Has Canva killed the Adobe star?

In the year 2026, professional-looking design appears to be available to pretty much anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. Social posts, presentations, posters, brochures, videos, logos. Pick a template, drag some things around, change the font, bosh. Done.

And despite what you might expect from an agency full of professional designers, we don’t think accessibility to creativity is a bad thing.

Canva has democratised design on an extraordinary scale. By the end of 2025, the company said it had reached 260 million monthly users, with more than 12 billion designs created on the platform during that year alone.

(Yes, you’re right, that is an awful lot of inspirational quotes sitting on pink-gradient sunsets)

But it does raise an interesting question.

If design tools are more accessible, what makes creative good or bad?

On one side, we have Adobe. The long-standing natural habitat of the professional, home to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and approximately 14,000 features that even we’re not 100% sure someone has actually used.

Adobe’s tools give designers an enormous amount of control over what they create. They also come with a learning curve that can make opening Illustrator for the first time feel a little like being handed the controls to a Boeing 747.

On the other side is Canva, built around a very different proposition: making visual communication simple enough for everyone to participate in it. Canva describes its mission as ‘empowering the world to design,’ and with hundreds of millions of people now using the platform each month, it’s fair to say that particular plan is going rather well.

It would be easy, therefore, to turn this into a tale of Adobe good, Canva bad. Proper designers over here, Brian from the local Bowles club dragging things into templates over there.

We know professional designers who use Canva. We know non-designers who use Adobe. And we’ve seen enough questionable Photoshop work over the years to know that paying for Creative Cloud doesn’t automatically bestow good taste upon the subscriber.

Why? Because the software isn’t the skill.

Canva has made design tools easier to use. But it hasn’t made design itself easy. And that’s pretty key.

A skilled designer is valuable because they understand hierarchy, typography, composition, colour, accessibility, format and how all of those things influence the way someone receives a piece of communication.

More importantly, they’re thinking about the questions that come before any of that. Who are we talking to? What do we need them to understand? How should this make them feel? What should they do next? How does this fit with everything else the brand is putting into the world?

You can give someone access to every tool in Adobe Creative Cloud, and none of those answers would magically appear.

In much the same way, prompting ChatGPT doesn’t make you a writer. Smartphones haven’t made everybody a professional photographer. And filming yourself making a salad doesn’t make you Gordon Ramsey.

What technology does brilliantly is lower the barrier between having an idea and being able to make something from it. That’s useful. But knowing how to operate the tool and knowing what should be made with it remain two very different things.

This is where things get more interesting for brands.

Canva is good at helping people make things that look ‘quite nice.’

And sometimes, quite nice does ‘just fine.’ An internal announcement doesn’t necessarily require three rounds of creative concepts and a mood board. Sometimes Sandra is leaving on Friday, and you just need to tell everybody there’ll be free beers at four.

The problem comes when ‘quite nice’ becomes the creative de facto for everything.

Canva reported that its users created more than two billion social designs in 2025 alone. That’s two billion individual pieces of content entering a world in which your customers are already scrolling past an extraordinary amount of visual information every day.

When everyone has access to the same templates, follows the same trends and reaches for the same shortcuts, brands very quickly start to merge into each other.

Let’s be real, you’ve already seen what we’re talking about. The same aesthetic, the same treatment, the same cadence, gradient, text, pose, script. The list goes on.

When did being recognisable become secondary, you ask? That’s a question for another blog. But good brand design MUST create a visual language that belongs to you to be effective, or else all you’re doing is chasing one viral trend after another.

Plot twist: if they want to, sure.

For teams with limited resources, Canva can be incredibly useful, and templates can help internal teams create everyday assets quickly without sending every single LinkedIn graphic back through an agency.

The question isn’t really whether something can be done in Canva. It’s whether DIY is appropriate for what you’re asking that piece of creative to achieve.

If you’re developing a new identity, launching your biggest campaign of the year, or designing an exhibition stand that thousands of prospective customers will walk past, perhaps don’t begin the creative process with “I just quite liked this template.”

The greater the consequence of getting the creative wrong, the stronger the argument for bringing in someone whose job is to get it right.

The Adobe-versus-Canva argument is fun because it gives us two neat opposing camps and a click-baity title. The seasoned designer hunched over Illustrator versus the enthusiastic DIY marketer knocking out a carousel before lunch.

But the reality is much less dramatic.

They’re tools (the software, not the people). And as both platforms continue adding AI and automation, the practical gap between “I have an idea” and “I can make something” is only going to get smaller.

That makes creative expertise more important, not less. When anybody can make something, the value shifts towards knowing what is worth making.

It’s the idea behind the campaign, the understanding of the audience, the judgement to know what to leave out and the experience to recognise when something isn’t working. That’s the craft.

And no software subscription comes bundled with it.

So, Adobe or Canva?

Use both, use neither. Use crayons if the brief calls for it.

If you need support creating assets that really do pack a creative punch in an oversaturated digital sphere. You know where we are.