Canva released its first image generation model on Thursday. Canva Craft, built by the company's own research team, is live for all users in the Dream Lab tab and available to developers through the Canva API, TechCrunch reported. It is aimed squarely at the same-category models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and Meta that Canva previously rented for its platform.

Craft works in two stages: a planning stage first works out the spatial relationships of elements, their relative scale, the visual hierarchy and any text, and a rendering stage then generates the image at up to 2K resolution across some 30 aspect ratios. The differentiator is the training data — human-designed templates from Canva's own library, including posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and other typography-rich layouts, rather than the photograph-heavy datasets behind most rivals. That makes for legible text and precise edits that leave the rest of an image untouched, and generated images can be converted into layered, editable designs with Canva's Magic tools. Researchers from Leonardo.ai, which Canva acquired in 2024, contributed to the model.

Preliminary blind comparisons put Craft fourth on DesignArena's image-generation leaderboard, which would make Canva the second-highest-ranked image lab behind OpenAI. Cheaper Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast variants are planned, as is image generation inside third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini through Canva's MCP connector.