Virtualbadge.io VS Canva: Who is the Virtual Badge King?

If you’re on a hunt for the best design tool for creating virtual badges and certificates - you’re in the right place.

Whether you’re just casually researching or have already decided that one of these tools will be your next partner in crime years to come, we’ve got your back.

You’ll learn the core differences, primary use-cases, and overall look and feel for both Virtualbadge.io and Canva. 👀

We’ll evaluate them based on the following criteria:

1. Ease-of-use
2. Features
3. Customer support
4. Who is it intended for?
5. Pricing

We’ll also highlight the downsides of using Canva instead of Virtualbadge.io — a tool specifically made for virtual badges.

Let’s begin!

Table of Contents

Using Canva For Digital Certificates and Badges: What to Expect?

Canva Badge and Certificate Features Overview

Badge Logo

Certificate

What’s So Great About Canva?

The Many Downsides of Using Canva for Digital Badges and Certificates

Canva Pricing

Virtualbadge.io: Social Media-First Digital Certificate Solution

Virtualbadge.io Features Overview

Why You Should Choose Virtualbadge.io

In Which Case Should You Opt For Canva Instead?

Virtualbadge.io Pricing

Final Thoughts

Canva For Digital Certificates and Badges: What to Expect?

Canva is a design-first tool, and as such, it is easy to get lost in all the beautiful design features it provides. 

There are loads of dedicated templates for both physical and digital image and video formats. With Canva, you can make:

• Presentations;
• Social media content (Instagram and Facebook posts, stories, WhatsApp statuses, YouTube thumbnails, etc.);
• Videos for different platforms;
• Print products, office, and marketing printables (design for mugs, totes, T-shirts, hoodies, posters, flyers, cards, etc.).

The list goes on, and it would be too much to list everything. You don’t need all of that for badges and certificates anyway. 

We’ll only compare Canva features dedicated to digital certificates, badges, credentials, and their management/distribution to recipients to make this a fair comparison. 

For this purpose, Canva offers Badge Logos and plenty of Certificates types.

Canva Badge and Certificate Features Overview

Badges and certificates can be filtered by style, theme, and color and browsed by categories. 

Both leave you with plenty of creative freedom.

If none of the provided templates sit right with you, you can use your designs or make a blank Badge Logo/Certificate for future use and reference.

Badge Logo

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There are 500+ Badge Logo templates to choose from.

Once you pick the one you like the most, an editor will open up the Badge Logo for your branding, personalization, and tweaks:

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There are few design limits; you can add frames, grids, charts, graphics, photos, and even audio and video — eihter your own or selected options from the Canva library.

Animations are a special touch to make the Badge logo pop, and you can even set the animation speed:

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When you’re done with the Logo Badge design, look right:

• Download your badge in PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, GIF, or MP4 Video — Canva will suggest the best format;
• Instantly share/publish your creation:

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Certificate

Relevant certificate categories for your consideration include:

1. Academic;
2. Achievement;
3. Course;
4. Internship;
5. Membership;
6. Workshop.
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Certificate designer looks identical to Logo Badge designer and offers portrait and landscape orientation for certificate templates. 

That’s why we won’t go through it again but skip right to the pros and cons.

What’s So Great About Canva?

1. Tons of templates.

As it puts a strong emphasis on pre-made templates, non-creatives won’t have a hard time working with Canva.
None of them work for you? No problem — add your own.

2. Great design options.

Badge Logo and Certificate designer is incredibly detailed, works fast, has animation, and doesn’t require a month-long course to learn how it works. To call it anything but flawless would be lying.

3. You can do a lot for free.

Not only is Canva cheap, but it has freebies as well:

• Classrooms and nonprofits can apply to use it free of charge;
• There’s a 30-day free trial for paid plans;
• The Free plan is rich and includes 250k+ templates, 100+ design types, 5GB of cloud storage, and allows collaboration with other team members.

The Many Downsides of Using Canva for Digital Badges and Certificates

The design capabilities are fantastic. 

The rest? Not so much. 

1. There is no way to validate the certificates and badges. 

Canva’s design options are beyond excellent, but certificate/badge management is an entirely different story. 

You can share badges and certificates via email providers, on social media, or with people of your choice. 

However, it wouldn’t be correct to call Canva a digital badge and certificate software or to try and replace that kind of software with Canva.

Everything you create in Canva acts as a piece of content or media. These images, videos, and gifs can’t be validated in a way real virtual certificates/badges can. It takes little effort to copy or falsify them, and there is no way to check if it’s the real thing.

2. Manual-labor heavy.

Another huge flaw is personalizing these certificates. You have to do it manually by copying the template for each participant and then filling in the names.

3. No data insights.

When you use a dedicated virtual badge and certificate software, you can track what’s going on with them. That option is not available with Canva; standalone data insights on certificates and badges only exist within the CRM/Email provider/other platforms you chose to share the badges and certificates.

If participants share them without tagging, you cannot track these certificates and badges from the “outside”.

Canva Pricing

Canva has a wide range of plans for different entities.

The price depends on your team size, it is scalable, and you can do a lot with a smaller budget, design-wise:

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VirtualBadge.io – A Social Media-First Digital Certificate Solution

Coaches, academies, enterprises, events, hackathons — Virtualbadge.io is made to cater to a broad audience with digital certificates, and badges participants proudly display on their social media.

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Virtualbadge.io Features Overview

Designing certificates and badges in Virtualbadge.io is simplified so a complete beginner can easily do it in a flash.

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There are several professional templates to choose from and add your signature, photos, text, and shapes.

The next step is to personalize the certificate with participant’s info:

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Campaign setup and Recipient View show what it all looks like from their side:
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You only need to upload a CSV sheet with names and email addresses to send the campaign, and your work is done!

The whole process is simplified and emphasizes substance. Design is more streamlined than the one you’ll find in Canva, but it won’t leave you or the recipients craving for more.

Why You Should Choose Virtualbadge.io

1. Unique online certificates.

With Virtualbadge.io, there is no chance that someone will forge a badge or certificate issued by your organization.

Professional online certificates made with Virtualbadge.io are hosted on our European servers, are entirely GDPR compliant, and can easily be validated at all times.

2. Automation capabilities you’ve dreamed of.

Hyperbole aside — we made sure it’s really good.

Virtualbadge.io automates the process of creating personal certificates from head to toe. 

With pre-defined fields, you can automatically create tons of different certificates according to the information that you have uploaded on the CSV file. Each certificate can be made with the participant’s name, the date they’ve completed the course, their grade, etc, without anyone having to enter the data manually.

3. Social media integration: sharing on autopilot.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn unlock the potential to spread the word about you across the world.

LinkedIn is especially valuable in this regard, as it acts as an impressive professional hub for multiple industries. Sharing certificates there improves the chance for career and academic advancement, so your participants will gladly share their hard-earned badges.

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Add your company’s LinkedIn ID while creating digital certificates, so each participant certificate points to your company’s LinkedIn page. 

This way, participants turn into your online advocates and promoters. Their authentic testimonials help build your online presence and authority.

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1. Precious data insights.

Make digital badges and certificates with Virtualbadge.io, and you’ll be able to see your brand growing in real-time.
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Social media tracking reveals where participants share their certificates and shows how to approach your audience.

In Which Case Should You Opt for Canva Instead?

Canva is a better choice if you value great design — it would be a lie to claim it isn’t close to flawless. Virtualbadge.io has design tools that help you create almost anything you imagine, but it still looks humble compared to Canva.

On the other hand, Virtualbadge.io is made to create certificates and credentials that cannot be copied with a “Right-click/ Save-as” action due to their validation. 

Virtualbadge.io Pricing

All pricing plans have a 7-day free trial period, so you can play with it and decide whether Virtualbadge.io is the right solution:

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Are you wondering if anything else is free?

Some of our fabulous templates, of course: 

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PS: Take a peek at more of them here!

Final Thoughts

Virtualbadge.io and Canva are different but overlap in one task: designing digital badges and certificates:

• Canva has incomparable design capabilities and numerous templates; for anything else, you’ll have to acquire an actual virtual badge software.
• Virtualbadge.io digital certificates and badges are authentic and impossible to falsify. They won’t be as flashy as those made in Canva, but they’ll turn the participants into your online advocates and reveal a rich pool of data as you track the campaign performance in real-time.

If you’re ready to start issuing digital certificates and badges in no time, try out Virtualbadge’s 7-day free trial and start rewarding the people who deserve it.