This canva program is for people at home without and formal graphic design training who would like to fancy themselves as graphic artist to play. The use templates and they don't set anything to the actual size and space you are designing for, which results in pixelled images when they need to blown up to fit the space. 

better to let an actual graphic designer do your work for you instead of playing pretend. Unless you are okay with me take a scalpel and doing open heart surgery because I watched a YouTube video that tells me how. Because that is the equivalent of the art I receive from canva users.

The only graphic design I use is free hand! ( Done it since 1965 ) BC before computer. 

Canva is a novice users program and is not to be taken as a serious graphic design program. Every file a person sends me from canva is useless and has to be redone.

I love using open source GIMP.

We build and maintain websites and have found that Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are far less expensive than the Adobe products and are almost identical to how they work, though less bloated and easier to use. We also have Affinity Publisher and use that occasionally as well.

Hmmm. Canva is a big no for me. So is Adobe. Canva is great though. 

I lean into Relaythat, Stencil, and Pixlr for photos. 

Flixier, Wisecut, and Rocketium for video. 

A few others as well for Ai Stock photos...

Canva is for non-designers. Adobe Suite is for professional designers 

I'm a marketing professional, not a graphic designer, so I've been using MS Publisher for nearly 30 years. It fits my purposes because I'm not trying to pretend to be a true graphic designer. I format proposals, promo material, some graphics, etc. in it. I'm amazed by what you can actually do in this little desktop publishing app.  

It depends on what you are designing. Adobe Creative Suite is industry standard. I use Premiere Pro (video), After Effects (video/promos), Photoshop (web images, branding, logos), Illustrator (branding/logos), InDesign (ebooks, menus, etc) and Camtasia Studio for quick video. Stock anything, I use Envato Elements and online elearning courses I use Articulate (RISE & Storyline) and for LMS course design I ​use MasterStudy Wordpress LMS theme and plugin because it accepts SCORM files from courses I ​build in Articulate and it allows me to develop self-hosted online courses.

Affinity Photo and Design are my go to for design work. Beside being incredibly powerful, with an easy to use basic toolset (and more) there are tutorials and asset libraries available online to expand the toolset. I've also created asset libraries of my own using PNG files and  created my own Style libraries for text effects. 

If you mostly work with images as opposed to text Apple's Pixelmator is a great tool. I still use it when I have to remove a background from something. Alas, it's text handling is nowhere near as robust as Affinity Photo and Design.