Canva makes your slides move. Synthesia puts a person on them. For training videos, one saved my week

Eleven onboarding videos, one week, zero video skills on the team. Canva got the first call because it's already our design home, and its video features genuinely surprised me — animated slides, transitions, timing, all dead simple. For a two-minute 'welcome to the company' video with motion graphics, Canva was plenty.

The moment the content needed a person explaining something — 'here's how to file expenses' — Canva ran out. Animated text can carry a slide deck, but a training video where nobody appears starts feeling like a slideshow with a soundtrack. Our test viewers agreed: they watched the Canva intro, then clicked away from the Canva explainer.

Synthesia filled exactly that hole. Type the script, pick an avatar, get a person on screen saying it — including in languages I don't speak, which mattered because our Berlin office needed the same videos in German. The avatars aren't perfect; there's a half-second stiffness in the greeting that everyone notices once. Nobody cared. The alternative was eleven days of filming.

Where Canva kept winning even inside the project: branded frames, intro cards, the PDF worksheets that accompany each video. Synthesia's template polish is thinner. The final series was Synthesia for the talking sections and Canva for everything visual around them.

So: graphics that move, Canva. A face that explains, Synthesia. If your training content is mostly visual and light on narration, don't pay for Synthesia. The moment 'watch this video' needs an actual human presence — at scale, in multiple languages — it's the only one of the two that delivers.