Canva vs HubSpot and Mailchimp

This shifts Canva from being the place where SMBs make marketing assets to being the place where they also decide who sees them, when they go out, and how follow ups are triggered. Ortto adds the customer data layer, journey builder, email and chat automation, and campaign analytics that sit closer to HubSpot and Mailchimp’s daily job. That matters because Canva already has 265M monthly active users and 31M paid subscribers, so it can bundle message creation and message delivery into one workflow.1 2 3 4 5

• HubSpot wins SMB marketing by owning the CRM and automation layer. Its current product catalog centers on Smart CRM plus marketing workflows across email, ads, website, chat, and social. Canva is approaching the same buyer from the other side, starting with creative production and moving into customer records and campaign orchestration.6 7 8
• Mailchimp has long been the lightweight SMB default for email marketing and customer journeys. Ortto is a step up the stack from simple newsletters into CDP style segmentation and cross channel lifecycle messaging, which means Canva is not just adding send buttons, it is adding the logic that decides which user gets which message after which action.1 9 10 11
• Canva has been expanding by bundling adjacent marketing jobs around the core design canvas. Recent research shows it layering AI generation, brand controls, marketing intelligence, motion design, and ad optimization. Marketing automation fits that pattern because it turns a finished asset into a measurable campaign, not just a file export.3 4 5

The likely end state is Canva becoming an all in one SMB marketing workspace, where a team designs an email or social post, pulls an audience, launches a journey, and reads performance in the same product. If that rollout works, HubSpot and Mailchimp face a competitor with a much larger top of funnel and a cheaper path from free design user to paid marketing stack buyer.1 2 3 6 9