BrandStudio vs Canva

What’s the difference between BrandStudio and Canva?

Canva is a general design tool. It’s quick to start, it does almost everything, and more than 250 million people use it every month. That breadth is its strength, and also why brands drift in it: unless someone sets up locks, anyone can change anything, and its template library is shared by everyone.

BrandStudio is built the other way round: for one brand at a time. We take your brand guidelines and design a set of templates for what your team makes most, starting with social posts, with your fonts, colours, logos, layouts and animation built in. Your team picks a template, changes the words and pictures, and exports a JPEG or MP4 in every size you use. There’s no blank canvas, so there’s no way to break the brand.

Because each studio is made for one brand, it can also do things a general tool can’t: a generative pattern drawn from your identity, an animation style that’s yours alone, or an interactive 3D model of your product. Those are scoped and quoted on the call. Print-ready PDFs, such as business cards and leaflets, and HTML email signatures and templates are coming soon.

Can you keep a brand consistent in Canva?

Yes, with some work. On Canva Business, admins and brand designers can turn designs into Brand Templates and lock their elements: fully, or so that text can be rewritten and pictures replaced while the layout stays put. Brand Controls can limit members to your brand’s fonts and colours, and require approval before anything is published.

What Canva doesn’t do is design those templates for you. Someone on your team has to build each one well, in each size you use, set the locks before publishing it, keep the set up to date, and check what gets made from them. If you have an in-house designer, that can work well. If you don’t, that’s the job BrandStudio does: we design the templates, and the brand is fixed by how they’re built rather than by settings someone has to look after.

Templates: designed for you, or picked from a library

Canva’s paid plans include over 3.6 million templates. They’re a great starting point, but every Canva user can pick the same ones, and a post that looks like a template looks like everyone else’s. Your audience recognises you by what’s distinctive about your brand. (More on why that matters in Is AI diluting your brand?)

A BrandStudio studio has between two and eight templates, designed from scratch for your brand and nobody else’s: a launch, a quote, an event, an offer, whatever you post most.

Animated posts and video

Both can make video. Canva can animate designs with its animation presets and export MP4 on every plan. In BrandStudio the animation is designed for your brand rather than picked from presets, and it’s part of each template, so every post moves the same way, with the same timing, whoever makes it. That’s what makes motion feel like part of a brand rather than an effect. (See Video vs static posts for when motion is worth it.)

Which costs less?

It depends on the size of your team and how you count the setup. Canva Business is priced per person. BrandStudio is priced per organisation, with a one-off setup for the design work.

So the subscription costs less than Canva Business from three people, and the gap grows with every person you add. The setup fee changes the first year: with a typical setup of about £2,500, Canva Business is cheaper in year one for teams of up to 16 people. From the second year, BrandStudio costs less for any team of three or more.

The bigger saving is usually somewhere else: the design time you’d otherwise pay a freelancer or agency for, or the hours your team spends making posts look right. See what social media design costs for those numbers.

When Canva is the better choice

• You’re one or two people, and the setup fee would be hard to justify.
• You design lots of different things, such as presentations, print and documents, not mainly social posts.
• You have a designer who can build and look after Brand Templates.
• You want the freedom to design something new every time.

When BrandStudio is the better choice

• Several people make your social posts, and the brand is drifting.
• You don’t have a designer to build and maintain templates, or you’d rather they spent their time elsewhere.
• You want animated posts that move the way your brand does.
• You’d rather pay once for your organisation than for each person.
• You want something no template library has, built for your brand alone.

Can you use both?

Yes, and plenty of teams will. Keep Canva for one-off pieces and documents, and use BrandStudio for the branded content your team makes every week. The quickest way to see the difference is to try the live demo: it’s a real studio for a made-up brand, and you can’t break it.