Menuzen vs. Canva: which is better for menu design? This article will answer this pressing question comprehensively. In this comparison, we’ll examine every critical feature digital menus should have and see how well Menuzen and Canva integrate these features. However, Menuzen’s specialised free menu templates clearly show that Canva will have a tough uphill battle. Let’s start by giving an overview of both menu design platforms.
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Before getting stuck into the comparison of the two platforms, have a look here to learn a bit more about each of them.
Menuzen is a digital menu provider based in Australia. It’s a highly specialised company that serves only the hospitality industry, allowing for better and more tailored services. The company has provided every tool a food business needs to display its food items digitally, receive online orders, collect and analyse customer data (upcoming feature), and build restaurant websites.
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Canva is a generic graphic design platform company located in Sydney, Texas, Manila, and Beijing. The company doesn’t specialise in any industry but provides a wide variety of tools for different designs, including calendars, menus, flyers, T-shirts, etc. Canva offers free services, but you may need to go premium for more advanced features.
Over the years, Canva has won many of us over due to its ease of use and vast menu template catalogue. While these are excellent features, they don’t match the breadth of benefits Menuzen offers, as we’ll see in the below table.
Cost
Limited free features or $13 monthly for the “Grow” package; pay $5 monthly forever for the “Grow” package when you opt for the early access offer.
Limited free features or $16/month for pro.
Item Manager
Update items on the go: alter your photos, add new items, update pricing, establish subcategories, and add information without having to completely redesign your menu.
Ease of Menu Creation
Simplified creation with unique zone editing.
Slightly more complex with limited zone editing.
Website Builder Feature
Free restaurant website builder.
Language Translation Feature
Under development.
Market Analytics Feature
Has an analytics feature.
Has a market analytics feature for customer insights.
Extra Graphic Design Tools
Has additional graphic design tools for creating flyers, logos, stickers, etc.
Business Manager feature
Set up and manage multiple menus in one account, h with individual items, sections and settings
Organizations can design for multiple locations in one account.
Now, let’s examine each of these criteria in more detail for a more profound comparison.
We’ll break this down into different sections for easier navigation and understanding.
Canva is one of the most accessible tools for designing a restaurant menu. As with Menuzen, all you essentially have to do is drag and drop the menu design items. Canva’s templates have many editable areas, despite restrictions on how far you can go as a newbie. Some items on their template require more profound design skills to change, unlike Menuzen, whose templates’ items are 100% easy to edit.
Compared to Canva, Menuzen—one of the best Canva menu maker alternatives—has put much more effort into simplifying things for its users. However, if you’re already an expert designer, both tools would be easy to work with, with Canva being relatively more complex.
Our modern lives are so full of commitments that, quite often, our 24 hours aren’t enough. So, when seeking solutions for business tasks, look for software that would meet your requirements quickly.
In this light, when you compare Menuzen to Canva, Canva can design great menus for you. However, unlike Menuzen, it’ll require more time and effort. You may even be forced to hire an expert for an adequately designed restaurant menu on Canva. That would mean spending more money on top of your current subscription plan, except when using free plans.
Canva gives you an intuitive design platform to create graphics — from restaurant menus to flyers, T-shirts, wedding invitation cards, and everything else. As a result, you should be prepared to grapple with a steeper learning curve. Also, be ready to study plenty of material and guides, including articles, videos, and even PDF books, if your skills must clock the level to design any menu layout imaginable with Canva.
Canva alternatives like Menuzen, on the other hand, offer services tailored to the hospitality industry. This means you’ll have less clutter to navigate through when designing your dream digital menu on the free menu maker. The dedicated 24/7 support team is also available to guide you through your menu design journey.
Again, we’ll split this section into subsections to enable you to follow properly.
The perfect restaurant menu is not only aesthetically pleasing but also very effective in selling off your dishes via the incorporation of menu design science, otherwise known as menu/pricing psychology. This is one area where Menuzen trumps all-purpose design platforms like Canva, Adobe Spark, etc.
Universal graphic designers most likely create Canva’s templates because most don’t fully meet the design requirements of menus. For one, relatively few of their templates are designed to accommodate pictures, which is an important psychological factor of menu design. Moreover, there appears to be an excessive emphasis on aesthetics, and arrangements scarcely follow the route with which diners are most likely to examine a menu.
Menuzen, on the other hand, integrates all menu factors into its free menu templates’ designs. For example, not every designer has the right design experience to create a template for Menuzen. The team behind Menuzen’s template database comprise experts in menu design science.
Plus, every new template is deemed 100% ready to accommodate all menu design features before publication. The template designs are very scalable, meaning the only action that may be required on your part is a little tweaking here and there. So, if you’re to opt for one of the best Canva alternatives, Menuzen is a valid option.
The kind of dedication Menuzen puts into designing each menu template is one of the reasons we don’t have thousands of menu templates yet. Having many templates doesn’t make a menu design platform suitable for your restaurant.
What’s the benefit of having over 7,000 templates when most can’t be customised easily to satisfy all menu design requirements?
Menuzen offers nearly 100 distinct, professionally-designed templates, with more in the works. You aren’t likely to study everything before settling for one.
In a nutshell, all templates on Menuzen are fully optimised, and there’s barely any menu feature you have in mind that Menuzen’s templates can’t accommodate.
Multi-purpose design tools like Canva and Adobe are great but aren’t always the best if you seek the best restaurant menu design platform, as discussed in our Menuzen vs. Adobe comparison guide.
Canva can be used for a broader range of designs than Menuzen — e.g. you can use it to design a wedding calendar or a birthday invitation card, which restaurants don’t usually need. However, if you want the best menu design platform that meets modern restaurants’ needs, Menuzen is a must-have.
Our Menuzen vs. Canva analysis shows that if you opt for Canva, you’ll be sacrificing some quality as the Canva templates don’t satisfy every requirement of a world-class menu. For example, menu psychology entails placing certain dishes strategically and using design features. These design elements lead to better exposure for specific dishes or make people more willing to spend more by buying more or manipulating their perception of value.
All these are critical factors that a designer must have at the back of their mind while creating any menu layout. However, a closer look at the menu templates on Canva reveals that not much care was given to meeting all menu design requirements. They appear more focused on menu aesthetics, which is NOT the only thing required for an effective menu in today’s competitive world.
Suppose you pay little credit to the benefits of menu psychology, which can potentially boost your sales. In that case, using Canva instead of one of the best Canva menu maker alternatives like Menuzen for your menus is okay.
It’s not that you can’t design a world-class menu with Canva, but the trouble of producing a menu that is 100% complete makes it a less favourable choice. Sometimes, you have to personally design the menu template from start to finish because no amount of tweaking to an existing template would produce what you want.
So, is it essential for a menu design platform to be capable of a broad range of designs irrelevant to a food-selling business?
This depends on your preferences and what you’re willing to sacrifice.
Menuzen has several advantages over Canva regarding extra features. These advantages warrant a closer look at the two before you choose.
Menuzen allows you to update information on the go quickly and with ease. While platforms allow that, Menuzen is much better since updating and collecting information is faster on the platform. The platform is light, fast, intuitive, and specialised, which makes managing your menu extremely convenient. Canva, on the other hand, is a generic design platform that lacks Menuzen’s specialised approach — a critical reason why it will always trail Menuzen in quality service delivery.
Secondly, Menuzen provides a website, shareable link, and QR code for each menu. You can link your social media, display your restaurant details and contact information, and share the unique URL to reach even more customers. This means your customers can access your offerings from anywhere in the world and also make bookings and reservations ahead of time. Canva is a design software so it cannot provide the website or extra features for you.
Also, fixing glitches on Menuzen is faster; let’s explain how. The issues you may experience with listing or describing food and drink items can be quite different from those experienced by someone designing a wedding calendar due to the variation in platform design and the tools being used. Menuzen’s specialisation in the hospitality industry puts it in a better position to deal with any potential issues in this regard.
Menuzen is also one of the best Canva alternatives since it delivers a superior customer service experience. This is possible since it only caters to a select group of people or a small sector of the graphic design market, i.e., its customer base is more manageable. Canva’s reach across a various industries makes quality customer support more challenging and less specialised.
A critically important feature of Menuzen that’s absent from Canva is the analytics tool it’s currently working on providing. This tool will help you collect vital information on your customers’ eating and ordering habits. You can then further process this data to gain meaningful insights that can guide your social media marketing campaigns and promotional activities. This helps you serve customers better and boosts sales, among many other benefits.
We noticed one advantage of Canva over Menuzen: you can order to print and ship paper menus to your location, provided they ship to your country. However, this may only benefit those bent on offering paper menus — a digital menu eliminates the need for this in the first place.
So, what makes up the packages included for Menuzen and Canva?
What you get from Canva is a platform to design, manage, publish, and print menus. There isn’t much more beyond that, save for integrating your Canva account with Google Drive.
While it’s true that Canva has over 7,000 menu templates in its database, these are just impressive numbers without much substance when examined closer. Many such templates appear to have been designed by people with little or no knowledge of menu design science. The phrase “quality over quantity” has a profound meaning here.
Most of the templates on Canva are more challenging to customise than Menuzen’s. The designers likely paid little heed to the universal requirements of a genuinely world-class menu. Menuzen, which tops the list of Canva alternatives, doesn’t publish a template until requirements are met.
As mentioned earlier, besides menu design and integration with Google Suites, Canva barely has much to offer. On the other hand, Menuzen, which specialises in the restaurant industry, provides several extra features that your restaurant can benefit from. For example, Menuzen’s upcoming market analytics tool collects vital customer information as they interact with your menu. Statistical manipulations of such data can distil precious market insights you can exploit.
Both menu design platforms charge reasonable fees for services provided. Investing in either will cut the cost of a graphic designer and can generate a nice profit, worth more than the subscription fee. Menuzen has the added benefit of creating your new website included in the price too. Find Menuzen's pricing here.
Summarily, the main advantage of Canva is the wide range of designs it covers. Without any serious graphic needs besides menu design, it’s better to stop at specialised solutions like Menuzen.
Listed below are the summarised perks and downsides of both digital restaurant menu makers.
Easy to use
Easy to manage items on the go
Menu analytics feature (coming soon)
Embeddable menus
No extra graphic design features
Multi-restaurant owners may need to opt for the paid “Grow” plan
Extra design features
Lots of templates
Additional promotional products
Expensive
No business manager feature
Listed below are the summarised perks and downsides of both digital restaurant menu makers.
Great value for money.
Specialised in menu design.
World-class templates.
A host of extra features.
Relatively new.
General purpose design platform.
A wide range of design tools.
Been around for a long time.
Steeper learning curve.
Less optimised menu templates.
Listed below are the summarised perks and downsides of both digital restaurant menu makers.
Great value for money.
Specialised in menu design.
World-class templates.
A host of extra features.
Relatively new.
General purpose design platform.
A wide range of design tools.
Been around for a while.
Steeper learning curve.
Less optimised menu templates.
The most important things which make Menuzen better than Canva include the following:
To select the best menu platform, first, figure out what digital menu features you need in your restaurant before considering the options available. Next, study the offers presented by your shortlisted platforms and then read reviews about those companies. Studying the value propositions of menu providers will give you an idea about whether or not they have what you’re looking for.
The features of a good digital menu platform include the following:
There’s no doubt that Menuzen is a better free menu maker than Canva, whichever way you look at it. Menuzen’s specialisation is particularly credited for this advantage. Our Menuzen vs. Canva comparison shows that Canva’s templates are numerous and beautiful, but most fall short of meeting all menu design requirements. You needn’t take our word for it; sign up for free on Menuzen today and confirm these statements yourself.
