Microsoft Designer Brand Kit vs. Canva Brand Kit: How Do They Compare?

Using a brand kit helps keep brand colors, fonts, and visuals consistent across your designs. Both Canva and Microsoft Designer offer a brand kit option. With each software offering similar design options in the way of design templates, let’s pit Canva against Microsoft Designer and see which comes out on top in this battle of the brand kits.

What Is a Brand Kit?

A brand kit is a core place to store styles for your brand. A brand kit or style guide often consists of typefaces—fonts—for various uses, a color palette, and sometimes visuals, logos, tone of voice, and implementation guides. This helps keep your branding consistent.

1. Accessing the Brand Kit

How easy is it to find and use the brand kits in Canva and Microsoft Designer? Are they self-explanatory or do you need to do a little more digging to use these helpful tools?

Canva

Once logged into Canva, you’ll see Brand Hub on the left-hand menu. While it’s easy to find, you’ll notice by the gold crown that it isn’t available for everyone to use. You must have a Canva Pro account to use the Brand Hub and access Canva’s brand kit feature.

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer has many tools, but its brand kit is a bit hidden away. You won’t find it on the homepage, and unless you generate and customize any images or templates, you wouldn’t even know the tool exists.

After selecting Customize Design, you’ll find the menu to select Brand Kit. Here, you can create a brand based on your generated result, over 20 pre-generated brand palettes, or create a brand from scratch.

2. Ease of Use

Which of these tools is easier to use?

Canva

You can read our guide on how to use Canva’s brand kit, although, after the introduction to new Canva tools in March 2023, the brand kit has changed slightly.

Even though Brand Hub is only available to paid users, it’s still an easy tool to set up and use. Just follow the guidelines for choosing and uploading the typefaces, colors, your logo, and other brand elements.

It’s equally easy to implement the branding in your designs. Just select Brand Hub on the left menu and select any element on the design—such as a title—to switch to your branded style for that element.

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft’s brand kit is simple but lacks depth. You can only have one saved brand; however, you still have the option of the many pre-generated palettes to use, and you can edit your brand at any point.

After customizing a design, you can implement your brand by selecting Brand Kit. The font colors and style will change to reflect your branding. You can shuffle the brand colors to suit your template designs better, but beyond that, there isn’t much further customization available.

3. What’s Included?

While these tools are similar, they do offer different things to users.

Canva

When setting up Canva’s brand kit in the Brand Hub, you can choose fonts for titles, subtitles, headings, subheadings, section headers, body text, quotes, and captions. It means no matter where your branding is implemented, all the same types of text will be styled the same. This creates recognizable branding.

Canva’s brand kit also allows you to upload your brand logo, brand colors, brand photographs, icons, and graphics. This brings your branding to a more professional standard.

Canva also creates a handful of various templates that fit your branding. This means you can easily create Canva templates for social media or other uses without starting from a blank canvas or customizing a totally different design.

Microsoft Designer

What is included in Microsoft Designer’s brand kit is severely lacking. You’ll only have font styles for a title, subtitle, and body text, but you will have a color palette with as many colors as you want. Perhaps in Microsoft Designer’s future, there’ll be more available for your branding.

4. Implementing the Brand Kit

Which tool makes it easier to implement or share your branding?

Canva

Canva’s Brand Hub lets you implement a style guide along with your brand kit. This makes it easy to share with others, and they’ll know how the branding should or shouldn’t be used.

You can choose Brand Kit while working on any design and at the click of a button, it applies your branding styles. You can easily share the brand kit for others to use too.

Microsoft Designer

This brand kit is very simple to implement, with just the click of a button. It applies branding to fonts, but you have to set colors yourself. There isn’t a style guide, but you can quickly add your branding to any template you create.

There isn’t a way to share your brand kit with anyone you might work with for design projects. But since Designer’s brand kit system is simple, you can just share the names of the typefaces and the HEX codes of colors used.

Which Has the Better Brand Kit?

It is easy to declare Canva the winner of the best brand kit. However, with the introduction of AI tools, Microsoft Designer may not be far behind for much longer.

Remember that Microsoft Designer offers its brand kit for free, whereas only Pro users can access Canva’s Brand Hub. It’s worth the price if you want all your branding in one place though.

Apply Your Branding to Template Designs

Both Canva and Microsoft Designer offer similar branding features, and after this short comparison, you’ll know which you should use. They each make it easy to apply font choices and color schemes to your designs, and it’s fun to explore either tool in your template designs.