from the starting blocks.

Models are a crucial selling point when it comes to features in the ready to use design market. With the sheer number of available and adaptable templates on offer, designbold does seem to score over Canva.

What’s more, is that these templates seem to be more up to date.

There are so many people making use of the Canva templates, that one becomes weary of seeing the same old models being used over and over again all over the internet and social media.

Just like the templates on Canva, the ones on designbold are also editable, and you can customize them to your heart’s content.

Designbold is also dedicated to keeping on uploading new templates and enlarging their stock with new and fresh ideas making it clear that they are a hungry company.

In the world of graphic design, there is no more beautiful thing than being hungry.

For my purposes, I like to upload my images, but for most people, this is not always an option or a possibility.

People simply don’t have the time or the means to do so, and therefore having access to a vast stock library is an essential part of the features when choosing a design platform.

Here too, designbold seems to trump Canva by offering its users more choice and a much higher selection of stock photos.

The fact is that the designbold has more photographs to make a selection from, and it’s premium images come at a lower price.

As with Canva, there are numerous types of fonts to choose from, and you can upload your own so that creating your identity for your brand or niche is a breeze.

Designbold has a higher number of custom fonts to choose from, proving that to think of designbold as a lesser competitor to Canva is a big mistake. 

Sharing your work online and collaborating with others in the design process is even more comfortable with the Designbold’s team function.

Here you can have unlimited teams working together to create visual content for your business or social needs.

As a team administrator, you have full control over all the design work, photos, fonts, and vectors, enabling you to create a consistent look for your brand or niche.

As with Canva, designbold also gives you free cloud storage, but with designbold, your cloud storage is limitless, and you can have as much work stored away as you like without you ever running out of space.

Apples to apples

As both of these two design platforms offer a free to use package, it is worth a comparison.

Understandably a lot of features on both Canva and designbold can only be accessed through a paid subscription.

They both, however, give free access to some of the more popular features and design tools, and even if it is to a lesser extent, you can still make use of both these platforms to create eye-catching designs.

It would probably be easier to list the features that are not available to free users, but for the sake of thoroughness, I’ll persevere.

Canva has three packages on offer- Free, Pro and Enterprise, and for now, I’d like to only look at what you can get with the free option.

You get more than 8000 templates from which you can choose to base your design on, and all the models can be edited to your requirements.

There are hundred-plus design types for you to make use of; these include social media posts, invitations, letters, presentations, posters, flyers, animated social media, cards, book covers, and more. You won’t find it lacking in design types that it have on offer.

With the free option, you also have access to Canva’s stock photo library, where you can choose from all of the free photos or buy from the premium selection at a nominal fee.

You are also able to upload your images or use photographs from Unsplash, pixabay, pexels, Shutterstock, or any of the other stock photo libraries. 

The photo editing tools allow you to personalize your images in a multitude of ways. You can quickly straighten and crop your photos to your design, and you can add text and speech bubbles to your pictures. There is a transparency tool that comes in handy should you wish to give your images a gentle faded or softer feel. Alternatively, you can enhance your photographs by adjusting the saturation or contrast and make them more crisp to let them stand out more.

Canva’s photo editing tools include a blur slider that can give your photos a slightly soft-focus appearance, or you can slide it in the opposite direction to sharpen the image.

To achieve a nostalgic appearance, there are several filters you can use together with the greyscale vignette tool.

You also have access to various design grids to choose from, which you can use to divide your page in half, quarters, or much more complex arrangements.

You can then simply drag and drop your pictures into your design, and the cropping is taken care of automatically.

This is very handy for creating photo collages for catalogs, blog posts, social media, etc.

Canva also has loads of free icons available to you.

With these instantly recognizable icons, vector images, and graphics at your disposal, it is easy to create visually strong designs that will make your product or niche stand out and be noticed.

There are picture frames that you can incorporate to your design and then simply drag your own chosen photos to your design page as you like it, a great social media tool.

Use this along with the digital stickers from the image library to play full fun interactions.

If you feel up to it, Canva can help you to create your website layout with its web wireframe.

From the image library, you can choose from its free widgets, sidebars, and interface elements, all ready for you to drag into place and use.

There are also several textured backgrounds available to the free user that could give your design a nice edge, and it’s easy to incorporate these design elements into your visual exploration.

With the free option on Canva, you can create designs with your custom dimensions as well as make use of standard sizes, for example, social media posts.

• You can export your designs as PDF, JPG, or PNG files.
• There is a built-in social sharing and presentation mode.

• You can collaborate with team sharing.
• Through a design link, you can share or give edit access to your design to people outside your team.
• You can select the people of your team to whom you give edit access and who can share your view.
• There is built-in commenting available to you and the people you share your design with.
• You have free 1GB Cloud storage available.
• You have two-factor authentication.
• Transparent backgrounds.

Designbold offer you two packages, Free and Pro

With designbold, you get access to over 10 000 templates and free layouts, which is more than that of Canva.

These layouts are just as easy to manipulate as the ones that you get from Canva, so your design capability is already somewhat improved with designbold.

The same design types are also available on designbold so that you never need to stand back when working on any graphic content with designbold.

You can just as readily create social media posts, invitations, letters, presentations, posters, flyers, etc. with designbold.

I have already mentioned that designbold boasts a much bigger image library than Canva.

With over 300 000 free stock photos and a pool of about 40 million premium images at a very competitive rate, you will be hard-pressed to find a better option elsewhere.

As with Canva, you can, of course, upload images and photographs of your own to use for your designs.

The same kind of photo editing is also available on designbold, so you have access to preset filters and advanced professional editing tools to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.

To manipulate any image to your specifications.

In short, you will be able to duplicate any photo edit from Canva with designbold.

Designbold gives you access to all the fantastic design resources that Canva has to offer, the same kinds of fonts, brilliant layouts, easy to use design tools, backgrounds, textures, icons, and vector images, etc.

So, where is the big difference that makes the one design platform stand out above its competition?

Is the fact that designbold allows you access to a more significant image library and offers you more templates than Canva enough to swing the vote?

I’ll get to that in a moment, let’s see what more designbold has to offer.

• Designbold also supports PNG, JPG, and PDF formats.
• It also has team functionality.
• You can also share your designs for viewing and editing purposes.
• You can upload images up to 2MB.
• You can upload vector images up to 2MB.
• You can create up to 5 design folders
• You can upload five additional fonts.
• Designbold gives you 2MB free Cloud storage.
• Transparent backgrounds.

So far, it does seem that designbold is the better of the two design platforms as it most definitely has got more on offer than Canva. 

So why then is Canva still so popular, it’s not that designbold is still new on the scene, it’s been around since October 2016.

The question is wrong because both these platforms are excellent, and they are both equally accessible. 

Canva was launched in 2012 to a selected group of professionals and opened in January 2014 publicly. It showed phenomenal growth and acquired membership of 10 million users in only five years.  

When designbold launched in 2016, it generated over USD$ 130 000 in sales within 14 days.

This is just to show that both these companies are active in terms of following and are solid contenders in the marketplace.

If it looks like designbold should be the stronger of the two design platforms, one should perhaps look at some of the negative criticism it received in a few reviews.

These are essential issues, but not all the users have been complaining about it, which leads me to believe that most of the applications for which designbold is being used is digital and not affected by these glitches. 

Most of the online reviews suggest that designbold is a perfect and user-friendly application that fulfills all of the criteria for which it is being used, and I tend to believe that.

Neither designbold or Canva lay any claims to be the same as top graphic design programs, and you are not paying the same price for it.

For this comparison, I have focused on the free options of both platforms to compare them on the same kind of footing.

So in all fairness, one should not judge these very user-friendly applications on the same basis as if you are spending hundreds of dollars on it.

The popularity of Canva I contribute to its two years plus advantage, and the fact that people who started of by using Canva haven’t had any reason to change to another design platform as Canva still fulfills their needs. 

My main reason for making use of designbold would be because there are so many Canva users that the newer template designs offered by designbold stand out in its freshness.

The Canva templates feel old and overused by comparison. But even this can be overcome by creating your designs from scratch, although I appreciate that some people feel intimidated by the prospect.

Conclusion of Canva vs Designbold

The more significant image library and the higher amount of templates make designbold the apparent choice in the battle of Canva vs Designbold

With its more significant Cloud storage availability, more fonts, and fresher look, I believe that in time it will even outperform Canva.…