What’s the difference between Photoshop and Canva?

Having used both Canva and Photoshop, I can outline the differences between both for you and help you determine which one might best fit your needs.

First off, while they seem similar they don’t offer entirely the same things which is why I maintain a subscription to both. I’m not saying you should, but as a media specialist, there are things that both programs offer that I need to use for my clients.

What’s the rave about Canva?

Canva is $12.99 per month and you don’t need any experience as a designer. One of the appeals of Canva is that they offer ready-made templates if you are design challenged. In fact, Canva makes it so easy for users, you are tasked with designing social media content, you don’t need to wonder about the size of that graphic content because Canva has templates for most social media page elements like Facebook headers, posts, youtube thumbnails etc. You can choose the right template and it’s automatically sized for what you need. Not only that, but Canva works with video and you can even build websites and landing pages on Canva! That is pretty impressive. You can also have team members, so if you are using Canva for business purposes, you can collaborate as a team on a project.

What’s so great about Photoshop?

For starters, Photoshop is the standard graphic editing software industry-wide. If you are a graphic designer and don’t know how to use Photoshop, it could affect your credibility. Most designers start here and move to other programs. Photoshop is the software used in design schools in many colleges.

So while Canva is meant for beginners and photoshop is meant for professionals, what are the other perks of using photoshop?

I would say one of the primary perks of photoshop is that after 5 years of steady photoshop use with clients, I still learn something new about it all the time. I learn how to use different tools in different ways to achieve the effects I want with a design, and while Photoshop doesn’t give you templates to work on, I’ve often taken Canva elements and designed a project in photoshop simply so I could have more control and turn layers of a project on and off. This is not possible in Canva as Canva doesn’t work with layers. Because of this, Photoshop gives you more artistic control. Also, I’ve often done mockups for clients for books and t-shirts and Canva currently has no way to insert an image in a mock-up because Canva doesn’t utilize layer control.

While Canva Pro can remove the background on images and create nice drop shadows, it is limited to that. While you can change the color on vector-type art, Photoshop has dozens of tools like the magic wand tool, crop tools, eyedropper tools when you want to match the color of an element, dodge tools for photo touch-ups, healing tools, clone stamp tools, the list goes on and on.

Photoshop is $9.99 per month but you also get Lightroom with it which is very helpful if you are a photographer. Photographers use photoshop to touch up the complexion of their subjects, (something Canva can’t do) and they also use Lightroom. Lightroom is offered with the Photoshop subscription and can help make those images pop. I’ve often edited images in photoshop, then brought them into lightroom to master the color. Then Lightroom allows me to bulk watermark all my photos, another thing Canva can’t do.

The purpose of this post is not to tell you which one is better than the other. I truly can’t do that because I use both of these programs for different things every single day and I need them both in my life! But if you are trying to make a choice between one or the other, hopefully, this will help.