Canva

Canva is the highest-leverage design purchase for any company where the people making things are not designers. That is most companies, most of the time.

The template library and the brand kit do the work. A marketing coordinator produces an on-brand social post, a recruiter builds a job ad, an ops manager makes a training deck — none of them open a blank canvas, and none of them produce something the brand owner has to fix. Canva Teams at roughly $100 per year per person for small teams (with a generous free tier underneath) is trivial next to the design hours it displaces. The AI features — background removal, Magic Studio generation, resize-to-format — remove the specific tasks that used to require asking a designer for a favour.

It is important to be clear about what it is not. There are no real components in the design-system sense, no interactive prototyping, and no developer handoff. Anything destined to become software should not be designed here. Output can look templated when nobody customizes, which is a discipline problem rather than a software one, and heavy files in the browser can feel sluggish.

Our guidance: buy Canva for marketing, sales, HR and operations, and buy Figma for product. Companies that try to force one tool to cover both ends up with unhappy designers or unusable marketing output — running both is cheaper than either failure.