Canva Bought Pexels and Pixabay, and Launched New Unlimited Downloads Subscription!
It's another day of exciting news in the stock photo and online design world. Australian web-based design tool Canva just announced they have bought Pexels and Pixabay, two major free stock photo sites –that we include in our big list of the 27+ Best Free Photo Sites–, and their libraries will be now available for Canva users, totally free.
And there's more: the company also launched Photo Unlimited, a new subscription service for their own premium stock photo collection that adds to the on-demand buying options they already have.
If you use Canva to design your visuals, you're now certainly given a lot more options in great imagery to use! If you want to know more about this design tool, check out our Canva review coverage. Details on this and other purchases can be found in our Canva Stats report, don't miss it! And definitely read on for more details on these update!
Pexels & Pixabay: Millions of High-Quality Free Photos to Canva
So Canva has acquired Pexels and Pixabay, two German-based, very prominent and popular free stock photo sites. With over one million images in their libraries each, these sites are very reputable in the free image download field. So much so that they're two of the highest-ranked in our dedicated review of the Best Free Stock Photo Sites, reaching 4th and 1st place out of 27+ sites reviewed, and scoring 8 and 9 out of 10 points respectively.
Through this acquisition, Canva will make both sites' collections available in their platform, meaning all Canva users will now be able to search, test and use free images from Pexels and Pixabay in their designs in a whim, and at no cost.
This huge lot of free photos adds to Canva's existing gallery of free visual resources. As both free image providers focus strongly in authentic, trendy imagery, it's clear you will now never be short of choice of beautiful and compelling photos to use in your visuals designed with this tool. If you want to know more about Canva's service, read our Canva Pro review!
Plus, both Pexels and Pixabay will continue to offer their free files to everyone on their stand-alone websites, just like before.
Photo Unlimited: Canva's New Unlimited Downloads Subscription
At the same time, Canva announced a new buying option for their premium stock photo service, in the form of a monthly or annual subscription with unlimited downloads: Photo Unlimited.
Until now, you could use Canva's premium images paying $1 per-image and per-use (this is, to use in one design only), or $20 per-image for lifetime use. This on-demand option is still available.
But now you can also opt to pay $12.95 a month or $120 a year to get full access to their premium photo library. This is an interesting addition that will certainly appeal to you if you need lots of visuals all the time and you like to use professional, premium quality images in them.
Canva Moves Forward in Integrating Design and Stock Media in One Platform
While it was already a very user-friendly and intuitive graphic design tool and its offer of free and paid imagery to use in your projects is also not new, it's clear that with these purchases and developments Canva is seriously looking to take on other major companies offering integrations of stock media resources and image editing software, like Adobe Stock or Shutterstock.
We think it's a very interesting development and look forward to seeing how it goes! Are you using Canva already? Are you going to try them now? Tell us your thoughts!
