It’s essential for any business to be able to create excellent graphics and photos for its company branding. With a multitude of graphics and photo editors out there, it can be a wearying experience trying to figure out which software is right for your business. So let’s take a look at what’s out there and hopefully simplify things a bit.
1. Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is an intuitive and powerful graphic editing software. Geared toward improving your social media presence. Spark makes it easy for you to build graphics from the ground up. With features like color match and suggestions for complimentary colors, an inexperienced user can quickly come with something professional and visually appealing.
Adobe Spark is a subscription based service with a tier based pricing strategy. The free subscription comes with basic templates and elements. The individual subscription unlocks all for the premium design elements. If you’re interested in trying it, there is a free 14 day trial, After that you’ll owe $9.99/month. If you have a team that you would like to access Adobe Spark, a team subscription is $19.99/mo.
2. Canva
Canva is an extremely popular web-based graphic content editor. Similar to Adobe Spark, Canva is highly user friendly. With many templates to choose from and useful design suggestions, it doesn't take long to create a fine looking graphic, whether it’s for a slide presentation or a social media post. If you import your company logo Canva will analyze the colors and create complimentary recommended colors for the rest of your design.
Canva also offers a free version and paid subscriptions tiers with increasing features. The free tier boasts 250,000 templates and 100+ design types. Unlike the free tier in Adobe Spark, the free version in Canva allows for team collaboration. The pro version costs $12.99/mo or $119.99/yr and opens up many new features. It allows you to create a brand kit and upload your own fonts and logos. Boasting 420,000 new templates and 75 million premium stock photos, Canva is sure to get your branding graphics in high gear. Canva Pro allows for scheduling social media content on 7 platforms. Additionally, 100 GB of cloud storage comes with the pro tier. The enterprise tier is $30 per person per month and offers multiple brand kits, unlimited cloud storage, and 24/7 support.
3. Vectr
Vectr is a free design tool that works with vector graphics. Vector graphics are a type of file that can be enlarged indefinitely without reducing the resolution of the graphic. This makes vector graphics distinct from bitmap graphics, which have a specified number of pixels and will become grainy-looking when expanded.
Vectr offers the ability to create high quality graphics for free. However, unlike the paid subscription services listed above. Vectr does not include a huge library of templates and elements to start with. Rather, you import them or create them yourself. This does take more work in some ways than Canva or Spark would. However, the fact that it's free may offset the limited types of features offered by Vectr to you.
4. Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is another graphic design editor that works with vector graphics as well as bitmap files. Similar to Canva or Adobe Spark, there is a free version of Gravit Designer as well as a paid version. Gravit Designer also offers cloud storage.
The free and paid version of the software have some distinct differences. The free version of this software is online based only and offers 500 MB of storage. It limits the resolution of files you may download and does not allow for all types of export. The paid version, on the other hand, has unlimited cloud storage and allows for full resolution exporting in many formats. You can also download Gravit Designer and work offline with the paid version.