Canva Bets Big on a ‘Creative Operating System,’ Makes Affinity Free Forever

Canva unveiled what co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams called a “Creative Operating System” today, marking the company’s boldest evolution since its founding. Broadcast live from Sydney to more than six million viewers worldwide, the announcement introduces a three-tier framework that unites creativity, intelligence and platform infrastructure into a single, AI-powered ecosystem.

“What we’re unveiling today will redefine what Canva means to people,” Adams said during a pre-announcement analyst event. “It’s a full end-to-end creation experience that allows you to create any content powered by AI.”

Company Momentum

Canva’s  global visual communication platform enables anyone, from individuals to large enterprises, to create presentations, videos, websites and marketing materials through an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface powered by templates and automation.

The platform serves more than 260 million monthly active users across 190 countries. Of those, 29 million are paying seats contributing to an annualized revenue run rate of $3.5 billion. Backed by a global team of roughly 5,000 employees, the company’s recent secondary valuation of $42 billion indicates investor confidence in its long-term growth trajectory.

Beyond its business reach, Canva is steadily becoming part of the fabric of how people learn to create. More than 100 million students and teachers now use Canva for education, and 850,000 nonprofit organizations depend on its visualizations to communicate, educate and advocate.

Similar to Apple’s early presence in classrooms during the 1980s and the widespread adoption of Google Classroom in the 2010s, Canva is positioning itself as the platform that will shape how people and organizations learn to express ideas and bring them to life.

Now, Canva is setting its sights on becoming a global creative infrastructure.

The Big Idea Behind Canva’s Creative Operating System

Canva’s next phase builds directly on its growing influence and user base. Its  “Creative Operating System” design platform is organized into three integrated layers:

1. Visual Suite. The all-in-one canvas for presentations, video, docs, whiteboards, websites, print, and now email and forms.
2. Canva AI. An embedded intelligence tier that understands design components, not just pixels, and meets users where they work inside the editor.
3. Platform layer. Brand systems, publishing endpoints, data, and now a lightweight growth engine for marketers.

Source: Canva

The structure reflects Canva’s broader ambition to evolve from a standalone design tool into a full-fledged productivity and workflow platform. The repositioning enters  Canva into a competitive landscape that includes enterprise content management systems, marketing automation platforms and creative cloud ecosystems. It’s a deliberate effort to expand from individual creators to enterprise-scale content operations.

The Visual Suite and Its Four Practical Additions

Let’s start with what’s new in Canva’s Visual Suite layer. Most users know this part of the platform best, the creative workspace where content comes to life. Today’s updates make it easier to move from idea to execution across video, data, interactivity and email within a single environment.

Source: Canva

Video 2.0 introduces a rebuilt editing experience for both desktop and mobile users. The new timeline structure feels more aligned with professional editing tools while staying accessible to non-experts. A refreshed template library and integrated AI assistant also help users quickly move from rough footage to finished, fit-for-purpose content.

Email Design addresses what Canva calls the “final frontier” of visual communication. It's a tool to create branded, responsive emails without writing code. Teams can start with drag-and-drop templates, customize layouts in the familiar Canva editor, and then export clean HTML files ready for any major email platform. For many marketing and communications teams, this fills a long-standing gap between design and delivery.

Interactive Design builds on Canva’s growing presence in web and presentation workflows. Users can now embed forms directly into websites, slides or even emails, with all responses flowing into Canva Sheets. This turns static designs into interactive experiences suitable for gathering feedback, registering events or running classroom assessments.

Data in Canva Code deepens the connection between creative and technical work. Designers can now connect live data from Sheets to Canva Code projects and bring those interactive elements back into the editor to create dynamic assets such as calculators, product builders or task trackers that stay in sync with real-time data.

Together, these updates strengthen Canva’s position as a full-fledged workspace for visual communication that reduces friction between creativity, interactivity and data.

An AI Layer That Evolves the Experience from Prompts to Full Compositions

Canva’s most consequential move is an internally developed design foundational model. From my perspective, this is one of the most exciting aspects of this product update.

Source: Canva

Unlike image generators that return flat pictures, Canva states its model understands and can manipulate layers, brand elements, fonts, templates, audio, animations and transitions. Adams called it “the missing piece” for turning conversations into editable, on-brand designs inside real workflows.

Two experiences bring that intelligence to life:

• AI Where You Work. AI shows up inside the elements and design tabs that already receive a billion monthly searches. Users can generate a slide, a template, or an element in context, with style-matching to keep visuals coherent. There is also a first wave of 3D graphics with rotation and animation support.
• Ask Canva. A context-aware helper you can call while editing any design. Highlight an element to get design advice, rewrite copy inside docs or emails, or request image edits using Canva’s integrated models. “This marks a hallmark moment in the way that you interact with AI through the work that you’re doing,” said Adams.

On safety and provenance, Canva uses C2PA, an emerging industry standard that tags digital content with secure metadata to verify when and how it was created, helping audiences distinguish authentic work from AI-generated material.

The company also runs its AI-assisted features through bias and safety reviews to ensure responsible use. In addition, Canva emphasizes localized experiences so that generated outputs reflect the context and culture of users in different markets, from São Paulo to Jakarta.

The Platform Layer and Its Expanding Reach

The final layer of Canva’s Creative Operating System focuses on how creative work connects to business outcomes. The Platform Layer’s new capabilities bridge creation, governance and professional design.

Canva Grow serves as a lightweight marketing engine for teams to create, publish and measure content performance within the same ecosystem. Users can draw inspiration from live industry ads, generate campaigns through AI and refine creative assets based on built-in insights.

Brand System brings more structure to enterprise design management. Teams can import existing brand guidelines from a PDF or website, automatically generate style kits, and ensure brand consistency through real-time checks and AI-assisted corrections.

The final pillar in this layer is Canva’s use of Affinity, which it acquired in 2024, to further its reach into professional design workflows. Affinity was known for its suite of creative tools - Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher - which served as a cost-effective alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. Canva has rebuilt Affinity as an all-in-one professional design application that supports vector, pixel and layout editing in a single workspace. 

Source: Canva

And here is the shocker move: Canva will now offer Affinity free of charge, giving designers access to professional-grade tools without subscription costs. The tight integration between Affinity and Canva allows creative teams to craft detailed assets in Affinity and scale them across campaigns inside Canva’s ecosystem.

The business model is straightforward: make the “craft tools” free and drive deep integration into Canva’s paid plans to unlock premium AI features inside Affinity such as generative edits, background removal, 4K image generation and deeper Affinity-to-Canva integrations. 

Adams positioned it as access and goodwill: “We’re putting professional creativity in the hands of everyone in the world… free forever.”

Why This Move Deserves Attention

Canva’s strategy delivers a trifecta impact across its key audiences—individual creators, enterprises and professional designers—each central to its growth strategy. The fact that it is addressing all of them in this product announcement is powerful.

For individuals and small teams, Canva is eliminating the messy middle of content operations. Video, sites, forms, email and data-linked widgets can now be created within a single environment powered by AI that understands brand context.

For enterprises, the combination of Brand System + AI defines the story. If Ask Canva and AI Where You Work can reliably generate on-brand assets within governance boundaries, organizations gain creative velocity without losing control. Now add in Canva Grow’s performance loop. This becomes a pragmatic marketing flywheel: ship, measure and iterate faster based on what the market sees.

For professional designers, Affinity Free Forever reframes the economics and workflow friction of modern design. The unified app model and Canva bridge reduce the “tool tax” of switching between vector, raster, layout and handoff tools. It’s a deliberate split, free craft tools complemented by paid AI at scale, designed to win favor with studios and in-house creative teams alike.

Closing Analysis

Taken together, the Visual Suite, AI Layer and Platform Layer illustrate how Canva is maturing from a creative tool into a full-scale content operations platform. The updates move the company further into enterprise and marketing workflows while preserving the accessibility that made it successful with educators, nonprofits, and small teams.

This evolution also underscores a broader industry pattern: creativity and productivity are converging. By embedding AI, governance, and professional design tools into a single environment, Canva is aligning itself with how modern organizations actually work—creating, publishing, and measuring in one continuous cycle.

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