How to edit text in an image in Canva.
And what to use when Grab Text can’t match the font.

Select the photo in your design, choose Edit on the toolbar, open Tools and click See all, then pick Grab Text at the bottom. Select the words and click Grab: Canva removes them from the photo and adds an editable text box in their place. Type your change and adjust the font, size and colour. If the words are already a Canva text box rather than part of a photo, just double-click the box and type, or use File > Find and replace text.

Grab Text is only on Canva's paid plans, such as Canva Pro. On the free plan you can still edit text that is a Canva text box, and for words inside a photo you can cover them with a rectangle in the background colour and type a new text box on top, which only works on flat backgrounds and does not remove the original. To change the words inside the image itself without a subscription, edit the image first in a tool such as EditText, whose first edit is free, and upload the result to Canva.

Yes, depending on what you need. To change the words and keep the picture, EditText rewrites the text inside the image in its original lettering; the first edit is free and has no watermark. To do it by hand, Photopea in a browser lets you clone out the old text and type new text, if you can find the font. If you only need to copy the words out, Google Lens or any OCR tool is enough.

Only if that font is in Canva's library. Canva says that when the exact font isn't there, it picks the closest one, and its help centre notes that the match doesn't always work. Brand typefaces, paid display fonts, hand lettering and logo type usually end up in a different font. EditText avoids the font question by drawing the replacement from the letters already in the image.

Canva's help centre lists the cases it does not support: rotated or arched text, languages that don't use the Latin alphabet, files with more than one page, and bold, italic or underlined formatting. It works best on straight, flat text, so a photo taken at an angle may not be read. It can also leave traces of the old text, which Canva suggests cleaning up with Magic Eraser, and it sometimes invents text from patterns. It is not available in Canva Docs or Video.

Yes. Once you've exported a finished Canva design as PNG or JPEG, EditText can change the text on that file. A common workflow is to design in Canva, export the finished image, then make copy changes such as headline variants without reopening the editor.

For occasional text changes, EditText usually is. Canva's Grab Text comes with a paid plan billed monthly or yearly, at a price that varies by country. EditText has no subscription: $14.90 buys 40 edits once, and credits don't expire. If you already pay for Canva Pro for design work, Grab Text costs you nothing extra, and the choice comes down to whether its font match is good enough for your image.

For changing the text on an image that already exists, yes. It does not replace Canva for designing a poster, social post or presentation from a template; it has no template library or brand kit. It does one job: upload a finished image, type the old and new text, and download the image with the words changed in their original style, whether or not the image was made in Canva.