Canva Releases Craft, Its First In-House Image Generation Model, to All Users

Canva on October 22, 2026 released Canva Craft, its first image generation model, to all Canva users worldwide. The company says Craft debuted as the fourth ranked model on DesignArena, a crowdsourced image leaderboard, and that it plans the layout of an image before it renders it.

Craft was built by Canva Research, the company's in-house AI lab, and puts the design platform in competition with image generation models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and Meta, according to TechCrunch. Until now Canva has relied on a range of outside image models inside its product (TechCrunch). The launch follows a run of AI features: in April 2026 Canva added prompt based editing and layers for AI generated images, The Verge reported.

What is Canva Craft?

Canva Craft is a two stage image model: a planning model first turns the prompt into a written composition plan, and a separate rendering model then draws the image from that plan, Canva said in its announcement on October 22, 2026. The plan lists which elements appear, how they sit relative to each other, their scale, the visual hierarchy and any text the image needs.

Canva says separating planning from rendering gives more legible text and more precise object placement, and lets users change one element without regenerating the whole picture. Craft outputs images at up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios or a custom one, accepts prompts in any language and renders text in 55 languages, according to the company.

Most image models learn mainly from photographs. Canva says Craft was trained from scratch on data that includes millions of human-made templates from its library, such as posters, social posts, presentations, infographics and menus. It was then tuned with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, a method that rewards the outputs reviewers prefer, using feedback from Canva's professional designers. Those designers and researchers compared more than 25,000 image pairs against leading models in internal tests, the company said, without publishing the results.

How does Canva Craft rank against OpenAI's image models?

Canva says Craft debuted fourth among image models on DesignArena, where users vote between AI generated designs, and that this makes Canva Research the second ranked AI lab for image generation. The Verge reported that the three models ahead of Craft are all OpenAI's: GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst, GPT-Image-2.5 Flare and GPT-Image-2.

Read together, the two accounts explain Canva's "second lab" claim: at launch, only OpenAI had models ranked above Craft on that leaderboard, which made Craft the highest ranked image model from any other company there.

Canva also reports subcategory results. It says Craft ranks first of 87 models in its people and portraits category, first of 85 in its nature category, second for Abstract and Patterns and fourth for Products. These are positions Canva reported at launch on a vote based leaderboard, and they can move as new models and votes arrive. Canva's announcement cites no independent evaluation beyond DesignArena.

Who can use Craft, and what does it cost?

Canva says Craft is available from October 22, 2026 to all Canva users globally through Dream Lab, in the bottom left panel of the editor, and to developers through Canva's public API. The announcement does not give a price for Craft, either inside Canva or through the API.

Canva pitches the API at marketing platforms, online stores, ad builders and print services, and as a way to compare Craft with other models on a developer's own prompts. Support in the Canva MCP server is marked "coming soon". MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI assistants call outside tools, and TechCrunch reports that Canva plans to use it to bring Craft image generation into chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Two cheaper variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, are in development. Canva says they will deliver high quality images at a fraction of the cost of leading frontier models, but gives no prices or dates. The company says it used distillation, which trains a smaller or faster model to imitate a larger one, to cut the number of generation steps, and that a custom engine for the planning stage made Craft an order of magnitude faster than its first internal version.

Craft falls under Canva Shield, the company's set of moderation, privacy and reporting controls for its AI features.

Why is Canva building its own image model?

Scale is the reason Canva gives: it says more than a quarter of a billion people use Canva and create over 400 designs every second, which makes the cost and speed of each image matter. Canva also said an in-house model gives it more control over quality and speed, according to TechCrunch, which adds that it will likely save the company API costs.

Craft is not Canva's first model. By November 2025 Canva had announced a design model that produces editable layered designs rather than flat images, Design Compass reported on November 3, 2025. The new release comes as Canva's finances draw scrutiny: the company was on track for $4 billion in revenue last year but cut its 2026 growth forecast, and its valuation reportedly fell from $42 billion to $35 billion, according to external analysts cited by TechCrunch.

What we don't know yet

• What Craft costs through the public API, and whether usage limits differ by Canva plan.
• When Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast will ship, and at what price.
• When Craft support in the Canva MCP server will go live.
• How Craft performs in independent tests beyond DesignArena; the results of Canva's 25,000 pair internal comparison are not published.