5 Best Free Tools to Create Professional Banner and Ads

Whether you want to design ads for your new product or create banners for your online profile on social media, a creative design tool is what you require to get things done quickly and easily.

Though Adobe Photoshop is a powerful tool, it might be quite an overkill for creating banners and ads. There are certain design tools that can be used by anyone. You just need to select the template, make some design decisions and then drag-and-drop elements to finish it.

So, here are some useful and free tools to design creative ads and banners. Read on to know more about each tool and its features.

Canva

Canva is a popular design tool that’s a perfect blend of amazing features and attractive visuals. Its most interesting feature is its support to design almost anything. You can work on banners, graphs, infographics, resumes, social media graphics, and a lot more — all through an easy and intuitive interface.

What I liked the most is its huge catalog of free templates. You can choose a template, then edit it to please your creativity or suit your project requirements. While editing it, you can add or delete elements, drag and drop elements, edit pictures or the entire design using its photo editor, and do a lot more.

What free plan offers

Though a little restrictive, its free edition is suitable for beginners. You get just 1GB storage for assets and photos and access to 8,000+ templates. Also, it has a wide range of free fonts, clip arts, icons, images, and scores of other elements like graphs, grids, frames, and illustrations to include in your designs.

What pro plans offer

However, Canva Pro — its premium edition — offers a lot more. You get unlimited storage for photos and videos, access to 400,000 free photos, support for custom fonts, option to customize and save templates, search feature, option to resize designs into custom dimensions, and a few export features.

PROS

CONS

More info: Sign up for Canva, or checkout its plans and pricing.

Creatopy (Formerly BannerSnack)

If you’re a layman with no or little knowledge of graphic design, Bannersnack can be a life-saver. It’s a go-to tool for creating dynamic banner ads for your blogs or websites. With its state-of-the-art editor, you need neither coding nor design skills to create the perfect banner for marketing your new product.

It comes with a neat interface featuring a drag-and-drop mechanism for visually building a banner. What I liked the most is, you can create animated banner ads using Bannersnack. Also, it offers a range of professionally-designed templates, vector cliparts, fonts, and a massive library of free stock photos as well.

The banners can be saved in a number of file formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, Flash, HTML5, and MP4. Moreover, it allows embedding a banner on a website, and it also provides analytics and heatmap information for the embeds.

What free plan offers

Its free plan is quite basic, but it proves useful to test the platform. It offers limited features and resources, and the designs contain a watermark. Also, you can’t download an animated banner in this plan. However, you can embed the banner and check its analytics (though limited!).

What pro plans offer

Creatopy’s premium plans offer a lot more of everything. You get to create more banners, the banners have no watermarks, and the suite offers more fonts, cliparts, photos, and templates. For instance, its Pro plan allows creating any number of static or animated banners and download them in any format.

PROS

CONS

More info: Sign up for Creatopy, or check out its plans and pricing.

Snappa

Snappa is a graphic design tool that enables you to create stunning visual graphics. You can create graphics for ads, blogs and websites, and social media platforms, unlike Creatopy and like Canva. Its simplistic interface lets you create, download, and share graphics without having design skills.

You can choose an existing design template and edit it to suit your needs. It has a functional graphics editor that allows editing images and adding animations and effects on them. It comes packed with a library of fonts, icons stock photos, and other graphics and also allows collaboration and sharing in teams.

What free plan offers

What makes Snappa stand out is that it features thousands of free graphics and photos that are available as royalty-free. It also offers 5,000+ templates in its free plan. However, it limits to three downloads per month, no social media sharing, no integration with Buffer, and no team collaboration option.

What pro plans offer

Of course, Snappa’s premium plans give you access to all these additional features. Moreover, you get unlimited downloads per month, unlimited social media sharing, option to upload custom fonts, and a few more features.

PROS

CONS

More info: Sign up for Snappa, or check out its plans and pricing.

Venngage

Venngage is a standard visual design tool — just like Canva — for creating infographics, charts, banner ads, and other visual graphics. It allows you to customize templates and create appealing graphics with simplicity. You just need to opt for a template, add visuals, and customize the design.

The software is stocked with well-designed templates that suit multiple requirements like banner ads or banners for social media platforms. It provides unlimited infographics, icons, charts, and a vast array of fonts. Venngage, like Canva, allows its users to create teams and work on shared projects.

What free plan offers

The banners or graphics can be exported to a number of formats, including PNG, PDF, and interactive PDF. However, its free plan offers limited features, unlike the above tools. You can create just 5 templates, and the banners are created with its branding with no support for collaboration in teams.

What pro plans offer

Its premium plans offer a lot more. It provides access to unlimited infographics, business and premium templates, charts and icons, team collaboration options, and priority support, and much more. Venngage also supports custom branding, allowing you to preinstall the company logo to design templates.

PROS

CONS

More info: Sign up for Venngage, or check out its plans and pricing.

BeFunky

BeFunky is an all-in-one creative platform — like Canva — that helps at editing images and creating appealing graphics. It features a simple interface with drag-and-drop support, like others.

BeFunky is basically an incredible photo editor that extends into a banner and a collage maker as well, unlike others. It eases the whole process of designing banners and editing them by providing various templates. Also, it enables you to personalize and edit them with fonts, icons, and other graphics.

What makes it unique is, there’s no requirement of making an account for creating banners or any other graphics, unlike the other tools on this list. Then, its photo editor allows you to erase objects from images, edit hundreds of photos using batch processing, and retouch them to perfection.

What free plan offers

That said, its free plan works well for most of your requirements, unlike other tools. You can download any number of graphics, which is the basic limitation of the other tools on this list. Also, you get all the templates in the free plan.

What pro plans offer

Its premium plan incentivizes you by offering more features and graphics. You get thousands of premium images, icons, and stickers too. Then, its Overlays lets you add a new layer of creativity onto your graphics.

PROS

CONS

More info: Sign up for BeFunky, or check out its plans and pricing.