Canva vs Spline
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
What Canva is
Canva is a browser-based design editor, and its developer documentation sets out two distinct ways to work with it in code: apps that run inside the Canva editor, and the Connect API, which drives Canva from another system. A Canva app is a plugin built with standard web technologies such as JavaScript, rendered inside an iframe in the editor's object panel. Three pieces make one up: the Apps SDK, the App UI Kit and the Fetch API for calls out to a backend. A finished app is either distributed publicly through the Apps Marketplace or shared privately with team members only. Local development uses the Canva CLI, installed from an npm package published by Canva, and expects Node.js v24 and npm v11, with the development server running on port 8080. The Connect API works the other way round, letting an external application create and retrieve work in a Canva account. It authenticates with OAuth 2.0 using the authorisation code flow plus PKCE with SHA-256, and Canva publishes the OpenAPI specification on its developer site. An integration is either public, which means passing a Canva review, or private, which is restricted to Canva Enterprise customers. Through the API, a design can be created from four presets (doc, email, presentation and whiteboard) or at custom dimensions between 40 and 8000 pixels on each side, with a total area no greater than 25,000,000 square pixels. Assets can be uploaded: images up to 50 MB as JPEG, PNG, HEIC, single-frame GIF, TIFF or single-frame WEBP, and video up to 500 MB as M4V, MKV, MP4, MPEG, QuickTime or WebM. Autofill populates image, text, chart and sheet fields in a design, which is the mechanism behind generating many designs from one data source, though the acting user must belong to a Canva Enterprise organisation. Brand templates can be listed 25 at a time by default and 100 at most per request, and require a Canva Pro, Canva Teams or Canva Enterprise plan. Exports are produced as JPG, PNG, GIF, PPTX, MP4, PDF, an HTML bundle or standalone HTML. MP4 is available at 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4K in horizontal or vertical orientation, PDFs at A4, A3, letter or legal, and JPG, PNG and GIF images between 40 and 25,000 pixels. Plan level reaches into the API here: Pro export quality, lossy PNG compression and transparent PNG backgrounds all need a Canva Pro level plan, and on the free plan a fixed-dimension design cannot be upscaled on export by more than 1.125 times. Rate limits are counted per user of an integration: 20 design creations per minute, 30 asset uploads, 60 autofills and 100 brand template listings. Exports are governed more tightly, at 750 per five minute window and 5,000 per 24 hours for the integration, and 500 per 24 hours for any single user.
What Spline is
Spline is a design tool for building 3D scenes in a browser and publishing them to the web. It ships two editors, a 3D editor and a 2D editor called Hana. The two share the same interactivity model and the same publishing pipeline, so they are two halves of one tool rather than separate products. Scenes render using WebGPU and fall back to WebGL. There is also a desktop app for macOS and Windows that supports tabs, offline-friendly editing, MCP and system fonts. The 3D editor goes past modelling into behaviour. It includes physics simulation, a particle system and first-person and third-person game controls, which makes it possible to build a scene a visitor can move around in. Imports cover OBJ, FBX with animation and rigs, STL, GLTF, GLB and 3D Gaussian Splats. Exports cover GLTF, GLB, STL, USDZ, OBJ and Spline's own file format, with stills as PNG or JPG and motion as WebM, MP4 or an image sequence. Hana is the 2D editor, with vector networks, booleans, gradients, glass and 3D projection effects, and it publishes to Webflow, Framer, Wix Studio, HTML and JS, Notion and Shopify. On the 3D side, Spline exports code for React projects and offers integrations for Webflow, Framer, Wix Studio, Next.js, Swift and Kotlin. Which of those outputs are actually available depends on the plan. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 2,000 AI credits a month, but web exports carry a Spline watermark. Hobby, at 12 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 15 USD billed monthly, removes the watermark and raises the allowance to 3,000 credits. Pro costs 25 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 30 USD monthly, and is the first plan that can export to Apple and Android apps and to USDZ and STL files. Max costs 60 USD per seat per month billed yearly or 70 USD monthly, includes 10,000 credits, caps video assets at 100 MB, and is where self-hosted export, code export and file version history become available. SAML single sign-on and centralised billing are reserved for the Enterprise plan, which is priced individually and billed annually.
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