2 Canva Alternatives for AMAZING Pinterest Graphics

Canva is quickly becoming the go to graphic design place for all social media graphics – but are there any viable Canva alternatives?

The short answer is YES!

The slightly longer answer depends very much on your design skills, your budget and exactly what you want your graphic design tool to do for you, so in this short post i’m going to compare Canva with Vista Create (Formerly called “Crello”)

and Visme purely on their stock of editable Pinterest Graphics and the relative cost of their paid versions.

Pinterest Graphics

If you create anything for Pinterest – or any other social media site – you’ll be familiar with the FREE (or even the paid) Canva software.

It’s now so popular, that suggesting something else is like saying that Google isn’t the only search engine – I hardly ever see any Canva alternatives getting a look in anymore but in all honesty I’m not sure why.

Below are 3 stock pins – one from each of the platforms – I’m not a graphic designer myself so i’ve just selected the ones that i thought looked the pretty from each. I have deliberately chosen images that rely on good photography so that you can see how similar they all are.

NOTE: If you are using your own images – either product images or original photographs to create your pins, then any one of the free versions of these tools will do the job equally well

Canva

This is from the FREE Canva stock “PINS” and as with all graphics, it relies quite heavily on the beautiful image quality – which of course is in this case, one of the free stock images available through the site.

It looks good doesn’t it?

Problem is that most people use free stock images when they create social media graphics and pinterest pins so try doing a reverse google image search to see who else is using it before you decide which of the stock images you are going to use as it might hurt your brand image long term.

Canva does have a very nice feature in that it allows you to publish DIRECTLY from the interface to Pinterest – saves all that downloading and stuff. Personally though I do like to put my pins onto my site with alt tags for SEO before I link it to pinterest but it’s still a cool feature.

Canva is well known for it’s free version but many of the features that make it so valuable are only available through a paid subscription.

PRO = 1-5 users

£10.99 ($15) if you pay monthly

£107.88 ($150) Annually

Vista Create

The layout of the Vista Create dashboard, the editing tools and even quite a lot of the available images are very similar to Canva though it doesn’t have the publish to pinterest option or the ability to schedule pins directly from the software (it does have a share facility though) as you can with the paid Canva subscription.

I do however like a lot of the additional Vista Create features such as their animated graphics and free video clips that you can use inside your chosen graphic. These options are all available in Canva and Visme too but the range inside the free accounts is different and it’s just my personal preferance to like the Vista Create ones.

Vista Create has a distinct advantage if you’re going for the premium version in that it’s pretty darn cheap compared to the other 2

Vista Create also has a free version so it would cost nothing to try creating a few pins on each platform to see which style and free elements suits you best.

PRO = upto 10 members on this plan

£7.50 ish ($9.99) paid monthly – (so cheaper than canva)

It doesn’t look like they give money off for an annual payment so if you’re in it for the long haul thats $119.88 per year which is still cheaper!

Take a look HERE for an example of an animated Vista Create (CRELLO) image.

Visme

I’ve spent the last 8 years as a management consultant working all over the UK in a wide variety of businesses so I have tried out a good many tools to make my presentations and reports stand out from the crowd – Visme has always been my go to tool.

The reason I leave this to the end though is because I’ve only recently started to use social graphics. I’ve written many (many!) business cases and created a raft of presentations, interactive infographics, business cards, leaflets and ebooks in Visme over the years and could not be happier with them but their PIN options could be better – especially as an alternative to Canva and Vista Create.

I Prefer the Visme interface, it’s very user friendly and i’ve never had any issues with it at all, and if you really just want the simple graphics without the super fancy animations – it’s probably the best in my opinion. However, the world of social graphics moves very quickly and if you want to stand out it’s important be be at the cutting edge.

That said, Visme animations are still really very good (they are adding new stuff all the time) and also quite different style wise from the Vista Create and Canva bank of options so it comes down to your budget, your style and what you want to use the tool for outside of pinterest and social media graphic creations.

More plus points that I feel I need to mention in favour of Visme are their blog, [extensive] instruction videos and regular live training webinars – they are soooo much more than a graphics tool – so despite my slight invidelity when it comes to the occassional animated pin, I’m definatly sticking with Visme.

Visme’s standard package is $15 (£11 ish) per month so similar to Canva but there are some features missing from this lower level that you do get with the other two plus you only get that price when you pay annually.

If you’re looking at this from a larger organisation point of view and you want more than just pretty pins, Visme has more to offer in my opinion – but it costs.

Take a look here for an example of an animated infographic using Visme or here for a 10 page pdf made with Visme too.

There is an amazing tool called photo vibrance that makes the most amazing moving images from a static photo – seriously worth a look!

Summary

If you JUST want pretty pins – i’d go with Vista Create to be honest, and buy some original images – that will totally do the job.

Since we are JUST looking at Pinterest graphics with this post, i’ve summarised below some points that i feel will be key in your decision making process BUT I encourage you to sign up for a FREE account with all 3 and try them out to see which one fits you and your brand the best.

[watch this space – infographic coming soon…….!]

P.S. if you are in need of some training where Pinterest is concerned, i found this course particularly helpful