Canva is an online design tool. Social posts, presentations, flyers, short videos and documents all start from a template in the browser, and a team can share its brand colors and logos so everyone’s work matches.
Co-founders Melanie Perkins, the CEO, and Cliff Obrecht launched Canva in 2013. In 2025 it had more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paying ones, and its annual recurring revenue reached $4 billion by the end of the year, according to Obrecht, its COO.
Templates the whole team can fill in
Business use usually starts with brand templates. A designer builds a layout once and publishes it as a brand template, part of Canva’s Brand Kit, and everyone else works from it, so a branch manager’s event poster keeps the head office look. Brand templates need Canva Pro or above.
Adding data fields turns a template into something closer to a form. Canva’s Data autofill app marks which text boxes and image frames change, and Autofill then generates a fresh design for each set of values. Canva’s own examples include personalized invites, letters, training materials and pitch decks.
Filling a template from a record
The Autofill APIs let another system do the filling. It sends the field values and Canva builds the design as a background job, ready to collect when the job finishes. Any images go into the account’s Canva asset library first.
From there, the export API turns the design into a file such as a PDF, a PNG, a PowerPoint deck or an MP4, and the resize API makes copies at other dimensions. Canva’s developer docs include a reference app for estate agency software that fills brochure and listing templates with property details and photos.
For Salesforce, Canva publishes Canva for Salesforce. It fills Canva templates with data from accounts, contacts, opportunities and custom objects, and builds charts from Salesforce reports. The designs open in Canva straight from Salesforce for editing.
Inside the editor, Data Connector apps pull a table in from another system for Canva’s Bulk Create. The table stays linked to its source, so it can be refreshed without importing it again. Data Connector apps are open to Canva Business and Enterprise customers, and to Canva for Education and Nonprofits.
Designs into HubSpot and Mailchimp
HubSpot’s editors for pages, blog posts, emails and social posts have a Design with Canva option, as do its Facebook and LinkedIn lead ads. Canva opens in a new tab, and Return to HubSpot drops the finished image into HubSpot’s files tool. It’s available on every HubSpot plan. The Canva brand kit and fonts don’t carry over into HubSpot’s own editors, and the browser has to allow third-party cookies for HubSpot.
Mailchimp builds two Canva integrations. Publish to Mailchimp sends a Canva design across as a complete email with clickable links, while Mailchimp Canva Sync makes the Canva library available inside Mailchimp’s Content Studio.
Canva in Claude and ChatGPT
Canva’s connector for Claude, made by Canva and verified by Anthropic, can browse, summarize, autofill and generate designs from a chat. ChatGPT has a Canva app too, and by October 2025 people had held more than 26 million conversations with it.
The Claude connector runs on the Canva MCP server, which other AI assistants can connect to as well. Every person signs in with their own Canva account and can do only what their Canva permissions allow. Generating and exporting designs works on every plan, while autofill and brand templates need Canva Pro or above.
What Canva’s REST APIs cover
The Canva REST APIs, formerly the Connect APIs, let another platform upload assets, create designs, export files and manage folders on a user’s behalf, once that user connects their Canva account. Canva’s own example is a digital asset library that sends its assets to Canva and gets the finished designs back as files. Endpoints marked as preview can change without notice, and Canva advises against using them in production.
Webhooks report activity as it happens, including new comments and approval requests. An approval in Canva can then move the job along in another system the moment a manager signs it off.
Brand on every output
Canva’s Autofill and export APIs open up a lot of everyday design work to automation. A new property listing can produce its brochure, a booked event its poster and name badges, and a new hire their welcome pack, each one on brand and saved where the team needs it.
If the same flyer gets rebuilt by hand for every new listing or event, those hours are worth adding up. And if Canva is one of several design and marketing subscriptions, a review of the whole stack shows where they overlap.