I’ve been a Figma diehard for years and only got the paid plan this year, and it’s what got me thinking about the other design tools I’ve used to varying degrees, and whether their subscriptions are actually worth reaching for. I had access to Illustrator a while back through Adobe’s Creative Cloud All Apps plan, but dropped that sub over a year ago now. And I’ve floated around Canva on the free plan forever, until curiosity got the better of me recently, and I finally paid for a month.
So this is my honest take on all three and what each paywall actually unlocks. Not a head-to-head, because these aren’t really competing tools despite the overlap on paper. What I’m more interested in is whether the free tier of each is enough on its own, or if the paid features are the ones you actually need to get anywhere…
Illustrator is for artists
It was the one I never really needed
Illustrator is Adobe’s flagship vector editor, and probably the one most people already know by name, even if they’ve never opened it. I had it through the Creative Cloud All Apps plan a few years back, and actually can’t remember exactly how long I kept the sub, but it was long enough to know I wasn’t really using it. I’d mess around in it more than I’d work in it, simply because the access was there.
I’d mainly lean on the Pen tool for practicing shapes, tracing the shapes to figure out how node editing worked, and the odd Pathfinder session where I’d combine and subtract shapes just to see what came out. Gradient mesh is the one I remember playing with the most, where you basically paint a gradient onto a mesh grid over a shape to get almost photo-realistic vector rendering. No other vector tool I’ve tried since really has anything like it.
I canceled Adobe over a year ago now, and to me, the $23 Illustrator subscription wouldn’t be worth it. This is definitely a tool for artists and illustrators, not so much designers (unless you’re creating buttons or logos). If you’re signing up in 2026 though, Illustrator has had some interesting updates – the 2026 release (v30) launches up to three times faster and saves files up to six times quicker because it only saves the changes, not the whole document. Turntable is the one I’d actually want to try – it uses Firefly to generate rotated views of a 2D vector, up to 74 angles that you can extract as editable vectors or export as a GIF.
Figma is for designers
I finally gave in and got the subscription
I coped on Figma’s free plan for years, which has a three-file cap (unlimited drafts, though), some paywalled features, and a 30-day version history limit, which I made work by simply deleting old files when hitting a wall. What finally pushed me to pay was curiosity about its Dev mode. Unlimited files is the boring one, but it’s the one I feel the difference on the daily now. I don’t have to think about the cap when starting a fresh project.
Dev Mode was the other reason I paid, more out of curiosity than anything else. I just wanted to understand what actually happens on the code side of a handoff even though I’m nowhere near writing production code myself. So paying to poke at Dev Mode felt like a reasonable spend. I will say, however, Penpot does make it easier to pull out clean code compared to Figma, so if you’re new to a design-to-code workflow, I actually recommend checking out Penpot first.
Prototyping is where the sub earns most of its keep for me though. Free-tier prototyping caps out at basic transitions and overlays, and paid unlocks variables (store and recall numbers, strings, booleans for things like a form that remembers user input), conditional logic with if/else rules, multiple actions on a single trigger, and variable modes for dynamically switching an entire prototype between light and dark or between languages.
And last but not least, I now get 3,000 AI credits a month for Figma Make instead of the 500 credits with a 150/day cap on free. Although this alone wasn’t the reason I subscribed, it’s a welcome perk.
Canva is for everyone else
The paywall lifts a lot at once
I’ve been on the free tier of Canva since forever. I briefly remember testing out a subscription years ago, but that was before all the AI tools started making an appearance, so this time the sub gave me a different type of access. The template and element jump is probably the most significant though. Free gives you 1.6M+ templates and Pro pushes that to 3.6M+, plus access to 141M+ premium photos, videos, graphics, and audio.
And then, of course, AI credits are the other big jump – free is 50 credits a month and Pro is 500, which is a 10x lift and covers all the Magic Studio features under one pool. Background Remover is the one I ended up using the most. It’s beyond convenient and pretty decent for such a non-complex design tool. Magic Resize is also useful if you’re pushing the same design to multiple formats. SVG export gets unlocked too, which sounds small but matters if you actually want a scalable version of a logo you designed.
I can definitely see the sub being useful to business owners or anyone who needs graphics at speed and at scale but perhaps don’t have the design experience to produce it.
Your pick might be different from mine
For me, Figma was the sub worth paying for and probably the only one I’d keep going long-term. Prototyping and unlimited files alone justify it for the UX practice I do. I’d only pick Illustrator back up if I moved into serious vector illustration work, especially since there is no free version. And I’d only recommend Canva Pro to someone who’s already living in Canva, whether for making business assets or presentations. Ultimately, they’re different tools for different jobs.
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