Compare
unPaper vs Canva
A general design suite, and a tool that does one job
Canva is a general design suite. Presentations, social posts, print, documents, video, brand kits — it does all of it, with an enormous template library, a real collaboration story and a team behind it. If design work in your organization is broad, Canva is a reasonable place for all of it to live, and nothing here is an argument against that.
Making a business deck in Canva is still design work, though. You choose a template, then you write into it and adjust it, and the discipline that keeps twenty slides consistent — one idea per slide, a word budget, the same chart shape for the same kind of comparison — is discipline you supply. Canva will let you put nine bullets on a slide and make them look tidy.
unPaper does one job: it hands your AI a slide language with those budgets built in, and hands you back a file that prints and converts. It has no image library, no social formats, no brand campaigns and no canvas. What it has instead is that your content never leaves the device, and that the rules are enforced before the slide exists rather than after.
Where they differ
| Feature | unPaper | Canva |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built for | Business and technical decks, and nothing else | General design — presentations, social, print, documents, video |
| Where your content is processed | In your browser. Nothing is uploaded | On Canva's servers |
| Who writes the slides | The AI you already use, guided by a named layout catalogue | You, into a template — with AI on every plan from a shared allowance (about 20 uses on Free, ten times that on Pro, twenty on Business) |
| Effort per deck | Write the brief, paste the prompt, get a structured deck back | Choose a template, then compose and balance each slide by hand |
| Editorial discipline | Word, bullet and one-idea-per-slide budgets carried in the prompt | Yours to supply |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Cost model | Free independent browser use; organised adoption licensed | Free tier; Pro at €110 a year; Business at €170 a year per person (it replaced Teams); Enterprise on request |
| Editable PowerPoint | Native text boxes and shapes, converted in your browser | PPTX export from the hosted document |
| Asset and template libraryIf you need a picture, Canva is the answer and this is not. | None — layouts only, no stock photography or graphics | Very large, and one of the main reasons to use it |
| Brand governance | One company template, saved locally, carried into every prompt | One brand kit on Free, five on Pro, a hundred with approvals on Business, a thousand with tiered approvals on Enterprise |
| Works with no connection | Yes | Canva Offline (new on every plan) keeps designs you opened beforehand editable; the editor is otherwise hosted |
| Private or air-gapped deployment | Licensed separately; static files behind your own boundary | Not applicable |
Claims about Canva were read off their own public pages on 11 October 2026. Plans and limits change often — check theirs before deciding.
Use Canva if…
- You need one tool for decks, social graphics, print and brand assets.
- Your team already works in Canva and shares a brand kit there.
- The deck needs photography, illustration or heavy visual design rather than structure.
- Several people need to edit the same document together.
- You are making something that is not a business deck at all.
Use unPaper if…
- You make the same kind of deck often and want them structurally consistent without policing it.
- The content is confidential and a hosted design tool is not where it should be.
- You want a real editable PowerPoint to hand to someone who lives in PowerPoint.
- You would rather write the argument than balance a layout.
- You want it to work on a locked-down laptop, on a plane, with no account.
Check it yourself
The rows above that describe behaviour rather than architecture come from published runs.
Or read the common questions first.