Canva vs. coolab.ai vs. Adobe Creative Cloud Express: The Best Free Graphic Design

Deciding between Canva, Coolab.ai and Adobe Express will come down to your graphic design skills, expectations and need for tools and elements. Not a simple answer because we are not comparing apples to apples.
 
Melanie Perkins founded Canva in 2012. She started an online graphic platform for schools and nonprofits, and it grew to more than over 100 million monthly active users. The startup now has users from 190 countries. In short, they’ve become the fan-favorite of newbies overwhelmed with the more complex Adobe Illustrator launched in the 80s.
 
Adobe Express is Adobe’s response to Canva. It is more enterprise oriented and when Integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets, Adobe Express for Enterprise will streamline end-to-end content development workflows across larger organizations. Not as many templates as Canva and not as trendy as Coolb.ai. But it offers more powerful tools than Coolab.ai and Canva.
 
Coolab.ai was created by Urbacnoolab – an Ai design lab founded in 2018 first in the world to use Ai to design streetwear and sneakers in an industrial scale. The start-up believes that not all if the 100 million Canva users are satisfied with the overused and mediocre design templates and its goal is to make Ai-enabled top studio quality design available to all as templates coupled with a powered stack of Ai technology tools. It is the design app for all things future.
 
The Australian design software maker Canva is not only locked in mortal combat between Canva and Adobe. It is also going against Microsoft. There is clearly a generational divide between the incumbent and the upstarts and even Canva and Coolab.ai share many common values, both companies are deeply different at the core as well as target uses. Canva is the Walmart of design and there is a reason Walmart is such a big company. Coolab.ai is like Saks Fifth Avenue (or Selfridges if you live in the UK or Le Bon Marché if you live in France) and the focus is on design and the best design.
 
Canva’s vision is to "empower everyone in the world to design anything." Canva’s target users are the mass. Reducing all design types to millions of simplistic, me-too and overused templates. It has reached a point of diminished return when more is not better. And with ever expanding scope to documents and presentations are not helping, but their long-term vision is to become part of your desktop. In short, Canva isn’t for amazing design outcomes. And the top 10% better quality templates are not free.


Coolab’s vision is to provide “stop studio quality design powered by generative tech”. The team has a deep history in design, tech and innovation. The goal is generating freshest designs powered by human x AI and new designs and Ai assets are delivered like daily drops in streetwear. It is a proof that template-based design does not need to be boring and repetitive.No premium content and all templates and assets are free. It is better if you are designing marketing campaigns. Futuristic design is their thing.
 
Another good mention is Kittl, a German-based design platform start-up making design easy. It is not a Canva, but more of an easier-to-use cloud-based Illustrator. They have much deeper and better tools for typography for more complex design. It is better if you are designing T-shirts and tattoos. Vintage is their thing.
 
All four are uniquely different and each serve their respective target customers. The most interesting feature on Kittl is it automatically detects your project’s colors and creates groups of variations for you. The most interesting feature on Coolab.ai is a feature that AI can extend and remix a design for you based on what you pick.
 
Canva, Coolab.ai, Adobe Express and Kittl all are part of a new design future – which is making it easy for everyone to design.