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Adobe Express versus Canva: which is 'better'? It's starting to become an exhausted debate in designer circles. But, really, it depends on your preference for...everything about graphic design for you!
In this blog, the free plans offered by Canva and Adobe Express will be discussed. Two very similarly designed magazine covers created by Liz Street Design artists serve as examples of the platforms' similarities and differences.
Adobe Express is a gateway to Photoshop, as a lot of the tools and features are set up to bridge users to become interested.
Time-saving key shortcuts are very similar between Adobe Express and Photoshop. However, their differences far outweigh their similarities, as Adobe Express cannot compare to the vast editing tools and features of the much more advanced Photoshop. It's a long bridge!
Between Adobe Express and Canva, the stock photos offered are both generous and varied. Though, if you or your business are 'speed-demons' of content creation, Canva offers thousands more. More importantly for business' commercial purposes, Canva has no licensing restrictions for using their stock photography.
Adobe Express' font typeface effects (used in our Liz Street Design surfing magazine cover) is both an advantaged and disadvantaged feature it offers over Canva. It was very sluggish to load, but it's very impressive when it finally does. For the more advanced designer, this patience-testing downside will frustrate.
Canva could well be slightly in the lead in the popularity 'race' of content creation. This is probably because it's very user-friendly. There are also templates 'for days', so designers can find ideas for their next project with a mash of this element from one template and that element from another. It also loads fast, unlike Adobe Express, which (as previously mentioned about font typeface effects) after adding several elements had significant lag when loading even simple edits.
Though, as a font-obsessive, Canva could organize their fonts better. Many typographers will mull over fonts into a dark rabbit-hole for hours because they have a particular font imagined already! But, 'this is the way'...before giving up and huffing and eye-rolling over to Illustrator to just create it!
Matt Walsh's article on Style Factory Productions is a great comparative analysis of the two platforms. One pro mentioned, which Liz Street Design strongly agrees with for why Adobe Express is more of a 'winner', is that unflattened pdf files can be exported. Because elements are layered, designs can then be tweaked in more familiar programs, such as Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign.
