Venngage

It's a wonderful idea but unfortunately executed horribly.

Even with my background as a designer and programmer, I found it to be clunky, nonintuitive and difficult to use. No phone support available and wasted hours upon hours trying to get help for a simple task. Oh, and beware if you ever want to try to close your account? Watch out, they don't make it easy. Steer clear.

1. Export the final design in high resolution
2. Create a folder structure to save files
3. Exhaustive library of images and cliparts

1. Search functionalities do not work very well
2. Tool freeze if the design becomes heavy

My students and I have enjoyed using Venngage for poster-making projects and infographics. There's a lot to like about it, especially since it's easy to learn to use and it's very user friendly. My students were creating in no time at all. Venngage offers of good selection of templates to choose from and they are well arranged and filtered when searching for a template type.
The offered templates look good - they are well designed, simple, and clean. The templates are helpful in the classroom because it gives students somewhere to start - less artistic students don't have to stare at a blank screen; instead, they are given an idea or motivation to start from and edit. Editing and creating is simple with the drag-and-drop features and layout of the platform. Venngage also offers a good selection of images that you are allowed to use in your projects for free; however, you do not have the ability to upload personal pictures with the free version. Another great features is that it autosaves - this is great for a generation of students that is accustomed to Google Apps automatically saving, at all times.

While I've enjoyed using Venngage for a few projects, I do have some concerns. For starters, you cannot upload your own images on the free version (a feature available with other platforms). Beyond that, you cannot download or export images as a PDF or PNG unless you have the premium version. Even though I like Venngage, this was somewhat frustrating to discover as I'd never experienced this problem with similar platforms. You can also only create 4 designs for free and all of these projects will contain the Venngage logo/branding. I must point out that my least favorite things about this software are all "free subscription" problems. From what I've read, if you purchase a subscription, all of my concerns are resolved. I understand - they are a tech company and they need to charge for the awesome product. I've just found other platforms with similar abilities that offer more features for free. I think it would be phenomenal if they'd consider some sort of teacher or education package, but as of now, this is too pricey for educational purposes.