Canva Docs is a document editor allowing individuals and business users to create and design documents containing highly visual content. In addition to traditional text-editing features, Canva Docs has built-in tools that support videos, graphics, charts, icons, and other visual elements. Read on for our in-depth review of Canva Docs to learn more about the platform’s pros, cons, pricing, and use cases.
Canva Docs: The Good and The Bad
Our research team at Crazy Egg tested Canva Docs and searched through verified reviews from real users to find common themes and opinions. Based on this research, we identified the strengths and weaknesses of Canva Docs—making it easier for you to decide if the software suits your needs.
What Canva Docs is Good At
Canva Docs shines in its simplicity, collaboration features, and interactive sharing capabilities. You’ll also have access to millions of free graphics and an AI-powered text generator. Let’s dive into each of these strengths.
User-Friendly Interface: After opening Canva Docs, you’ll quickly notice how simple the platform really is. This is somewhat surprising when you consider how many different features and capabilities are available from your dashboard. There’s a slight learning curve, but the interface is clean and easy to navigate—making for an enjoyable experience.
Canva Docs has lots of text-editing features that you’re already familiar with. But the drag-and-drop editor and visual design elements that might be unfamiliar are still fairly easy to figure out.
Team Collaboration: One standout of Canva Docs compared to similar tools on the market is its seamless collaboration capability. Multiple users can view and edit documents in real time, and Canva Docs makes this easy to track, as each user’s name and cursor movements will be displayed on the page. This feature helps teams get work done faster, as everyone can make changes when needed rather than passing things through a linear workflow.
You can also add comments to documents and assign tasks to other team members. Canva Docs even lets you work with collaborators who don’t have a Canva account. You can easily invite someone to start editing immediately without forcing them to sign up and get onboarded—while maintaining control over your document permissions and sharing access.
AI-Powered Text Generation: Canva Docs has a built-in AI writing assistant called Magic Write. It’s a great way for creative professionals to avoid writer’s block, generate outlines, brainstorm, and simply get words on the page faster than doing it on your own. This has quickly become a favorite feature for users who are great with graphic design but struggle with writing.
Simply give Magic Write a prompt, and within seconds, the tool can generate headlines, lists, complete paragraphs, and even summarize texts. Presentation text that used to take you an hour to write can now be completed in just a few minutes.
Interactive Sharing: Canva Docs lets you share your documents online with a single click. But rather than just sharing an editable or view-only version of your work, Canva Docs makes it possible to share it like a website. This allows users to scroll and interact with the document more naturally without feeling like they’re viewing a raw document.
You’ll also have access to analytics and insights that track engagement. Canva Docs shows you how people interact with your document, who viewed your links, and when. All of this is built directly into the platform, so you won’t need to use a third-party tool.
Vast Media Library: You can easily add images, icons, videos, emojis, and other media elements to your documents for free—without ever leaving Canva Docs. The platform has over one million free graphics and more than 3,000 premium fonts, eliminating the need to browse the web to find images and verify the license before using it.
Finding what you’re looking for is also very easy; you just need to click where you want the visuals placed, and you can quickly search for your desired graphic. Adding on-page design elements like page dividers, tables, and more is also simple.
Affordable Teams Plan: Canva Docs is 100% free for anyone with a Canva account. You can sign up quickly, even with a personal email address. But if you want to get more out of Canva Docs and take full advantage of the collaboration features, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Fortunately, Canva’s plan for teams delivers incredible value. It’s just $14.99 per month total for up to five users. To put that into perspective, the Canva Pro plan for individuals is $12.99 per month. The team plan lets you add four additional users for just $2 more.
What Canva Docs is Lacking
Canva Docs isn’t perfect, and it has a few limitations worth considering. So, keep these weaknesses in mind while evaluating Canva Docs for your desired use case.
Limited Free Storage: Canva Docs has 5 GB of cloud storage for users on a free plan. While this may be enough for some of you, it won’t be enough for high-volume business users who save lots of media-rich files to their accounts. Many business users will eventually need to upgrade to Canva Pro to get 100 GB of storage.
If you compare the Canva Docs free plan to a free Google Drive account, you’ll get triple the amount of free cloud storage with Google.
Limited Professional Design Use: Canva Docs is not built for professional graphic designers. It’s simply a way to supercharge traditional text documents with enhanced visualizations. Professional designers won’t find the tools they need to create content directly in Canva Docs.
You do have the option to connect Canva Docs with other designs you’ve created in Canva. But these are still beginner-friendly design tools and aren’t really built for the pros.
Limited Support: If you’re using Canva Docs for free, you won’t have access to live support. Instead, you must rely on Canva’s knowledge base for help. Since Canva Docs is a relatively new product, the support documents aren’t quite as in-depth as some of you might hope, and you may have some unanswered questions.
To access 24/7 support, you’ll need to pay for a Canva Pro account. Unfortunately, Canva’s customer support team doesn’t have the best reputation based on online reviews. While some reviews still have good things to say about the support team, the negative remarks can’t be overlooked.
Proof of Long-Term Durability: Canva has been around for a decade. But Canva Docs is a brand new product. It started in beta before it became widely accessible to all Canva users, but it’s still less than a year old.
While this hasn’t led to any specific drawbacks yet, you won’t find reviews of Canva Docs users saying they’ve used the platform seamlessly across an entire organization for years. So the verdict is still out on whether or not the platform will meet expectations over time.
Canva Docs Pricing & Options
Canva Docs is free for any user with a Canva account. You’ll also have access to Canva’s apps for whiteboards, presentations, social media, videos, print, and websites. The free plan comes with most Canva Docs features, including the AI-powered writing tool, 250,000 templates, and over one million free graphics. Premium subscriptions are available month-to-month, with the option to save 16% with yearly billing.
For $12.99 per month, Canva Pro users get additional storage, 24/7 support, unlimited folders, 610,000 premium templates, and over 100 million premium graphics. Canva for Teams starts at $14.99 per month for up to five users and comes with additional collaboration tools, SSO, ISO 27001 compliance, and more. Continue below to learn more about the most common use cases for Canva Docs and some special pricing options.
Canva Docs For Education
Canva Docs has versatile education use cases for teachers, students, and school districts. Teachers can use it to create lesson plans and highly-engaging presentations for the classroom and online. With interactive sharing capabilities, teachers can even track which students accessed specific documents.
For students, the platform works really well for group projects. It’s easy to keep everyone on the same page and keep each person accountable for their tasks. There are also plenty of templates for students to manage their class schedules, study sessions, and workloads.
If you’re a teacher, you can get 100% free access to Canva Docs and other Canva products by verifying your eligibility. K-12 school districts can also get Canva Docs for free with enterprise-level deployment. Just be aware that the Canva Docs education packages are not yet available for colleges or universities.
Canva Docs For Business
The versatility of Canva Docs makes it an excellent option for businesses and small teams. It can be used to create financial reports and client presentations and provide more clarity to data with charts and graphs. Marketers can use templates to create emails and social posts, and content creators can use them to add creativity and eye-catching visuals to their work.
You can also use Canva Docs to help manage workflows for one-off and ongoing projects. Teams can collaborate on documents simultaneously, and everything is saved automatically to the cloud. Built-in comments and tagging make communicating with remote co-workers and managing responsibilities easy.
Business users can also use Canva Docs for sharing information with clients or third-party collaborators. You can generate an interactive and professional link to share with people, and they don’t even need a Canva account to view it. Since the tool is easy to use, your team won’t have to go through a complicated or lengthy onboarding or training process either.
Canva Docs For Enterprise
Larger organizations can rely on Canva Docs as a single source of truth for creating, editing, and distributing key documents. One standout example includes employee onboarding. You can create highly visual and interactive onboarding documents that are much more engaging than a standard PDF email attachment.
You’ll also be able to track if your new hires read the document and how often they return to it. This information can be useful for refining your onboarding policies and making real-time adjustments in areas that need improvement.
Canva Docs has excellent OKR templates, too. You can use these department-wide, organization-wide, or create unique ones for individual teams and projects to ensure everyone is clearly aligned with the same goals. Enterprises will also benefit from additional cloud storage, ISO 27001 certification, and 24/7 support.
Canva Docs For Personal Use
If you’re currently using other document editors to manage personal tasks or other initiatives, Canva Docs is a solid alternative to consider. This is especially true if you’re highly visual and need more than just text on a screen to keep yourself engaged.
For example, you can use various templates to create personal and professional to-do lists, keep track of your sleep habits, fitness goals, journal entries, track books you’ve read—virtually anything you want.
It’s also a great way to let your creative juices flow. Maybe you’re thinking about starting a business or have a side-hustle managing social media pages for small businesses. You can use the AI text generator built into Canva Docs for brainstorming and getting words on the page rather than staring at a blank screen and pulling your hair out. Best of all, Canva Docs is free for individual users.
Summary
Canva Docs is a solid document creator and editing tool with many built-in design elements. It’s free to use and shines with its intuitive interface, collaboration features, and interactive sharing capabilities. We recommend it for teachers, students, marketers, small teams, and even personal users who want more visual options compared to a traditional document editor.
