Canva is very successful in marketing circles. It allows you to trivially generate visually appealing images to accompany social media posts. I.e. it's a domain-specific tool for bottom-feeder marketing spam.

You could replicate everything it does trivially with most basic features of Photoshop, or even Paint.NET - its main selling point is that it comes with lots of templates and images you can use with one click, and has a very gentle learning curve (because there isn't much to learn there).

> You could replicate everything it does trivially with most basic features of Photoshop, or even Paint.NET

Not harping on you, but this is “Dropbox is just CVS and ssh-copy, trivial” line of thinking.

I have Paint.Net AND a complete Adobe CC subscription, but opt to use Canva for almost all my lighter editing. The selling point is nice looking templates that are context-aware - if you want to pull in more element they will match what’s on screen.

I’m usually done faster in Canva than loading Photoshop would’ve taken

You could say it differently, instead of impoverishing Canva value prop, by noting that many teams don't really need advanced design features, and speed of execution matters much more for daily tasks: Canva really excels in that.

Ah so it's used for those sites that all look the same to the point it's impossible to figure out what the product is :)

I've encountered some enthusiastic users. These were people who had never done a lick of graphic design in their life but are now using it for things like birthday party invites, event announcements etc.