Quick Links
Canva provides many graphic design tools and features, but many are only available for Canva Pro users. you may access plenty of great tools from a free Canva account, however. These are my favorite free Canva features.
1Website Builder
Canva is mostly used for creating social media designs, but you can also create entire websites using Canva’s website builder. While you won’t get the most extensive website, it’s a great place to build one-page sites or landing pages using Canva’s easy templates along with its drag-and-drag process for design elements.
You can add navigational menus to jump to different parts of the one-page design, hyperlinks to external sites, images, animations, text designs, and all design elements available. Your website is also responsive—all without needing to know how to code, host, or troubleshoot.
There arepros and cons for using Canva’s website builder, but for a free feature, it’s one of Canva’s best offerings. Canva offers free users up to five Canva domains to host for your Canva websites, meaning you can have up to five live websites for free hosted by Canva.
2Animation Tools
The majority of Canva’s animation tools are available to free users, except Magic Animate—an AI animation tool—and some speed/intensity settings for the animation tools.
you’re able to easily transform your Canva designs for social posts or online adverts by adding animated elements, text, or images. Canva’s free animation tools work effectively and are easy to navigate.
You can choose from subtle or bold entrance or exit animations, page animations, or you can animate an element along a self-drawn path across your designusing Canva’s Create an Animation feature. The tools look simple, but they produce high-quality results.
3Color Edit
The Canva Elements library feels infinite, but sometimes the elements you find aren’t in the colors that match your design. Luckily, for both vectors and other image elements, there are free ways to edit the colors in Canva.
You canuse the Color Edit feature to change colors in an SVG vectoruploaded to Canva, which allows you to rebrand elements to fit your design’s colors. You have to navigate your way through a few menus, so Color Edit tools are often overlooked by Canva users.
There are other color editing tools for non-vector graphics, such as duotone, colorize, and filters.
4Share Links to Projects
Sharing your Canva projects is helpful in more than one way. Not only does it let you easily collaborate with project partners by sharing your project with team members, but you may also share your designs with anyone. Linking your project lets you receive feedback or save time when others need access to your project, since they can open and edit it directly at the same time.
Canva lets you choose whether your project link can be used to edit your project or be kept as read-only. Sharing editable Canva links is the best way to create andsell Canva templates on online marketplaceslike Etsy—we recommend you make a duplicate copy of your project when using links to distribute to others.
Using layers in graphic design software is one of the best ways to keep your projects organized and to easily access elements overlapping with others.
From the Position tab, you can select between seeing all the layers in their order or specifically viewing only overlapping layer elements. Viewing your layers directly in the Layers panel saves time and frustration rather than clicking and double-clicking throughout your project to navigate to the correct element.
Along with the alignment tools also found in the Position tab, easily being able to re-order the layers is one of the most helpful free Canva features.
6Docs to Decks
Canva Docs is an area of Canva that’s set up slightly differently than the other design options. You can create well-designed documents such as resumes, documentation for meetings, presentation notes, articles, and more.
With Docs to Decks, at almost the click of a button, you can quicklytransform your written document into a beautiful presentation deck. This works most successfully when your document uses correctly sized headings and titles, images, and paragraphs.
Docs to Decks is found by selecting Magic Resize—even if you’re a free user—then you can choose the design type to match your document design, and Canva will apply all the information correctly to each slide.
You may have to edit the colors or branding throughout the generated presentation deck, but the auto-layout works very well. It’ll save you time from creating the entire presentation from scratch, although you’re able to do that with templates in Canva too.
7Video and Audio
Canva is primarily a design tool, but it also offers some video and audio features within its free access. While there are better video editing tools, such asCapCut or Premiere Pro, if you don’t need anything expertly produced or if you’re adding a quick video to social media, Canva’s tools are a great free option.
You can use any of the free video templates in the extensive video library. These include YouTube intro videos where you can edit text or swap out image elements. You can also upload your own videos to Canva, although they only work as elements, so you don’t have much editing power over them.
There’s an audio library in Canva too, although the majority of audio is for Pro users only. However, when using any free tracks, it allows you to easily add the track to your video where you can extend or crop the sound to fit with your visual project. Canva Pro users can sync the audio to the visuals—which might be a good enoughreason to choose Canva Pro over Canva Free.
Using Canva’s free video and audio tools means you don’t have to learn video editing software or pay high-end subscription prices, especially if you’re not creating videos very often.
8Design Accessibility Check
Good design should be accessible to everyone, which is why it’s important to keep accessibility in mind when designing. Design accessibility includes high-contrast colors, bold and readable text, large enough minimum body text, and well-placed layouts.Web-based accessibility needs to fit the WCAG ratiofor acceptable contrast and size.
Overall, the best design practice is to design inclusively at every stage. you may use Canva’s built-in design accessibility checker to test your design to the minimum standards. Inclusive design is often overlooked, but with a free built-in tool like this, there’s no excuse for your designs to not be accessible to everyone who may view them.
Found under the File tab of the design page, the design accessibility check reveals green ticks when your design hits the mark and numbered issues where you may improve. When selected, the issues will show advisories on fixing your design to make it more accessible.
Canva’s free tools provide great design options and the available tools go beyond this list, including text tools, element libraries, and Canva’s third-party apps. These are my favorite free Canva tools as they are often overlooked, but you can do so much with them without paying for Canva Pro. Though feature availability may change, all mentioned features are available for free at the time of writing.
