And I choose…
Omkar Khapare · Follow
5 min read · Jun 28, 2020
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10 years ago, only professionals stood up to the task of graphic designing.
It became a nightmare for enthusiasts and hobbyists to express their ideas and vision to the designer.
A few years ago, designing was considered an artistic profession. Learning and implementing Adobe was a mammoth task. So, even an interested individual with no artistic background had to spend a lot of time and energy to build something of his own.
Only few big organizations could afford designers. It was still a dream for many small businesses to hire graphic designers.
Forward to today, the scene is dynamic. Tools such as Canva, Figma, Sketch, and many more allow for seamless designing on the go!
It is not a dream anymore. Anybody can create mesmerizing templates, presentations, infographics, social media post, website design, flyers, posters, videos, invitation cards, brochures, resume, business card, and banners .
Since 2 years, I have regularly used Canva and Figma for my work as well as personal projects.
Here’s what I learned about these two tools.
They Are Not Competitors.
When you compare Canva and Figma, it’s equivalent of comparing a cricket T20 (20 over match) to an ODI (50 over match). Both serve different purpose even though they belong to the same industry.
Canva is an easy tool. Figma is a sophisticated tool.
In Canva, there are ready-made templates that boost your productivity considerably. Canva takes care of theme, color, alignment, text-font, placement, and other aspects of a clean and compelling design.
It also gives you the freedom to choose your own design elements and frame your design as you want. Such flexibility is rare in other tools.
Figma provides a clean slate to start working on your design. There are no pre-defined templates like you find in Canva. You have to create every element on your own or import it from sites such as Freepik, Unsplash, Pixabay, Font Awesome, and others.
Figma is best suited to professionals who want to give a personal touch to their design. The ones who want to take care of every single detail and make the design personalized for brands.
Figma Leads With Plugins
Figma has a whole different page for plugins. These plugins give you an added advantage while working with a diverse team or importing resources from other known sites.
Canva lacks plugin advantage. Yes, Canva does provide a few plugins such as Canva for Wordpress. But yet, the features aren’t as fancy as Figma. Figma promotes its plugin feature as a medium to connect with other users and community members.
One such plugin is Figma Chat — it allows you to send text and interact with frames with other users in the same file.
Thus, again Figma stands true to professional standards. But don’t make up your mind yet! Canva hasn’t lost.
In Canva, you don’t start from scratch
Many small businesses and firms believe in Canva. It saves a ton of time, money and frustration.
Canva provides two alternatives to design. You can choose to discover styles or you canstart with a blank template. Either way, you’re not empty- handed. The left panel allows access to different backgrounds, design elements, GIFs, images — free and paid, uploads, grid structures, and much more.
Figma Loves Layers
It’s super easy and fun to work with layers. Just like Adobe Photoshop but less complicated.
You can name your layers, group them, push them up and down as per your convenience. A designer’s paradise is a simple layer management system that Figma provides.
Canva is a mess in terms of layer management. It provides options to push element up or down to a relative element but there’s no naming or any kind of practice that eases the process. I personally don’t recommend Canva if you’re working on a design that incorporates several small elements.
Let’s take element A & B as examples. B is hiding behind A. Let’s say we want to move B to another position. You can’t access B as it lies behind A. your best bet is to move A to another position to access B. I know, it’s not user friendly!
Web Designers Love Figma
With Figma, one can design a sophisticated prototype look of a website and present it to the team easily.
Many UI/UX Designers today prefer Figma to create UI frameworks. With its clean UI and dashboard, it allows for unadulterated work. By unadulterated, I mean, a design that replicates designers thought-process.
Recently, Figma introduced another feature that allows you to hide the Figma footer while presenting your mock website to your team. It reduces confusion when testing websites and apps. So, you can take the whole benefit of presentation mode.
Better Navigation In Figma
Do you need to work on your year old design? What’s the best strategy here?
If you saved your projects month wise or day wise, it becomes easy to factor out design when you don’t remember the name of the file.
But sometimes, we don’t do that. We don’t follow the naming convention nor do we understand a designers dilemma.
A designer’s dilemma is naming the different versions of the same design file.
Structuring is very important in design work. If you don’t you’re going to lose your file for sure!
Figma promotes a hierarchical structure where you can have multiple designs or frames in a single file. Sadly Canva doesn’t have this feature. A single design is created in single template file. In Canva, you’d have to put the designs in a separate folder that belong to the same project or portfolio.
As you see, I have written more about the features of Figma overtaking the features of Canva.
After bragging about Figma, let me tell you I still use Canva and advise my friends to do the same. I use Canva everyday. It’s easy, super fun and admirable.
Both the tools serve different purpose. As a content creator, I’d rarely have to go to Figma. My friend, who’s a designer uses Figma daily. He rarely uses Canva.
So after reading my brief personal analysis of both these tools, you decide which serves you best.
