If your video already lives in a Canva design, Canva's own captions are the obvious choice. They're quick, the style packs look good, and you don't have to move the video anywhere. We checked every step below against Canva's help article on generating captions in October 2026. Canva rolls features out gradually, so your menus may differ slightly.
Before you start
Canva only offers captions when a few conditions are met:
- The design is a video, a supported social media design, or an audio file (M4A, MP3, OGG, WAV or WEBM). To check, open File. The design type is shown under the design name.
- The video has speech in it. Captions come from the audio only.
- On desktop, the video has finished uploading. On mobile, you can pick a video from your camera roll straight from the Captions panel.
How to add captions in Canva, step by step
Captions or subtitles, the steps are the same. This is also how to add subtitles in Canva on desktop:
- Open your design in the editor.
- Select the video (or audio) and choose Captions from the toolbar. You can also go to Text and select Captions under Dynamic text, or search for Captions in Apps.
- Choose a caption style pack. You can change it later.
- Optional: under Apply captions to, untick any clips you don't want captioned.
- Optional but worth doing: select Edit next to Automatically detect spoken language and choose the language yourself. Canva says this can improve accuracy.
- Select Generate captions.
The captions appear as their own layer on the video timeline. The same panel has a Translate captions into option for captions in a different language from the one spoken. Canva's feature page marks its AI translator as a Pro feature.
Editing Canva captions
Read the captions through once with the sound on. Automatic captions tend to trip on names, product terms and numbers. From Canva's editing guide:
- To fix a word, select the caption segment and type, or open Captions in the toolbar and edit the line in the panel.
- To change timing, drag the start and end edges of a caption segment on the timeline.
- To remove a line, hover over it in the Captions tab and select the delete icon. Delete all captions clears the lot.
- To move captions on screen, drag them where you want them. Repeat on each page of the design.
Styling Canva subtitles
Canva has more than 20 caption style packs. Each one bundles a font, colors and an animation, and they preview live when you hover over them. To change the pack after generating, select any caption, open Captions from the toolbar, go to the Styles tab and pick a new one. It applies to every caption in the video.
For one-off changes, select a single caption and use the toolbar for font, color, size and effects. Canva is also rolling out caption animations under Animate: Reveal, Highlight and Snake. If you're after the word-by-word emphasis that's everywhere on TikTok, try Highlight first (our guide to word-by-word captions explains how that style works).
Two catches. If none of the style packs match your Brand Kit, Canva hides them and shows the Brand Kit default instead. And at the time of writing, the style packs are available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Indonesian and German, so other locales may see fewer.
Two kinds of captions in Canva
Canva has two separate caption features, and they're easy to mix up. The Captions panel makes Editable Captions, which you can change and which download with the video. Separately, Canva has view-only captions, turned on under Your account, Accessibility, or with Show view-only captions on a video. Those only show inside Canva (the editor, present mode and share links). You can't edit them and they don't download. If your downloaded video has no captions, check this first.
Limits worth knowing
| What | Canva, at the time of writing (October 2026) |
|---|---|
| Spoken languages | 57 listed, from Afrikaans to Welsh, including Hindi, Arabic, Japanese and Spanish |
| Video upload | MP4, MOV, MPEG, MKV, WEBM or GIF, up to 1 GB per file |
| Storage | 5 GB of uploads on the free plan; paid plans get more |
| Resolution | 4K uploads are stored at 1080p |
| Download with captions | MP4 only. Image and PDF downloads don't include captions |
| Price | The feature page calls the caption generator free; translation is marked Pro |
Canva doesn't publish a video length limit for captions. Upload limits are on its upload formats page.
When Canva captions go wrong
The Captions option is missing
Open File and check the design type. A presentation or a document won't offer captions even if it has a video in it. Then make sure the clip has speech and, on desktop, that it has finished uploading. Canva notes that captions are available for audio files in the timeline but not in page view.
Captions don't generate, or miss words
Canva lists three causes: unclear speech, loud background noise, and music over the voice. Its fixes, in order: lower the music, try Enhance voice under Audio tools on the selected video, and on desktop re-upload the video from Uploads and generate again. If the detected language was wrong, delete the captions, set the spoken language by hand and regenerate. The last resort is typing captions with the Text tool.
When to use something else
Canva does a lot well. It has 20-plus style packs, caption animations, translation and Brand Kit control, and everything stays inside the design you're already working on. We'd stick with it for social posts made in Canva.
It's the wrong tool in a few cases:
- You need a subtitle file. Canva's help only documents MP4 downloads with the captions burned in. Our subtitle generator gives you SRT, VTT or TXT as well.
- The video isn't a Canva design, and uploading a large file just to caption it is slow. Our auto captions tool opens the video in your browser and sends only a small audio track for transcription.
- You want captions viewers can switch off. Canva's downloaded captions are open captions, always on. Our guide to open and closed captions explains when each one fits.
Our tool is narrower than Canva. It has four caption styles (Karaoke, Classic, Boxed, Bold pop), no translation and no templates. What it does have is SRT and VTT downloads, no account and no watermark.