A practical guide to getting your work out of Canva: bulk download, which export formats keep what, what you lose on the free plan, and how to rebuild your templates somewhere else.
Most people who want to leave Canva stay because of one worry: "What happens to everything I've made?"
You can get your work out. You just can't take it out as editable Canva files, so it helps to plan what you export and how.
Canva has a bulk export for your uploads and designs:
Canva emails ZIP files, usually within 24 to 72 hours, and the link expires after 14 days. If you're on a team, only the owner can run it. Full details are in Canva's help article.
Do this first, even if you're not sure you're leaving. It is your backup.
The bulk download is a safety net. For the designs you'll actually reuse, export them one by one in the right format.
PDF Print exports at 300 dpi and can include bleed and crop marks. The CMYK option needs a paid plan. If you're on Free, you can still export PDF Print, just in RGB.
SVG keeps shapes as vectors, so you can edit them in Inkscape, Affinity, Figma or Bitgrain. SVG export needs a paid plan.
PNG is flattened, so you can't edit it later, but it's the simplest record of what a design looked like. Transparent PNG needs a paid plan.
Canva's own list of formats and limits is on this page.
If you're on Pro and leaving, export your SVGs and transparent PNGs before your plan lapses. After you drop to Free, those options go away.
Be realistic about this part:
Your own uploads, your own photos and your own copy are yours. Those are what the bulk download is for.
Most people use five to ten designs over and over: a weekly post, an event poster, a story layout, a price list. Rebuild those first and ignore the rest until you need them.
A simple way to do it:
It takes ten to twenty minutes per design. It's also a good moment to fix the things you never liked about them.
It depends on what you made in Canva:
Bitgrain has a template library of posters, covers, social posts, zines, resumes and decks, and every template opens as a real layered document. You can bring in your Canva PNGs and SVGs as layers, use your own fonts, and set your brand colours as design tokens so one change updates every page. The difference you'll notice is the image side: dithering, halftone, riso and film grain are built in, which is usually what Canva designs are missing.
We compare the two in more detail in Canva alternatives.
Once that's done, cancelling is the easy part.