Indesign or Canva?

16 April 2027:

Indesign or Canva?

I receive projects in both and I am happy to work in either format. The right one for you will depend on the nature of the document and even your organisational workflow. Here are some pros and cons of each to help you decide.

Indesign has been the industry-standard graphic design software for many years. It’s extremely sophisticated, which also means it takes a while to master the basics. It’s capable of almost anything you can think of, and as part of Adobe Creative Cloud it’s highly integrated with other flagship software packages such as Photoshop - which also take a while to learn.

Consequently Indesign will probably require you to have a trained graphic designer at hand, whereas Canva is a much simpler web-based alternative that makes a more friendly impression on DTP beginners. It’s more intuitive for placing text and imagery and has some excellent templates and AI features to compensate if you lack experience in graphic design.

However, as it doesn’t work offline, Canva can’t integrate with computer-aided translation tools such as translation memories nearly as well as Indesign. Recently Indesign has introduced functionality to deconstruct PDFs, which is a massive advance in workflow efficiency.

On balance, the longer and more complicated your document, the more likely it is that a familiarity with the more advanced feature set of Indesign will pay off in the long run. Having said that, the Adobe pricing policy for different package combinations seems conceived for maximum cash extraction compared to the simpler price tiers of Canva.