

(To be honest, this criterion weeded out the most apps.)Is this app multi-purpose? While images for social media marketing may be your key reason for seeking out a graphic design tool, you'll ultimately be more productive if you only need to learn and use one tool for multiple marketing design purposes, such as creating email banners, postcards, flyers, blog images—you name it. This list features apps that are ideal for companies and individuals looking to represent their brand with professional-grade social media images. Some apps might have passed muster, except that the web experience was consistently frustrating (freezing screen, slow to load designs, not saving or accepting changes, etc).Are the design assets professional? There are a lot of tools that offer templates—just not the kinds of templates and assets that are going to help you represent your brand well. These apps are geared toward simplicity, so you don't have to spend agonizing hours designing every single graphic.Is the app experience smooth? When trying to design something in a web app, a major factor is how smooth and fast the web experience is. Thus, I wanted to make sure these apps could be used effectively by people (like me) with minimal knowledge about design and design tools.Is this app suited well for social media marketing? Some apps are awesome, but have too many features when all you want to do is put together a good image to go with a social promotion. I tested over 15 apps to bring you this short and sweet list of the best free apps for creating your own vibrant and professional social media images.When testing and evaluating apps, I had a few key criteria that each app needed to meet to be included:Is this app easy enough for amateur designers? In most cases, your company's designer (should you be lucky enough to have one) is not who will manage your social media.
Just click the search bar in the top right of the screen and look for something like "birthday instagram stories" to see more specific options. It's a lot to navigate, but there's great search built in. There are hundreds of thousands of templates, graphics, and photos you can use as part of the free plan (that goes up to millions of assets with a Canva Pro subscription).When you open Canva, you're presented with dozens of possible templates for everything from posters to Instagram Posts.

You can also create your own design using the Icons, Design Assets, and Backgrounds tabs in the sidebar, and, of course, adding your own photos (or pulling them from Pixabay) and text with the appropriate tools.One great feature of Spark is how easy it is to resize and reformat your posts for different social media platforms. The simplest way to get started is to select the kind of post you want to make from the home screen, then use the Templates search in the left sidebar to find the one you want, rather than to just search everything from the home screen. (To me, it looks like it's a roughly 50/50 split between free and Premium).Search isn't as good with Spark as it is with Canva. A good chunk of them are Premium templates, only available to subscribers, but there are still thousands available for free. And it's free to get started.As I write this, Spark claims to have more than 34,000 templates for you to work from. Adobe Spark (or Adobe Spark Post on mobile for the tools you want) isn't as well known as Photoshop or Illustrator, but it's better for most people.
Videos is just what it sounds like: a basic video editing app that works as smoothly as Spark's graphic design tool. With Pages, you can build a simple, sleek web page that you can then share via a direct link. You can create libraries (in the Libraries tab of the sidebar) that are available across all your Adobe apps, pull in photos from Lightroom, and use Adobe Stock images.Beyond the Post (graphic) design type, Spark also provides two other project types: Pages and Videos (available as separate apps on iOS). If you plan to scale your business to the point where you need to use (and pay for) Adobe's more powerful tools, Spark is the way to go. It normally does a pretty good job, and it should only take you a few seconds with the admittedly lovely-to-work-with editor to fix any quirks.Spark is an excellent standalone editor, but it's hard to overlook its integration with the rest of Adobe's Creative Suite. Spark will then make a best guess at reformatting everything to fit.
Royalty Graphics Free For Basic
To us, that's a feature—but if you need something with more options, check out one of the other great apps on this list.Seriously, Pablo is barebones. It couldn't be simpler to use or in its design. (These premium features also come with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, starting with the $19.99/mo plan.)Pablo is a minimalist tool for placing text over the top of images from the team behind the social media scheduling app Buffer. If you click on this logo, it will say Remove Once, but, after lots of testing, the logo appears to be removable in all designs—you'll just have to deal with that upgrade pop-up each time.Adobe Spark Price: Free for basic features from $9.99/mo for premium features, such as logo upload and placement, branded templates and tools.

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It makes it beyond simple to create basic-but-good-looking social media images. If you do queue it up with Buffer, you can also connect it to any of the other apps you use with Zapier.For all the lack of options, Pablo is still on this list. That's literally it.Once you're happy with your post pic (and it won't take long for you to be), click Share & Download to save your image or post it directly to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram (or queue it up with Buffer). Oh, and click Reposition to change the position and crop of the background image.
