Figma vs Canva: The ultimate 2026 showdown for collaborative brand assets

If you’re trying to figure out how creativity, ownership, and speed should coexist inside your organization, you’ve probably found yourself comparing tools like Figma and Canva.  

You might be wondering:

• Who should be able to create brand assets?
• How much control is enough without slowing teams down?
• How do you scale output without breaking consistency?
   

Let’s take a closer look at how Figma and Canva support very different ways of working and what that means for collaborative brand asset creation in 2026.

Here's what both Figma and Canva are really competing for: they want to be the place where everything brand-related lives. So, the goal is the same but with totally different execution.

How Figma does it

Figma thinks about brand assets like a design system. Everything is connected through components.

You've got:

• Component libraries where you build once, use everywhere
• Design tokens that keep your colors and typography consistent
• Version history so you can see (and undo) every change
• Auto-layout that makes things responsive automatically
• Variables that link design decisions across all your files

When your design team updates a button style, it updates everywhere. But this only really works when the people maintaining your system know their way around design tools.

How Canva does it

Canva thinks about brand assets as templates you can use.

You've got:

• Brand kits where all your approved colors, fonts, and logos live
• Locked elements so people can't accidentally mess up your logo
• Template libraries organized by what you're actually making (social posts, decks, docs)
• Brand controls that limit which fonts and colors people can even access
• Approval workflows for stuff that needs a second pair of eyes

Marketing team creates the templates once, then anyone in the company can use them. When your brand colors change, they update everywhere. This works when you need a lot of people making stuff quickly.

This is where things get interesting. Both tools have an opinion on who should be allowed to create brand assets and how much freedom they should have.

Figma: "Let's be careful here"

Figma is slowly opening up to non-designers, but carefully:

• Dev Mode lets engineers grab what they need without breaking anything
• FigJam is for brainstorming and workshops
• You can set permissions so people can comment or view, but not edit
• They're simplifying things, but it still assumes you know your way around design

The underlying belief here is that good brand work needs design thinking. We'll bring more people into the conversation, but the actual making still needs someone who knows what they're doing.

Canva: "Everyone's a creator now"

Canva's whole thing is making design accessible to everyone:

• Drag and drop that actually works
• Templates that handle the hard layout stuff for you
• Magic Resize so you don't have to remake everything for different sizes
• Suggestions for layouts based on what you're working on
• Combinations of elements that already look good together

The underlying belief here is that brand safety comes from making things simple and constrained. Give everyone the power to create, but make it really hard to go off-brand.

The big question

Figma asks: How do we bring more people into the design process?

Canva asks: How do we let people create without needing a design process?

It's a fundamental disagreement about whether brand consistency happens through:

• Giving people powerful tools but limiting who uses them (Figma)
• Giving everyone access but limiting what they can do (Canva)

In 2026, brands aren't making 5 big campaigns a year anymore. They're shipping dozens, sometimes hundreds, of variations every month with localized content, A/B tests, regional adaptations, and same-day turnarounds.

The question is: how do you move that fast without everything falling apart?

Figma: build it right, scale it smart

Figma's approach is all about systems:

• Designers build components with variants built in
• Trained team members create new stuff using those components
• Changes flow through everything automatically
• You get high-quality, systematic output

The upside: Incredible power and flexibility if you have the design resources.

The catch: Your speed is limited by how available your designers are. Every little update, like resizing, tweaking the copy, making a version for LinkedIn, etc., needs someone who knows Figma. That queue gets long fast.

Canva: Templates all the way down

Canva's approach is about pre-solving common problems:

• Templates cover most of what you need to make regularly
• Anyone can duplicate and adapt without waiting for a designer
• AI tools (Magic Write, background remover) speed things up
• You can create and schedule in bulk for campaigns

The upside: Non-designers can ship stuff daily without creating bottlenecks.

The catch: You're working within template constraints. Complex, custom work is harder.

Here's the thing: choosing between Figma and Canva isn't really about features. It's about what kind of organization you are (or want to be).

The Figma org structure

• Your design team owns the system
• Other teams either get outputs from design or submit requests
• Quality is controlled through design review
• Brand stays consistent because creation is limited to people who know what they're doing

This makes sense when:

• You have a solid design team
• Your brand work is complex and needs expertise
• You're okay trading some speed for precision
• Your volume is manageable through expert channels

The Canva org structure

• Your brand team sets up templates and guardrails
• Every team creates within those boundaries
• Quality is controlled through how the templates are designed
• Brand stays consistent through locked elements and brand kits

This makes sense when:

• You need high output across lots of teams
• Your brand work follows repeatable patterns
• Speed matters more than infinite flexibility
• Your team is distributed or doesn't have design resources

Two Philosophies

Figma's worldview: Creativity is a specialist skill. We support it with systems.

Canva's worldview: Creativity is something everyone should be able to do. We enable it with guardrails.

Neither is wrong. They're just optimized for different realities.

Plot twist: the gap between these tools is shrinking fast.

Figma is getting more accessible

• Figma Slides for making presentations
• Easier sharing and commenting for non-designers
• AI features to speed up production
• More template options and community resources

Figma is quietly admitting that not everything needs to be built from scratch by experts.

Canva is getting more sophisticated

• Advanced layout controls and grid systems
• Animation and motion design tools
• Real collaboration features (comments, version history, permissions)
• Developer handoff options
• Enterprise brand management that actually works

Canva is proving that "easy to use" doesn't mean "dumbed down."

The overlap is real

Both can now handle:

• Creating and managing brand assets
• Team collaboration and feedback
• Building template and component systems
• AI-assisted design
• Version control and approvals

So the question isn't really "can they do this?" anymore. It's "which one does it in a way that fits how we actually work?"

At the end of the day, Figma vs Canva is a philosophical statement about creativity.

Here's what the smartest teams are doing: they're not choosing. They're using both strategically.

Use Figma for:

• Building your design system
• UI/UX and product design
• Core brand identity work
• Complex projects that need exploration
• Designer-to-designer collaboration

Use Canva for:

• Daily marketing execution
• Sales decks and customer materials
• Internal communications
• Regional and localized content
• High-volume campaign assets
• Anything non-designers need to create

Your designers focus on the complex systems and big problems. Everyone else executes within those systems at speed. Each tool does what it's actually good at.

Figma is still essential for design teams building sophisticated systems. That hasn't changed, and it won't. What has changed is how much brand work needs to happen, how fast it needs to happen, and who needs to be able to do it.

Canva shines by making it possible for way more people to create good work without slowing everything down. The teams that figure this out don't pick sides. They use the right tool for the right job.

See how Design Pickle can help speed your content creation with custom Canva templates 👉 book a demo