Top 40 Free Graphic Design Software

Visual Content = Engagement

 

The use of visual content's been increasingly popular in the current digital age for various professionals, including designers, marketers, bloggers, and even small business owners.

This is not surprising. It's been proven that the use of images and videos yield much higher engagement rates, especially on social media. For instance, tweets with images are 34% more likely to get retweeted. A quick search on Google Trends will show that the interest in the term 'social media images' has increased tenfold over the past decade. Furthermore, a study conducted by CoSchedule on the top 100 global brands found out that image and video posts accounted for over 80% of all Facebook posts in 2016 for these brands, effectively drawing in a massive 92% of all engagements.

As such, it's important to keep up with this trend for your brand to stay afloat. Luckily, you no longer need a design background or to spend a lot of money to produce high-quality visual content. As the demand for this practice grew, there's now an abundance of online solutions available to meet this need. At Smallpdf, our set of free tools is used every day in conjunction with many of these services to help users to manage their files, and we thought it'd be useful to compile a list of the best and free graphic design software as well as other related online tools for you to explore using.

The List

 

Below are best 40 free graphic design software that you can use to instantly create personalized visual content within minutes and capture your audience's attention.

1. Canva - a favorite of Smallpdf users, Canva offers countless designs, filters, fonts and icons online to help you create presentations, social media graphics and more! One of the most popular free graphic design software out there.

2. Stencil - aimed to help you make images faster and easier than ever experienced, Stencil offers quotes, custom sizes, icons, templates and over 1.5 million photos to create the perfect image for your work.

3. Bannersnack - all-in-one banner maker and advertising app, featuring ready-made designs and templates over an easy to use, drag and drop interface.

4. Freepik - the leading search engine of free vector designs, with over 1 million stock photos & 40 million monthly visits for all the graphic resources needs.

5. Venngage - a free online tool to create beautiful infographics, icons, text or images.

6. Icons8 Lunacy - free graphic design software for Windows with built-in design resources (photos, icons, and illustrations). Fits for creating simple design templates or sophisticated user interfaces. Lunacy works offline and supports .sketch files.

7. Designbold - aimed to empower everyone to create visual content, Designbold features simple but powerful design tool to turn your ideas into stunning visual content.

8. Vectr - a free graphic design software used to create vector graphics easily and intuitively.

9. Fotor - another free online graphic design software, featuring a photo editing suite that allows users to 'edit', 'collage' and 'design' any form of graphics.

10. Piktochart - No complex design software. No heavy designer fees. Just a simple, intuitive tool that helps you tell your story with the visual impact it deserves.

11. Prezi - never experience another boring presentation with Prezi, the cloud-based presentation platform open canvas allow you to navigate through topics freely, encouraging interaction and collaboration with your viewers.

12. Desygner - offers people a collaborative design tool with 1000's of ready-made beautiful designs, which can easily be tweaked, published and printed.

13. Easil - another online graphic design software to streamline the marketing campaign creation process by allowing users to create beautiful graphics quickly and easily with 1000's professionally designed, fully customizable templates.

14. Pablo - created by Buffer, the popular social media management platform, Pablo provides a tool to create beautiful images they can share on social media.

15. Genially - a single platform for all kinds of interactive contents, in which you can create presentations, video presentations, dossiers and more!

16. Animatron - easy to use online video maker for creating marketing and social videos in minutes. Don't limit yourself to just images with our list of the best and free graphic design software.

17. Giphy - for all your gif needs.

18. Befunky - online photo editor to create beautiful photographs and professional-quality graphic design without any special skills or technical expertise.

19. FotoJet - a free online collage maker where you can create beautiful photo collages, posters, cards and more in minutes.

20. Greetings Island - offers templates and design tools to customize invitations & greeting cards. You can even print, or send designs online.

21. Postermywall - thousands of templates, free downloads and easy to use tools to create posters, videos, and graphics.

22. Evite - a social-planning website for creating, sending, and managing online invitations with over 100 million yearly users.

23. Lucidpress - A cloud-based design & publishing platform featuring over 350 templates for brochures, flyers, business cards, social media, newsletters and more.

24. Paperless Post - create fliers and digital invitations online to help users connect at life's most important occasions.

25. Template.net - online database of templates for users to download in various editable formats.

26. iPiccy - another photo editor, with over 100 photo effects, facial retouching and frames for users to use.

27. Creative Market - ready-to-use design assets from 27,311 independent creators, including graphics, fonts, themes, and photos.

28. piZap - fun and easy to learn online photo editor & collage maker, with tons of effects, fonts, stickers, collage layouts, borders & editing tools.

29. Hloom - over 1,000 Microsoft templates, including flyers, CVs, invoices, certificates and more!

30. Vecteezy - vector database with over 100,000 vectors to download.

31. Photovisi - free and easy to use photo collage maker. Premium version available to save collages in higher resolutions.

32. Crello - the simplest online image editor to produce posts, covers, graphics, and posters using the best software on the web.

33. Recite This - this unique tool allows users to create beautiful visual quotes as images. Download and share on your favorite social network.

34. Pictaculous - ever wonder what colors to use with an image? This tool generates a color palette for you to use after uploading your image.

35. Tinkercad - Tinkercad is the quickest way to go from mind to design in minutes, including toys, prototypes, home decor, Minecraft models & jewelry.

36. PicMonkey - Photo editor. Design maker. Idea realizer.

37. Infogram - quickly create charts, maps, infographics, reports, and social media assets. You have access to designer templates, 40+ chart types and over one million high-quality stock images and icons.

38. Typito - canva for videos. Use drag and drop and professionally designed text animations and overlays to make engaging videos for social media marketing.

39. Visme - originally a presentation software, Visma also offers users to create designs such as flyers and posters.

40. Powtoon - online video creation platform to create video and presentations, with over 18 million global users.

41. Snappa - free graphic design software to online graphics in a snap, with pre-made templates, 500,000+ high-res stock photos and 70,000+ vectors and shapes for users to use.

How We Can Help

 

And there you have it. The best part is that they are all free to use. Similarly, Smallpdf also offers 17 free online conversion tools to help you with your visual content, including:

PNG-PDF - a lot of templates are saved as image files, in which you can convert to PDF format to prevent them from being edited.

Merge - useful when you have many pages or want to combine your designs together to be sent via email.

Compress - got a file that's too large to be sent via email? Our compress tool's free to use to solve this problem.

Protect - sending your files electronically? Why not take a step further and encrypt your designs with this tool.

Many of these tools are online, similar to Smallpdf. As such, it doesn't matter if you want to use these free graphic design software on Mac, Linux or Windows. Furthermore, they focus on easy-to-use UI and powerful processing to help make visual content creation easy, for beginners and pros.

What's your go-to tool to create visual content? What do you consider to be the best graphic design software on the market? Let us know via email or twitter!