ci-book™ Enterprise versus Canva® Enterprise

Introduction

ci-book™ and Canva® serve different requirements and tasks in brand management: Canva® focuses on design, form and the process of creation. ci-book™ focuses on design compliance, content and the customisation process.

With ci-book™, the visual appearance of a brand is specifically set to the specifications from the corporate design to prevent accidental changes by users. The more design freedom users are given, the higher the risk of unwanted results for print or online media that are no longer within the scope of the CD.

With Canva®, on the other hand, these restrictions can be made less precisely or not at all. The Canva® Design Editor offers users more options and functions for simple design within the framework of the layout elements authorised by Canva® than was ever intended for the ci-book™ Universal Editor.

Both solutions have many features in common but also have some differences; Canva® Enterprise is more focused on free design and parallel collaboration, while ci-book™ offers additional features for campaign management, job ad placement and detailed role and process management.

Initial experience with Canva® has shown that although jointly developed designs provide a good basis, they are by no means a fully-fledged replacement for the templates created in Adobe InDesign, especially when it comes to the quality specifications for high-quality print products or the PDF/X standards to be adhered to when generating PDFs.

Risks and limitations when using Canva® Enterprise

Limited workflow options

The approval process in Canva® is linear and not very customisable. The definition and provision of extensive workflows, e.g. multi-level approvals, conditional approvals, necessary escalations, integrable proofreading or translation options, are sometimes not possible or only available with difficulty. Canva® is well suited for visual brand communication in small teams or departments, but rather limited for complex workflows, sophisticated design, data protection-compliant transfers/storage, automation or process integration in large, internationally active companies with existing, extensive IT environments.

Limited licence management

Obviously, Canva® does not have individual licensing per asset, which can lead to confusion when using certain layout or design elements. To be on the safe side, already licensed brand assets (texts, images, videos) should therefore be managed and stored locally or internally and not in Canva® without exception.

Lack of protection of intellectual property

With Canva® there is no guarantee of exclusivity of designs, which can lead to trademark conflicts. In addition, different legal situations in the international environment, e.g. fair use in the USA versus copyright in the EU, lead to potential legal disputes.

Insufficient data protection

Canva® stores data on servers in the USA and Australia, among other places, which is not GDPR-compliant without additional protective measures. In particular, the use of ‘Canva® AI’ is not advisable today, as a cooperation with the US company ‘Open AI’ has been established and data generated or processed by the AI is transmitted to Open Ai for training purposes. [Source: AI Product Terms, Technology partners: https://www.canva.com/policies/ai-product-terms/ [2025-04-16]] In addition, Canva® does not appear to have guaranteed data residency, which is an issue for countries with strict data localisation laws, and no end-to-end encryption of content at the user level during creation/design.

Compliance concerns

Canva® should only be used in combination with clear policies and guidelines or restricted to use for non-critical content/data/materials and privacy, licence and T&C checks should be carried out by legal/compliance departments in advance and explicitly to Canva® Enterprise's specifications.

Reduced layout options

Canva® is mainly suitable for simple, visual designs and, compared to Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, offers few to no functions for complex layouts with necessary layers and, for example, typographic fine-tuning.

Limited automation capability

Extensive automation requires extra development and implementation, especially if separate database connections are required for DAM, PIM or ERP systems, for example.

Limited integration capability

Canva® offers only limited or restricted integrations for existing, company-specific IT environments, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Azure AD, SharePoint, Amazon AWS and comparable services, which can lead to media disruptions, inefficient maintenance processes and so-called shadow IT.

Difficult user management

Large companies often have difficulties managing authorisations and roles for specific user groups in Canva® and lack differentiated role and rights management and traceability for the administration level.

Lack of cost control

To the best of our knowledge, licence prices cannot be controlled according to the respective role of a user and lead to unnecessary costs, especially if not all authorisations/functions need to be used. In addition, there is no central licence management across several regions, which can lead to inactive/unused but still chargeable licences.

Weak templates and media management

With many templates, clarity becomes problematic. There is a lack of sufficient search or filter options and intelligent organisation of templates, e.g. regarding their duration, keywording or authorship. Functions such as the maintenance and assignment of metadata, tags, usage rights and versioning for media data or digital assets are also missing.

Rudimentary reporting

The reports and analyses in Canva® do not provide sufficient insight into usage behaviour or the performance of individual content, templates or applications. In addition, reports and the graphical presentation of results in the form of charts, diagrams or similar are rather rudimentary and therefore cannot be used directly for internal reports in PowerPoint or similar applications.

Critical lock-in effect

Changed templates or designs are not fully portable with Canva®, which can lead to data loss and increased additional work when switching to another solution. Export options for professional, reusable formats, e.g. for further processing or post-processing in Adobe InDesign with its INDD/IDML formats, could not be identified.

Problematic PDF exports and production of print templates

PDF exports are either too large or too heavily compressed, do not comply with the full PDF/X standard for the print sector and often show blatant colour deviations between RGB and CMYK.

Note: The above points are based on currently available information and unspecified, chargeable development services provided by Canva®.

Feature comparison between ci-book™ and Canva®