And it's not like you're just dealing with one platform either. Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn – you need to produce trendy, engaging content on all of these platforms to build a strong social media presence. Just where would you find the time to do this all?
Luckily, there are now tons of social media tools to help you. These tools come with ready-made templates, AI features, and easy-to-use editors all built to simplify your design process.
We rounded up below the top tools for creating social media graphics quickly. Let's take a look at them!
Top 7 Tools for Social Media Graphic Design
We have tested dozens and dozens of tools in the market over the past few months. The tools that impressed us the most are the ones we have in this list.
Here is a quick look at them:
| Tool | Free Option? | Pricing | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design.com | ✓ | Starts at $9 | 5/5 | Wide range of high-quality templates |
| BrandCrowd | ✓ | Starts at $9 | 4.5/5 | Modern and stylish designs |
| Canva | ✓ | Starts at $12.99 | 4/5 | Beginner-friendly editor |
| Adobe Express | ✓ | Starts at $.9.99 | 4/5 | More granular and comprehensive editing |
| Descript | ✓ | Starts at $16 | 4.5/5 | Text-based video editing |
| Synthesia | ✓ | Starts at $29 | 4/5 | Creating humanlike AI avatars |
| ElevenLabs | ✓ | Starts at $5 | 4.5/5 | Generating narrations, voiceovers, or BGMs |
And here are the in-depth reviews of each:
Design.com
Rating: 5/5
Design.com is the #1 online platform for small businesses, solopreneurs, and individuals to create professional and on-brand social media assets without the complications.
They offer over 1M+ design templates, with templates covering all social media needs. So whether you are looking for a Facebook ad, Instagram Reel, or YouTube banner, you can surely find one on the platform.
Here are a few samples of their Facebook ads. As you can see, each template is visually eye-catching, which is an important factor in ads.
Sample Facebook ad for a music festival made to look like an admission ticket
A trendy monochromatic eye-catching design to promote a pop-up sale
This template showcases bold visuals and modern design accents, ensuring your announcements capture attention and leave a lasting impression.
Design.com also boasts one of the most advanced AI in the market. Simply enter your business name and a few keywords, and you can get thousands of relevant designs in seconds. It's a huge step up to most AI tools that can either produce only a dozen outputs or produce results that aren't really tailored to what your prompt was.
Here is a poster we generated for a retail store that is having a flash sale:
Great, right? It understood the concept of the sale and the fact that the brand is a retail store, so it hits all the right details.
Overall, Design.com's design quality, wide variety of templates, and smart AI features makes it the best overall tool for crafting social media graphics.
Design.com Highlights:
- Large collection of social media templates
- Templates suitable for a wide range of industries and niches
- Also houses templates for other marketing assets: logo, website, poster, flyer, presentation, QR codes, etc.
- Smart AI generator that can produce optimal results with just short inputs
- Brand Kit feature that can automatically apply your logo styling across social media graphics for a more consistent look
Pricing:
- Free templates are available for download.
- Premium templates require subscription before you can download them. Plans start at $9.
BrandCrowd
Rating: 4.5 / 5
BrandCrowd is a design platform that stands out for the quality of its templates. Instead of generic, overly basic, or very “template” templates, what you'll get are modern, trendy, and stylish designs.
For instance, here's a minimalist Instagram template with a vintage flair for a coffee shop in colors often associated with cafes and coziness.
For most users, this is a huge help. Instead of giving you a template that can feel like a placeholder, what you'll start with are designs that already follow the latest design trends, which means less editing is needed and also higher chances of it being engaging and eye-catching for your audience.
BrandCrowd Highlights:
- Modern and stylish layouts
- Tools for a wide range of social media needs: YouTube video maker, Instagram Stories maker, Pinterest pin creator, Snapchat design maker, and many more
- Beginner-friendly editor
- Fully customizable elements, can edit every color, font, icon, placement, spacing, etc.
- Can add animations, gradients, curved text, and other design elements
Pricing:
- Free templates are available for download.
- For premium templates, you'll have to pay for a plan to download them. Plans start at $9.
Canva
Rating: 4 / 5
Canva is known as the template king in the industry, and for good reason. The platform houses thousands of templates for all marketing assets imaginable: email newsletters, posters, flyers, presentations, company invoices, logo maker, and more.
Of course, they also have an answer for all your social media needs - whether its Facebook posts, YouTube thumbnails, Pinterest video ads, and many more.
And while Canva may have streamlined the process with all these ready-made designs, that doesn't mean your output will be basic or boring. They also provide millions of free graphics, icons, illustrations, BGM, sound effects, and other media elements that you can use to spice up your templates and make them feel more uniquely yours.
Canva Highlights:
- Very beginner-friendly editor plus a simple editing interface
- Thousands of social media formats to choose from, such as carousel ads, event covers, and profile pictures
- Inclusive and diverse templates covering a wide range of events, holidays, and languages
- Real-time collaboration option that makes it easy for teams to work together on one design
- Pro accounts enables users to add music, auto-sync footage with audio, schedule and publish posts, and more
Pricing:
- Free plan gives you access to some free templates and to limited editor features
- Pro plan unlocks premium templates and full editor features. Plan starts at $12.99.
Adobe Express
Rating: 4 / 5
Another big name in the industry is Adobe Express.
Unlike in Photoshop or Illustrator where you'll need to wrestle with complicated tools and controls, here in Adobe Express you'll just need to edit premade templates. It's kind of like the other tools above.
Size-wise, Adobe Express has slightly fewer templates compared to the others. For instance, here's a template for an Instagram post about recycling:
However, their editor is better as it offers more comprehensive features: more advanced text effects, an option to tone or saturate your colors, sharpen blurred photos, and a lot more.
Adobe Express also gives you access to premium Adobe libraries, such as Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock, plus access to their generative AI Adobe Firefly. So if you want an Adobe level of quality without all the technical hassle, Adobe Express is worth a try.
Adobe Express Highlights:
- Thousands of social media formats and layouts to choose from
- Simpler interface and controls compared to more complex Adobe tools
- Access to Adobe stock photos, graphics, and fonts
- More advanced editing tools and features compared to other design platforms
- Premium plans unlock their built-in content scheduler tool
Pricing:
- Free plan includes basic editing tools and limited access to assets
- Premium plan unlocks more advanced tools and features, plus access to Adobe Firefly
Descript
Rating: 4.5 / 5
If you're looking to cut down your video editing time, then Descript might be worth a look.
Descript is a content creation tool that focuses on video and audio editing. Instead of trimming down clips manually, Descript allows their users to edit the video by editing the written transcript instead. So instead of cutting out a clip, you'll just need to delete that part on the transcript. Easy, huh?
Descript's AI can also help you generate and edit videos. For example, you can ask them to write a script for your Facebook ad, which you can then further edit by asking the AI via chat to make it more casual and friendlier. You can also have the AI generate videos based on a prompt, turn static images to videos, or have them automatically apply smart transitions. This makes it easy to make more engaging social media videos, podcasts, or ads.
Descript Highlights:
- Text-based video editing to simplify the process
- Provides automatic captions and transcripts for video and audio files
- Generative AI tools to help you create everything from the video itself to b-rolls, green screens, and transitions
- AI design tools to help adjust the color, quality, and layout of your video
- Tons of editing features to make sharper and cleaner audios
Pricing:
- Free plan available, with limited AI credits and limited access to Underlord, their AI co-editor
- Starts at $16, but the paid plan at $24 per month gives you bigger AI credit, higher export qualities, and full access to Underlord
Synthesia
Rating: 4 / 5
Need someone to act, speak, or present in your social media videos? Then Synthesia is a great tool for you.
The tool allows their users to create human-like avatars made through AI. You can also add voiceovers to make them “speak”.
This removes the need for having to hire someone for your videos, as well as reduce the time for filming and shooting.
There is also a wide range of looks and voices to choose from for these avatars, so you can find one that is right for your brand identity and target audience. No need to get stuck with just using the same person over and over again in your videos.
Synthesia's avatars are also available in multiple languages, which is helpful for brands that have a more global reach.
Synthesia Highlights:
- AI avatars that look, speak, and act like humans
- Large selection of AI avatars to choose from
- Text to video generation
- Multilingual features: can have the avatars speak in different languages, can automatically translate script, can provide automatic multilingual captions
- Brand Kit option so every video can look visually cohesive with your brand
Pricing:
- Free plan provides 1,200 AI credits per month which equals to about 10 minutes worth of video
- Paid plan starts at $29 per month, which unlocks more features and AI credits
ElevenLabs
Rating: 4.5 / 5
ElevenLabs is an AI voice and audio generation platform that marketers can use to add voiceovers, narrations, and BGMs for their social media video content.
The tool is easy to use. Instead of recording manually, users just need to enter their text which will turn into the speech audio. Users can then choose from over 10,000+ voices to find the one that best fits their concept.
There is also a voice cloning feature, which can be used to replicate your voice and use that for narrations.
Music can also be generated on the platform. Simply enter a prompt of the music style or genre that you are looking for, and their AI will give you a snippet of music that best suits your prompt.
ElevenLabs Highlights:
- AI text-to-speech generation
- Can choose from over 10,000+ voices
- Music generation tool which is helpful for adding BGM, SFXs, ambient audio, and transitional music for your videos
- Voice cloning capabilities
- Easy export options
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Paid plan starts at $5 per month, which adds commercial license use, more project limits, more credits, and other features
Conclusion
If you want to have a thriving social media account, you'll have to post quickly and frequently. But with the rising demand in our current world, it's just not realistically possible to do it on your own.
Fortunately, we now have tons of tools at our fingertips. Whether you just need a simple template for your Facebook Stories or need a faster way to edit your weekly YouTube podcast, there is a tool for you. All the tools mentioned above are also free (or have free options) so you can try them out without worrying about the cost just yet.
And if you are looking for the best overall tool to try, then we recommend Design.com as it has the most complete features – a large template collection to choose from, a wide range of social media formats available, and smart AI tools that can easily streamline your editing process.
