Canva for Teams Setup: Brand Kit, Permissions and Leavers

Canva Teams vs Canva Business: which plan you need

Canva's help centre now notes that Canva Teams is no longer available for new sign-ups or upgrades; existing Teams subscribers keep it. New teams start on Canva Business. Canva Pro is for one person only, so it is not an option for shared use.

Each person you invite uses a paid seat. For a comparison with Adobe's alternative, see our Canva vs Adobe Express guide.

Step 1: create the team on a company account

The team owner can delete the team and controls billing. If that is a staff member's personal Canva login, or your agency's, your designs leave with them. Create the team from a role address the business controls.

1. 1

   Use a company role address as owner

   For example design@ or marketing@ on your own domain, with the password in the company password manager and MFA on.

2. 2

   Start Canva Business from that account

   Canva says a team needs a Business trial or subscription, and isn't available on 1-day or 1-week plans.

3. 3

   Invite people from Settings, People

   Invitations link to the email they were sent to, work for 30 days and can be used once. Invite work emails only.

4. 4

   Assign roles

   Make one or two trusted people team admins. Give your designer or marketer the brand designer role. Everyone else stays a member.

5. 5

   Record who owns what

   Note the owner account, admins and billing card in your IT records, alongside other subscriptions.

Canva's roles page sets out the split: owners and admins manage members, settings, Brand Controls and approvals; brand designers can set up Brand Kits and publish Brand Templates; members design and collaborate.

Step 2: set up the Brand Kit and Brand Controls

A Brand Kit holds your logos, colours, fonts and other assets in one place, so staff stop downloading the logo from your website. Start with one kit. Add more only for genuinely separate brands or clients.

• Logos: upload the main logo, a one-colour version and a square version for social profiles, as PNG or SVG.
• Colours: your exact brand colours by hex code, in a sensible order (primary first).
• Fonts: upload licensed brand fonts, or choose the closest Canva fonts and set heading, subheading and body styles.
• Photos and graphics: approved product shots, team photos with consent, icons.
• Brand Templates: two or three ready-made layouts for the posts you make most (promotion, announcement, hiring).

Then switch on Brand Controls. Admins can restrict designs to brand colours, restrict fonts, and require design approval before members publish. Controls are set from a computer, and they still apply when someone edits on the mobile app. Approval is useful if junior staff post to social media; for a team of three it is often unnecessary.

Step 3: review AI, sharing and privacy settings

Canva says AI features are enabled for all team members by default on Canva Business. Admins can choose who can use each one (Magic Write, Magic Design, Magic Media, Canva AI, Canva Code and others) under Settings, Permissions. If you switch off Magic Design or Canva AI, staff can still design manually with the Brand Kit, but may not be able to generate on-brand designs with AI.

Next, check external sharing. Canva's sharing controls let admins decide who can share designs externally via links and to external emails: everyone, admins and brand designers, admins only, or no one. Some options, such as private embed domains, are Enterprise only. A sensible small-business default is to let admins and brand designers share public links, and keep personal privacy preferences under each user's Privacy controls.

Step 4: when staff leave, transfer their designs first

Designs belong to the person who created them, even inside a team. Canva's help centre presents transfer as the way to keep a removed member's designs and assets accessible to the team, so do it before removal, not after. Canva's ownership transfer moves a member's folders, designs, templates, videos, audio, uploads and shared content to someone who stays. Comments and activity history are not transferred.

1. 1

   Check ownership transfer is on

   Canva says it is on by default for teams. Teams created before 1 June 2026 should check Settings, Controls, Ownership transfer.

2. 2

   Open Settings, People

   Find the leaver and open the role drop-down next to their name.

3. 3

   Choose Transfer designs and remove from team

   Confirm you have the person's consent, as Canva asks, and pick the new owner from the list.

4. 4

   Confirm and wait

   Canva warns the action can't be undone. Large transfers can take over 30 minutes; content appears in the new owner's Projects with its sharing settings intact.

5. 5

   Close the loose ends

   Reduce the seat count in billing, check which social accounts they had connected for publishing, and change any passwords that were written into designs.

Canva is one line in a longer leaver list. Our employee offboarding IT checklist covers email, files, devices and other apps.

Do it yourself or get help?

A small team can do all of this in an hour or two with the checklist below. The parts that are easy to miss are the owner account and the leaver process, because they only matter months later.

If leavers keep slipping through, our Workflow Automation service (S$390 per workflow) can build a simple offboarding workflow in Make, Zapier or Google Apps Script, for example one that reminds the Canva admin to transfer designs and remove the seat whenever someone is marked as leaving in your HR form.