10 Best Free Design Tools Online for Creating Eye-Catching Content

Use these 10 best free design tools online to create effective and visually stunning marketing designs without paying a premium price.

Is spending on premium plans out of the budget? No problem! You can always use free design tools online.

Despite having limited features compared to paid programs, free tools can bring life to your marketing materials without breaking the bank. From finding royalty-free stock photos to using online design editors at no cost, our list of free design tools will help you get started to create stunning visual content for your website, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Best Free Photo Editing Tools

Canva

Canva is a jack of all trades. It lets you create designs, edit videos, and publish your own website using a free domain. But what puts this free web design tool above the rest is its drag-and-drop editor that allows even non-designers to design.

Canva’s free version provides over 250,000 professional and customizable templates for various designs: infographics, business cards, ebooks, social media images, websites, and 100 other design types. You can choose from over a million free photos and graphics to add to your designs and collaborate with others online.

The free tool is more than enough to ramp up your creativity, but it also lets you access much more features in its paid versions: Canva Pro and Canva for Teams.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: Starts at $119.99/year for one person

Pixlr

Pixlr is an online photo-editing and design tool available on the web browser, desktop, and mobile for average and pro users.

Pixlr X gets the job done for quick designs with its drag-and-drop editor. But for those looking for advanced photo editing features, Pixlr E is the better choice. Both versions let you access free templates and images that can transform your designs to a new level.

You can unlock more templates, images, and access to Pixlr Mobile Apps when you subscribe monthly or yearly.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: Starts at $4.90/month for one person

Adobe Express

Adobe Express is a new online tool from Adobe that lets you create visual designs and content right on your browser. Adobe calls it their forever-free tool and positions it as a user-friendly design editor for everyone. In short, it is like Canva but is part of the entire Adobe ecosystem.

The free plan has all the core features to help you create your designs. It features thousands of unique templates, different styles of design assets, and enough Adobe fonts to work it. It gives you access to basic editing features, several photo effects, and a limited collection of royalty-free Adobe Stock photos.

This free design tool can be used on the web and mobile and comes with a free 2GB storage. More features and storage are available through the premium plan.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: Starts at $9.99/month

Best User Interface (UI) Design Tool

Figma

Figma is a free, all-in-one collaborative interface design platform that proves to everyone that ‘the best way to design is together.’ From brainstorming to designing and building, this vector-based design tool offers the best possible way to make the design process more efficient. And various companies can attest to it.

What is striking about Figma is that it allows everyone to experience what it offers at no cost. The starter plan allows for three Figman and three FigJam files, unlimited personal files and collaborators, and the use of plugins, widgets, templates, and its mobile app.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: Starts at $15.00/editor per month

Best Free Font Tools

Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel offers a collection of free fonts licensed for commercial use. It lets users download high-quality fonts at no cost. No premium plans are available, but some fonts can only be purchased. Besides free fonts, Font Squirrel also features a Webfont Generator, where you can upload your own fonts, and a Font Identifier, where you can find the best match to the image of the font you uploaded.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: N/A

Fontjoy

Fontjoy is the solution for everyone who needs the inspiration to find the best fonts to use together. This online tool is practical because the pair of fonts you use in a design can make or break your campaign. Fontjoy displays combinations of fonts in real-time to let users see how the pairings look.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: N/A

Google Fonts

Open-source fonts are readily available on Google Fonts. It features more than 1,400 customizable font families and APIs that let users add fonts to their websites. All the free fonts are in Google Fonts’ GitHub repository, and the website’s interface allows you to filter fonts and find the one that best matches your preferences.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: N/A

Best Free Stock Photo Resources

Freepik

Freepik is a popular source of free, high-quality assets, including photos, vectors, mockups, and more. It features a variety of collections that even free plan users can utilize.

Freepik, primarily a hot pot of free graphics, has created its own universe and expanded to three projects: Flaticon for free customizable icons and stickers, SlidesGo for free Google Slides and PowerPoint templates, and Wepik for pre-made and customizable design templates.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: Starts at $24.00/month

Pexels

Pexels is every designer’s best friend. It offers hundreds of thousands of free stock photos and videos with the Pexels license. The assets available on the site are high quality and come from user uploads or free image websites. You can use the Pexels app on Android or iOS devices and connect it to Google Chrome, Photoshop, Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, and Google Slides.

Price: Free. Premium Plan: N/A

Pixabay

Pixabay is one of the top sources of free stock photography shared by its community. But it has become so much more since its launch. It now features more than 2.6 million free images plus royalty-free stock media, including videos, sound effects, and music licensed by Pixabay.

This free design tool offers its own Pixabay API adopted by more than 2,000 developers, including Canva, Adobe Spark, and Google Docs.