This week Shopify launched its free alternative to Canva, Taler. An always free to design too with customisable templates.
At Pink Elephant Media we love new tools and couldn’t resist giving it a try however, we found it had a long way to go on its rival canva. Firstly is it just does not have as many options to design for. At Canva you can design from a whole host of social post types, documents, presentations the list is endless. Taler, however, only has options for Facebook Cover, Instagram Story and Youtube Banner.
Taler is just not as intuitive as Canva and has fewer options for assets and therefore is pretty limiting in your design process. However, for a free tool, it has plenty of customisable templates and stock photography to choose from and could be good for the odd social media posts
Taler is not the first tool that Shopify has created. Last year Shopify launched Hatchful, a tool to create your own logo design (we will stick with our logo) and the year before a tool called DopinBlog to address one of the issues of Shopify websites with their blogs. Whilst these tools are probably a welcomed relief to those on the Shopify platform they also have many drawbacks and again add yet another expense they add on to their end-user for their design flaws.
Whilst Shopify is continually investing in its platform and offers a low-cost entry point, it still has many drawbacks in its technology it offers and as such is limiting to customers wanting to scale their business.
So whilst we love a free tool and is great for people who don’t need a design tool that often, we wouldn’t recommend using it if you are serious about getting your brand noticed.