Canva vs Piktochart – Which Is Better?

Whether you’re a blogger, online entrepreneur, freelancer, or even an agency, one of the best things to have is a DIY design tool.

There are many such DIY design tools being released on the market today. If you’re looking for a strong DIY design tool to use though, you can’t do much better than Canva and Piktochart. Not only are they reasonably priced, but they’re also easy to use.

In this comparison review, we’ll look at these two market-leading options based on their rich features, ease of use, template choices, and price to help you create your visual storytelling aids.

Canva vs Piktochart

What Is Canva?

Canva is a visual design tool founded in 2012 and renowned by DIY graphic designers and pros alike for its simplicity and ease of use. It’s mainly used for creating visuals such as infographics, design graphics and layouts for social media, and more.

What Is Piktochart?

Piktochart, on the other hand, was formed in 2011 and is designed to empower people to tell powerful visual stories that matter. Over 6 million people from individuals, companies, nonprofits, and others use Piktochart to create beautiful visuals using a wide range of available templates.

Features

Piktochart 

What I like about Piktochart is that it’s an all-in-one visual communication solution with features for creating presentations, reports, social media graphics, infographics, and prints.

Not only that, but it’s easy to bring team members on board in the event that I’m working with a larger team and share my visual work, brand assets, and review each other’s work on the fly. This way, it’s easy for everyone on the team to collaborate and stay on the same page.

Some of the design features within Piktochart that I use to create stunning visuals include:

Interactive charts and maps

Piktochart offers stunning interactive charts and maps, which I find useful when creating infographics. The best part is that I can create beautiful infographics without any design experience. It’s simply a matter of importing my numbers, picking a chart or map, customizing it, and it’s done.

Library of icons and images

Piktochart’s editor makes it easy to create infographics. The large library of images and icons makes it easy to pick and place onto the graphic, but I get the option to upload my own images or icons without having to attribute, pay licensing fees, or hassle for it.

Color schemes

Color is important for any brand, which is why I love Piktochart’s color schemes that are easy to flip and try out different looks to match my brand or campaign.

SEO-centric graphics

If you’re a blogger like me, an online store owner, vlogger, or other content creator, SEO is an important factor for any type of content, including graphics. Visual work is created to be seen, but also to be discovered. Piktochart makes it easy for search engines to find and understand visual content.

Password protection

Security is an important consideration for me when creating visuals. Piktochart allows me not only to publish my visuals anywhere thanks to its versatile sharing options, but I’m also able to protect my work using passwords, download and email it, or share it with the world.

Presentation maker

Piktochart’s easy presentation maker comes handy when I need to perfect a pitch, sales proposal, present products, host webinars, or even deliver a keynote speech.

The feature offers great visual assets including animated icons, images, photos, interactive maps, and charts to tell impactful data-driven stories, beautiful color schemes, and emotions.

I’m also able to present my visual stories as a slideshow using slick transitions, show time, and the native Presentation Mode for instant presentations. Plus, my slides go anywhere I want them to using Piktochart’s versatile sharing options.

Report maker

As a marketer, you need to impress your boss, colleagues, or even your clients.

With Piktochart’s free online report maker, it’s easy to create insightful yet beautiful reports that turn complex information to impressive, customizable, and interactive maps. What I like about this report maker tool is that it’s free and I don’t have to have coding or technical knowledge to use it.

Plus, with Piktochart’s 15 interactive chart types, I’m able to bring different pieces of information to life from simple pie charts or bar charts, to creative icon matrixes that suit my needs.

Flyers

Getting the word out about news, updates, events, promotions, contests, or just saying thank you to audiences can be difficult. It’s one thing to use email messages, but it’s another to add a beautiful, eye-catching, and attractive flyer to deliver the message.

I find Piktochart’s flyers easy to use because I don’t need any design chops to get started. Plus, there are thousands of royalty-free, high-resolution images I can choose from to use on the flyers.

Piktochart also makes customization easy as I simply apply my brand colors or play around with different looks and feels from the beautiful color schemes. I also don’t have to waste time worrying about the right size for the flyers because Piktochart’s flyers scale and adapt on the fly.

Poster maker

What do you do when you need stunning posters in a matter of minutes, not days?

Piktochart offers a free poster maker that helps create attractive and attention-grabbing posters in a simple, fun, and fast way.

Like the flyers, the posters also scale magically, print easily in pixel-perfect, and are easily shareable to social media right from the poster maker.

I like the fact that with Piktochart, I can create custom posters that match my brand and choose from a vast library of high-resolution images that look crisp on-screen and in print. 

Canva Features

Canva offers a variety of templates for creating stunning visual graphics such as infographics, reports, flyers, posters, social media posts, YouTube visuals, and much more. 

The feature-rich aspect of Canva places it well ahead of other graphic designing tools like Ripl, Crello, Bannersnack and others. 

Let’s take a look at some of the features.  

Variety of document types

Canva has an awesome suite of features, the main one being the popular document design types. It’s possible to create almost any type of document using Canva such as cards, flyers, social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube) graphics, brochures, calendars, invitations, labels, letterheads, logos, photo collages, planners, presentations, resumes, thank you cards, menus, and more.

Unlike Piktochart, which offers six categories of documents I can use for visual designs, Canva offers a wide variety of document types so I’m not necessarily limited to the six common ones.

Canva is equally easy to use, modify, and scale automatically based on the dimensions I need for my graphics, without needing design or coding experience. I can create perfect designs in a matter of minutes.

Textures and Backgrounds

Canva also offers different textures and backgrounds that accentuate images with transparency or photo filters and use them in any part of my designs. I can pick from fanciful designs and patterns to real-world papers and fabrics to add to my visuals. With Canva, I’m literally spoiled for choices.

Image Cropper

Canva’s image cropper comes handy when I want to crop my images for precise, trim compositions. 

The image cropper is especially helpful where I have images that could use some retouching or that may need to be labeled. It’s easy to crop my photos and transform the shots to look stunning with my next project as they’re trimmed down to the right size. 

Plus, I don’t have to open my laptop or computer to crop images; I can do it from any mobile device like an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, or tablet using the free Canva app.

Speech bubbles

Speech bubbles are useful for storytelling especially in comics, newspapers, and other digital books that want to bring conversations to life. I use the speech bubble feature a lot when creating visuals for mobile phone conversations. 

It’s a simple drag and drop to create the speech bubbles, resize, and add my own dialog to the visuals. I can also edit the dialog to change the text or fonts within it, colors, and move or resize the speech bubbles.

Photo effects

This is probably one of the most important reasons why I love Canva. The photo effects are really cool ways of creating unique visuals and glamorizing the images and designs.

One of my favorite photo effects is the Background Remover, which cuts out any background parts of the image I want and leaves only the part of the image that I’d like to use on my visuals. This way, I can add stellar photo effects to make my visuals magnificent and give them an out of this world style.

There are plenty of photo filters to choose from in Canva that will give images a signature look. It’s a matter of clicking on the filter and scrolling through each of them to find the one you want to produce unique visuals.

Add Text To Photos

Canva makes it easy for me to add text to my images for quick captioning or to add a compelling commentary. This is especially useful when creating memes, adding speech to cute cat photos, or other commentary to entertain, inspire, and/or communicate. There are tons of text tools and fonts to create expert typography on any image or design.

Photo straightener

With Canva, every aspect of design matters. I particularly like the fact that I can straighten or rotate my photos and use the margins to keep them straight or squared up. No matter what image I use, Canva’s photo straightener ensures my designs look elegant with photos in place.

Design and photo grids

Besides the photo straightener feature, Canva offers photo and design grids to keep photos and layouts crisp. This way, images deliver an appealing sense of form and structure to those who look at them. Plus, I have more room to envision and play around with designs using the drag and drop function.

Transparent images

Canva also allows me to create designs with transparent images. This way, it’s easier to add an elegant backdrop with adjustable transparency. All I do is select the element and adjust the transparency slider to reduce opacity until the element is entirely transparent or gone.

Digital Stickers

I love Canva’s free and ready to use digital stickers because they’re a way of adding fun to my visuals. 

There are a wide range of stickers I can add to any design, from a library of 1 million illustrations and stock photos to spice up my projects.

Frames

A tasteful and matching frame gives digital design work the masterpiece treatment. Canva offers a wealth of frames I can choose from and add the drag and drop photo frames effect to use with photos.

Vignette

When I need to add some effects to my images, Canva’s vignette filter is the perfect solution. I can create vignette effects with any image and use the filter from any device including my tablet or phone. This feature is particularly useful with vintage photos to bring out the character in the old pics and get brilliant retro photo effects.

Icons

Like Piktochart, Canva also offers a large collection of abstractions and symbols you can use on any design. These vector images look good at any size and range from a Facebook thumbs up to an emoji or animated elements among others. 

The Canva icons are free to use as they are, though some icons in the elements section are charged at a fee of $1 with Canva Pro. However, they make for great branding elements, logos, and more.

Photo Blur

Sometimes you want to help your audience focus on a particular part of an image or visual. For this purpose, Canva’s photo blur slider offers a great way to stimulate depth of field and/or style. 

The feature shows results right within the layout view so I don’t have to toy around with complicated controls or guess how it will look like in the end. It’s also easier to blur or sharpen my photos.

Support

Canva offers different types of support for its users including teaching materials, a blog, a help center, social media, tutorials, and even a Design school.

Piktochart on the other hand offers support via a help center, video tutorials, social media, and a chatbox.

Pricing

Both Piktochart and Canva offer three different packages, one of which is a free plan. However, Piktochart’s Pro and Pro Team plans cost $24 and $82 per month but don’t offer a free trial. Check out Piktochart’s pricing page for more details.

Canva offers Pro and Enterprise plans, which cost $9.95 and $30 per user per month.

The difference is that with Canva, you can try the premium plans out for free before committing to a monthly or annual subscription. Refer to Canva’s pricing page for more details.

Piktochart vs Canva: Similarities & Differences

	Canva	Piktochart
Design templates	Cards Flyers Social media graphics Brochures Calendars Invitations Labels Letterheads Logos Photo collages Planners Presentations Resumes Menus	Presentations Reports Infographics Social Media Flyers Posters
Drag and drop function	✔️	✔️
Collaboration tools for teams	✔️	✔️
Pricing	Free Pro $9.95 per user/per month Enterprise $30 per user/per month	Free Pro $24 Pro Team $82
Free trial on paid plans	✔️	❌
Plans for Nonprofits and Educational institutions	✔️	✔️
Design school	✔️	❌
Support	Help center, social media, blog, teaching materials	Help center, video tutorials, chatbox, social media

Canva vs Piktochart: Pros & Cons

Canva

Pros

• Easy to use interface
• Slew of different design assets
• Organizes templates by category
• Free plan available
• Free trial available with premium plans
• Canva Lite plan available if you can’t afford Canva Pro
• Millions of stock photos available
• Rich library of icons and elements
• Variety of photo effects and filters
• Background remover feature
• Design school helps newbies and pro designers navigate and learn
• Share images to social media directly from Canva
• Download images in multiple formats

Cons

• Teams plan charged per user
• Background remover only available with paid plans
• Limited selection of photos with the free plan
• No rich media export options

Piktochart

Pros

• Easy to use interface
• Variety of templates
• Import data from other applications
• Free plan available
• Interactive charts and maps
• Share feature available within the tool

Cons

• Free plan is limiting in terms of features
• No rich media export options

Wrapping Up – Piktochart vs Canva

I hope this comparison review has helped you decide which tool, between Canva and Piktochart, best suits your needs. 

I recommend Canva for several reasons. Not only is it simple, free, and easy to use, but it offers a wide range of document templates, a vast library of elements, images, backgrounds, and textures. 

Plus, it’s designed with many robust functionalities and options compared with Piktochart and you can test-run its pro plans for free to check out its powerful features.