Open source alternatives to Canva

What Canva does

Canva lets people without design training make visual content in the browser or its apps. You choose a template for a social post, presentation, poster, document or video, replace text, photos and elements, apply a brand kit, and download or publish the result. Downloads cover JPG, PNG, SVG, standard and print PDF, GIF and MP4. Plans run from Free and Pro to Business, introduced in October 2025 for small teams, and Enterprise, alongside free programs for education and nonprofits. Canva also offers a growing set of AI tools.

Why people look for an alternative

• Changes to team pricing. In April 2024 Canva ended its early Teams pricing, which included extra seats at no additional cost, and planned to move teams to per-person pricing starting at three people. After complaints it kept the old pricing for existing early teams and published a promise of at least 60 days’ notice before price changes. In October 2025 Canva Business became the plan for new teams.
• Data location and AI training. Canva’s privacy policy says information is stored and processed in the United States, Australia, Singapore, the EU, the UK, the Philippines and New Zealand, and that Canva may use users’ content and uploads to train its models, with a setting to manage that preference.
• Paid export options. Transparent backgrounds, SVG with transparency, CMYK color and compression settings are limited to paid plans.
• Designs stay in the service. Downloads are finished images, PDFs and videos; the editable design lives in Canva’s cloud.
• No self-hosting. Canva is available only as a hosted service.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Templates. How many come with the tool and how easily your team can make its own.
2. Brand control. Brand kits with colors, fonts and logos, and shared access for a team.
3. Outputs. Social formats, print PDF with bleed and crop marks, animation and video export.
4. Collaboration. Real-time co-editing, comments and share links.
5. Running it. The services and storage a self-hosted install needs, and what content you must load yourself.
6. License terms. Any attribution or branding conditions for hosting it for others.

Which one to choose

Doory is the open source tool that targets Canva’s main job. It is a browser editor with templates, several pages per design in different sizes, brand kits, animations and audio, real-time co-editing, comments and version history, and it exports PNG, JPG, SVG, print-ready PDF, MP4, WebM and GIF. You can self-host it with Docker Compose or use the author’s instance. Be aware that it is a very young project at version 0.1.0 with ten starter templates, that a new install has to download its fonts, icons and templates, and that its Attribution Assurance License requires a visible credit in any copy you host for others. There is no documented import of Canva designs.

For one-off image edits without templates, miniPaint runs in the browser and keeps images on your device. Teams designing app or website screens rather than marketing graphics should look at Penpot.