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12 Best QR Code Generators for Dynamic QR Codes (2021)
Written by:
Brian Nuckols
In this comparison guide for 2021, we compare the two popular online design tools.
Here’s what we’re comparing:
Right before the end, we also share a better alternative for easy and free online design with you.
Let’s get started.
Comparison Point #2: Templates
Comparison Point #4: Usability
Comparison Point #5: Mobile App
Comparison Point #6: Stock Photos
A Better Alternative to Canva and Adobe Spark
In our first section, we will compare the features of Canva and Adobe Spark.
These graphic design platforms have features that allow you to create websites, presentations, documents and all types of visual content.
While both platforms have their strengths, we will explore where Canva and Spark have specific advantages over the other, and whether there's a better alternative out there.
Canva’s real-time collaboration allows you to create designs with your team quickly. Whether you are working on social media posts or an important presentation, Canva makes it easy to collaborate on all of your devices.
Collaboration is essential because it can help you reduce the amount of time you spend on approving designs and other administrative tasks.
Using Canva, you can easily invite your team, modify editing permissions and begin the design process in minutes instead of days.
Another great feature that Canva offers is textured backgrounds. Because flat background colors are utilized so often, taking advantage of Canva’s textured background tool is a great way to make your designs unique.
The textured background tool allows you to make your digital design look more like materials in the physical world. For example, Canva has patterns that look like fabrics and different types of paper.
Another feature that Canva offers its users is a precise cropping tool. If you have several photos you are working with, it can be challenging to make sure they all look uniform and on-brand.
With the Canva cropping tool, you can quickly transform your picture in ways that help to streamline this process and create complementary designs.
Spark’s visual story editor allows you to create high impact and compelling video. You can combine different types of visual elements like photos, video clips, icons, text and animations to create dynamic video content.
Also, you can easily add separate sequences of images, video clips or icons into scenes that have cinematic effects. These cinematic effects help you create quality video stories without extensive editing experience.
The next feature to explore with Adobe Spark is the social media graphics creator. This creator is one of the significant pros of utilizing Adobe Spark.
Spark helps you take customization to the next level. You can adjust any aspect of your social media creation until you are happy with the final product.
Additionally, you can adjust color schemes and add text to any graphics. Plus, you add all types of icons, shapes, custom fonts and visual elements.
Another feature that Adobe Spark has is the animated effects tool. You can easily add animations to any photos or designs quickly.
Spark has an extensive library of animations you can take as examples for your next project.
Both Canva and Adobe Spark have pros and cons when it comes to their feature availability. If you are looking for collaboration, then Canva is a clear winner; however, If you are looking for strong performance on video, Spark deserves your attention.
However, both tools fall short when it comes to interactivity. When you are looking for a way to stand out in the crowded social media landscape, adding interactive animation is an excellent way to increase engagement.
When it comes interactivity, Visme stands out with the ability to easily animate objects and make charts interactive.
Sign up. It's free. Create engaging animated content with Visme.
In the next comparison point, we will compare Canva and Adobe Spark when it comes to templates.
Design templates refer to pre-designed visual assets that you can customize. Most typically, templates are made to conform to existing best practices for the particular type of asset you are using.
Canva’s templates are versatile and can help you bring your unique creative vision to life.
Canva allows you to modify any of the pre-existing images and colors. The ability to alter these elements helps to find alignment between the template and your brand.
Another benefit of Canva is they have over 250,000 free templates available for social media posts, presentations and more.
Adobe Spark also has over 20,000 templates that you can utilize for your designs. Adobe features preset templates that make use of bold color themes. Additionally, they showcase templates with colorful shapes and dynamic imagery.
Another benefit Spark has when it comes to templates is the existing integration with Adobe Fonts. This integration means that Adobe Spark can feature templates with animated text.
When it comes to templates, Canva is a clear winner on quality. With nearly ten times as many templates as Spark, you will find no shortage of options to browse during your design process.
However, sometimes quality is a better differentiator than quantity.
While Visme has less templates, there is a focus on professional design. Each Visme template is carefully designed to help you create unique visual content you likely won't find anywhere else with minimal effort.
Sign up. It's free. Create any type of social media graphic with Visme!
When it comes to pricing, both Canva and Spark utilize a similar model. You can download both apps for free. However, if you would like access to premium features, there is a subscription cost.
With these similarities in mind, we will move on to explore the different levels of access and cost for premium features across both Canva and Spark.
Canva has a robust free setting with the following features available.
Canva also has several premium features that you can pay extra to unlock. If your team is yourself and four other people or less, the price is $12.95 per month or $119.40 per year.
The premium costs you unlock with a premium membership include the following.
Also, if you need to share with more than four more users, Canva has additional costs built into their software.
Adobe Spark takes a different approach when it comes to premium pricing. While they have a free starter plan, the features are minimal. Essentially, the starter plan allows you to view the stock photos available to use.
You begin to unlock the premium features when you pay for an individual account. The personal accounts are $9.99 per month or $99.99 a year. Additionally, Spark offers a 14-day free trial so you can try the features before you purchase a plan.
The individual plan comes with the following features.
Another critical difference between Canva and Adobe Spark is that Spark has an additional fee involved in adding team members. You can add multiple users to your account starting at $19.99 a month or $239.88 a year.
Canva seems to win this category for two reasons. First, Canva has a robust free plan that far outstrips what Spark offers. Secondly, Spark charges almost double for team features up to 5 people.
Also, you have to upgrade to the paid plan to remove the Adobe Spark watermark.
Visme takes a different approach using a freemium model. This model gives you access to many features and templates when you sign up for the free version.
However, if you decide to upgrade to a paid plan — there are three to choose from —you get access to various premium elements, such as exclusive templates, a brand kit to store your logo, colors and fonts, extended download types and more.
In our next section, we will compare how Canva and Spark compare when it comes to usability. Usability includes how easy the content is to read on the apps and whether or not the content is available offline.
Ultimately we will explore how easy it is to use when it comes to navigating the application.
According to research by usability expert Cassidy Kolczun, Canva has strengths and weaknesses in usability.
For one, the template search process can be challenging for users. Some users find difficulties when they are trying to search for a specific template to meet their needs.
Also, a portion of users had challenges with editing text and design elements. These difficulties with editing were particularly pronounced on the mobile app.
With that said, Kolczun’s research demonstrates that Canva users can create designs even when they are new to the software and lack design experience.
An analysis of user reviews shows some challenges that Adobe Spark users report when it comes to usability.
Notably, some users struggle with the embed functionality. This struggle causes users to report negative experiences when embedding self-hosted videos on the Spark platform.
Adobe requires you to host any media through Adobe and you may require reviewing their tutorial for how to make this feature work.
Also, when it comes to building websites using the Spark app, many users request that they want the ability to create multi-page websites. Currently, Spark lacks the required functionality to handle this request.
When it comes to ranking how user-friendly these graphic design tools function as a web app, Canva is the clear winner if you need to embed any video content in your design or build web pages.
However, if you are looking for specific templates, Canva’s confusing search tool may be more a hindrance than a help.
If usability is crucial to you, then Visme is an excellent choice for your graphic design tool. Visme is founded on principles that include making design and usability focal points at the center of building great businesses.
Also, Visme places great value on information design and we put it at the forefront of our content. You do not need a graphic designer to create stunning content for your startup or social media platforms.
In our next section, we will discuss the mobile apps of both Canva and Adobe Spark.
Worldwide, users are demanding better mobile experiences when it comes to their design apps. This demand stems from the fact that many users are doing most of their work from a mobile device or tablet.
This section will explore how both Canva and Spark perform when it comes to common mobile app challenges like making navigation intuitive, ensuring a seamless experience across the mobile and desktop versions, and if the mobile version adequately helps users meet their goals.
Canva’s mobile app is available for iPhones, iPads and Android phones and tablets.
When it comes to Canva’s main value proposition, the app succeeds as many users quickly create professional-looking designs. Additionally, Canva’s mobile app is a useful tool for sharing creations on apps that are often used primarily on mobile devices.
Some of the most salient features for this purpose include the following.
Adobe Spark’s mobile app looks quite different from its desktop version. The desktop app functionality is split into three separate apps that you’ll have to download individually.
First, if you want to create social graphics, you can download the Spark Post app available on both Apple and the Google Play Store.
Next, if you want to create mobile websites using a drag and drop editor, you can download the Spark Page app. Spark Page is only available on Apple devices.
Finally, if you need to use Adobe Spark as a video editing tool, you will need to download the Spark Video app.
When it comes to mobile app functionality, Canva is a clear winner over Adobe Spark and Visme. As a designing tool for mobile, the ability to pack most of the desktop version functionality into the app makes it an excellent tool for those who work on mobile.
Downloading Canva from the app store is a smart move for users who value mobile performance.
In the sixth comparison point, we will review how both Canva and Adobe Spark perform when it comes to stock photos’ availability.
As a reminder, stock photos are images that are already prepared for use. When photographers of stock photos publish their work, they make it available using a specific license.
One of the significant advantages of using professional design tools is that you gain access to quality stock photos that are not already widely used.
Canva comes pre-loaded with thousands of high-quality stock photos that you can take advantage of in your designs.
Additionally, Canva has another benefit that can help you while creating designs.
You can stay inside of the Canva editor while you are selecting a stock photo. The advantage of staying inside the editor is you can quickly test design elements against the stock photos seamlessly.
Adobe Spark has a different approach to working with stock photos. Unlike Canva, you need to add a photo to your image library before using it in the editor.
With that said, Spark does have a few impressive integrations you can use on your project. For example, you can upload any images you need from the well regarded Adobe Stock images that Adobe's other tools like Photoshop and Illustrator are often used.
Additionally, Adobe Spark comes with an integration of the popular stock photo collection called Unsplash.
Unsplash is dedicated to sharing stock photography under a free license. Unsplash includes over 207,000 contributing photographers with over 2 million photos.
Adobe Spark wins this section for a couple of reasons. First, bringing together their well-known library of stock photos that comes pre-loaded in their creative cloud platform is a significant advantage.
Also, the built-in integration with Unsplash makes stock photos a strength for Adobe Spark.
If you're looking for a design tool that lets you access millions of stock photos and videos, make sure to check out Visme. You can also browse through thousands of free icons and shapes, and upload your own photos and videos to create your personal library.
Both Canva and Adobe have their strengths and weaknesses, and the tool you decide to pick should depend on your specific needs and usage.
For example, Canva offers a robust and useful real-time collaboration tool. This real-time collaboration makes it an excellent solution for teams working on a design that includes multiple collaborators.
However, using Adobe Spark may be a better fit for an individual designer who wants to work more with video and animation.
When it comes to choosing between Canva and Adobe Spark, it primarily comes down to the design projects that most interest you.
For example, Canva makes it much easier to work across iOS, Android and desktop because it maintains most of its functionality across the platforms.
However, Adobe Spark comes pre-packaged with premium stock photo integrations.
If you are looking for a tool that combines both tools’ strengths, a complete graphic design tool is Visme. With this tool, you can create stunning social graphics, infographics and more.
Visme offers more than 3,500 templates across 40+ categories, from Facebook posts, Instagram stories and animated charts to promo videos, presentations, reports and more.
Other exclusive features of Visme include:
Ready to take your visual content to the next level?
Sign up for a free Visme account today and end the Adobe Spark vs. Canva debate for good.
About the Author
Brian Nuckols is a writer working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He enjoys communicating visionary ideas in clear, action oriented language. When he’s not working on content for a transformative company you can find him analyzing dreams, creating music, and writing poetry.