Canva vs Figma: Which App Is Better For You?

Mariia Gurkina
3 min readFeb 27, 2023

--

It’s quite improbable that you haven’t heard of either Canva or Figma, even if you’re new to the graphic design industry. Although both tools are wonderful in what they can do, they also differ from one another.

This article is ideal for you if you want to learn which tool is better for novices, provides more plugins and integrations, is better for collaboration, is more affordable, etc.

Let’s compare Canva vs Figma to discover which one can win your business.

What Kind of Tool is Canva?

A user-friendly graphic creation tool is Canva. You can make designs that appear professional using Canva’s collection of pre-made templates and simple drag-and-drop tools without the help of a dedicated design staff. Canva is utilized for a variety of design tasks, including infographics, presentations, social media postings, and advertisements. Canva is a terrific tool for companies and people that need to produce high-quality designs quickly and affordably because of its user-friendly interface.

What Kind of Tool is Figma?

A vector graphics editor and prototyping tool is called Figma. Vector-based designs may be scaled indefinitely without losing quality. Collaboration is also a pleasure with Figma because you can simply modify and share files with numerous people at once. Also, Figma features a vast library of integrated components that make it simple to construct intricate designs with a unified style.

Now that we’ve covered the basics let’s check the major differences between Canva and Figma in more detail.

1. The Design Style

When contrasting Canva vs Figma, the sort of design you can make using each is the most obvious distinction.

If you need to produce marketing designs for social media, posters, advertisements, videos, etc., Canva is a great option. But, if you want UX and wireframing designs, user flows, and website prototypes, Figma is the solution to employ. Don’t be fooled, Figma “just” allows you to design website or app prototypes. These are not genuinely constructible.

2. Features

Canva is more focused on visuals used for marketing purposes. Hence, it pays more attention to photo editing tools such as:

  • Automatic resize tool — You don’t have to worry about different size requirements, this tool adjusts your visuals automatically
  • Brand Kit tool — It helps you to stay on the same brand identity page.
    Content planer — You schedule your posts and marketing material
  • Animations and Video designs — It allows you to create more dynamic and captivating visuals

Figma, on the other hand, offers more UX-oriented features. You can utilize it to start from scratch and benefit more from “typical” graphic design features. For example, there are drawing tools like pens and curve tools.

  • CSS support for elements — It allows you to change the content in terms of style, colours, layout, etc.
  • Advanced grid system — It allows you to align objects within a frame, which provides a visual structure to your design and helps you stay consistent across various platforms and devices.
  • Layer exporting option — It enables you to easily export your layers in the desired format like PNG, SVG, JPG, etc.

3. Templates

Canva is essentially a tool for creating marketing graphics. Hence, a large selection of templates (more than 400 000) and picture editing capabilities are provided by Canva’s special characteristics. This covers things like stock photos, vector graphics, typefaces, designs, and animations. Nevertheless, there are only 250 000 templates available for usage in the free Canva edition.

Contrarily, Figma doesn’t provide many templates, which is quite logical given the software’s primary objective. This is a result of Figma’s increased emphasis on producing prototypes and mockups.

Follow for Part 2! More to come :)

--

--

Mariia Gurkina

Hi, there! I am a Content Writer who is passionate about design & video games