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What are the best Canva alternatives in 2026?

Published 2026-10-13 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

Canva alternatives are now a real decision: Penpot's Professional plan costs $0 per user per month and Doory self-hosts free, both verified on 13 October 2026. Penpot's paid tier is $7 per editor per month and Doory uses a custom attribution licence rather than an OSI-approved one.

Key facts

What matters

Doory, a browser design editor published on GitHub on 10 October 2026, reached 803 stars and 33 forks within three days.
Doory's licence is the Attribution Assurance License, not an OSI-approved one: commercial use is allowed, but the running app must credit the author.
Penpot is MPL-2.0 and lists Professional at $0 per user per month, Unlimited at $7 per editor per month capped at $175 per month, and Enterprise at $25 per member per month.
Figma's free Starter plan includes unlimited drafts and up to 500 AI credits per month; a Professional full seat lists at $16 per month.
Canva's pricing page refused our automated check on 13 October 2026, so the table below quotes only prices read on the vendors' own pages.

What is Doory?

Doory is a browser-based design editor published on GitHub on 10 October 2026 that its own README describes as an open-source Canva alternative. It is a React 19 and TypeScript front end over a Django 5 and PostgreSQL back end, shipped as a Docker Compose stack.

The launch numbers are real but young. The repository shows 803 stars, 33 forks and 19 open issues on 13 October 2026, three days after publication, and points to a hosted instance at doory.art.

The README lists layers, groups, masks, filters, curved text, snapping, rulers, multi-page documents, 27 enter and exit animations, 12 emphasis effects, 16 page transitions, a 24-loop music library with 88 sound effects, brand kits, comments, version history and real-time co-editing. Exports cover PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF plus MP4, WebM and animated GIF, with a print-ready PDF option for bleed and crop marks. Ten starter templates ship with it: gig poster, wedding invitation, event story, sale post, cafe flyer, quote card, resume, YouTube thumbnail, pitch deck and business card.

Designs made without an account stay in the browser. Sign in, and they live on whichever server runs Doory, which matters most when that server is yours.

Doory's licence is the part to read before migrating

The repository's LICENSE file is the Attribution Assurance License, adapted from BSD. You may run, modify and redistribute the code, including commercially, but running or redistributing it requires a prominent credit to the author (Doory by Siam, creator and maintainer of Doory) together with the repository URL, keeping the licence and NOTICE file alongside.

That clause is why GitHub reports the repository as NOASSERTION instead of naming an SPDX licence. Doory is source-available under a custom permissive-with-conditions licence, not OSI-approved open source in the sense Penpot is. If an agency wanted to white-label the editor for a client, the visible-credit requirement is the term that decides the deal.

Self-hosting is documented in three commands: copy .env.example to .env, set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY and POSTGRES_PASSWORD, then build and start the Compose stack. Server-side PDF export needs the headless Chromium image, stock photo search needs an Unsplash or Pexels key, and uploads can go to a local volume or S3-compatible storage. That is a Docker host to maintain, not a $5 shared plan, which is the real cost of free in this comparison.

Penpot is the mature open-source alternative

Penpot has been on GitHub since December 2015 and now reports 60,970 stars and 4,204 forks under MPL-2.0, which is the licence to pick if a mandatory credit banner is a problem for your team.

Its pricing page, read on 13 October 2026, lists Professional at $0 per user per month with no missing tools, Unlimited at $7 per editor per month with a cap of $175 per month no matter the team size, Enterprise at $25 per member per month for governance and centralized administration, and Private Server at $50,000 per year for dedicated infrastructure. The page offers separate Cloud (we host) and Self-host (you host) views.

The $0 seat is the honest differentiator. A team that only needs design and prototyping seats pays nothing, and Penpot's development history goes back to 2015, so migration material exists. What it does not have is Canva's template library or a social-post-first workflow: Penpot is a product design tool, not a poster maker.

Figma Starter and Photopea solve different jobs

Figma's Starter plan is free and, per its pricing page, includes unlimited drafts, UI kits and templates plus 150 AI credits per day up to 500 per month. Paid seats start at $16 per month for a Professional full seat, $12 for a Dev seat and $3 for a Collab seat; Organization runs $55 per full seat billed annually and Enterprise $90. AI credits are metered by plan, from 3,000 per month on Professional to 4,250 on Enterprise.

Photopea covers photo work rather than layout. Its site states that files open locally with no uploads and that it reads more than 40 other formats on top of PSD, which makes it the replacement for paid image editors rather than for Canva boards.

Neither one replaces Canva for somebody who needs a finished template in five minutes. They replace parts of it, and for a lot of small teams that is enough.

How to choose between Canva alternatives

You want the design files on your own hardware: Doory or Penpot, both self-hostable. Budget a Docker host and somebody to maintain it.
You need a permissive licence with no credit clause: Penpot under MPL-2.0.
You need unlimited free seats: Penpot Professional at $0 per user per month.
You need a free tier for UI design with metered AI: Figma Starter.
You need browser photo retouching with local processing: Photopea.
You need the largest template library and do not care where the files live: stay on Canva and pay for it.

One caveat applies to every free route here: the software is free, the infrastructure is not. Doory needs a Docker host with PostgreSQL, and Penpot's self-host route puts the same burden on your team, so the saving against a Canva subscription gets measured against a hosting bill instead.

What we could not verify on 13 October 2026

Canva's own pricing page returned HTTP 403 to our request and a bot challenge in a browser, so no Canva plan prices appear in this article. Doory's README describes Canva as having a free plan plus paid Pro and Teams plans and a very large template library; treat that as a competitor's description, not a verified price list.

We also did not test Doory hands-on. The feature list, licence terms and deployment steps come from the repository files, and each price comes from the vendor's own pricing page on the date given. Doory is three days old at the time of writing, and adopting a three-day-old editor is a different bet from adopting Penpot, which dates to 2015, or Figma.

At a glance

Tool	Price (verified 13 Oct 2026)	Licence	Self-host	Best for
Doory	Free, every feature	Attribution Assurance (not OSI-approved)	Yes, Docker Compose	Teams that want designs on their own server
Penpot	Professional $0 user/mo; Unlimited $7 per editor/mo capped at $175/mo	MPL-2.0	Yes (self-host view)	Teams that need unlimited free seats
Figma	Starter free; Professional full seat $16/mo	Proprietary	No	UI and product design with a free tier
Photopea	Free per its website	Proprietary	No	Photo editing in a browser
Canva	Not verified this run: canva.com/pricing blocked our check	Proprietary	No	Non-designers who want a large template library

Canva alternatives compared on 13 October 2026, prices read on each vendor's own page

FAQ

Is Doory really free?

Its README says there are no plans, paywalls or ads, and every feature is available to everyone. The trade-offs sit elsewhere: the licence asks for a visible credit to the author, and self-hosting needs a Docker host with PostgreSQL.

Is Doory open source in the same way Penpot is?

No. Penpot publishes its code under MPL-2.0. Doory publishes under the Attribution Assurance License, which allows commercial use but requires a prominent credit in the running app, and that is why GitHub reports NOASSERTION instead of an SPDX licence for it.

What is the cheapest Canva alternative?

Penpot Professional is $0 per user per month and Doory is free to use, so both beat paying for Canva Pro if you can work with their editors. Canva also has a free plan; its paid tier prices were not verifiable in this run.