Google Labs’ Free Pomelli Tool Takes Aim at Canva for Small-Business Marketing

Google Labs and DeepMind’s Pomelli is a free AI marketing experiment that turns a business website into brand-aware campaigns, photoshoots and creatives. Here is how it compares with Canva.

Google Labs has a new answer to one of the biggest design headaches for small businesses: how to create consistent, on-brand marketing content without a full design team. The product is called Pomelli — spelled with two Ls — and Google describes it as a free AI marketing experiment built by Google Labs in partnership with Google DeepMind.

Pomelli is being positioned by many early observers as a Canva alternative, but the more accurate description is narrower and more interesting: it is a brand-aware campaign generator for small and medium-sized businesses. Instead of starting from a blank canvas or a template library, Pomelli starts from a business website, builds a profile of the company’s visual identity, and then generates marketing campaign ideas and creative assets around that profile.

What Google says Pomelli is

In its launch post, Google said Pomelli helps small-to-medium-sized businesses generate “scalable, on-brand social media campaigns.” The tool analyzes a company website and existing imagery to create what Google calls a Business DNA profile. That profile can include tone of voice, custom fonts, images, colors, values, catalog items and other brand assets.

Once the Business DNA is in place, Pomelli can suggest campaign ideas, generate image-and-text marketing creatives, and let users edit the output inside the tool. Google’s Help Center also describes related modules for catalog items, AI product photoshoots, website creation, brand books and sharing finished assets to connected apps such as Google Ads.

How Pomelli works

The workflow is designed to be simpler than a traditional design suite:

Build the Business DNA: enter a business website, start from scratch, or use a template. If available and allowed by the user, Google Business Profile data can help populate the brand profile.
Add products or services: Pomelli’s catalog can pull product information from a URL or accept manually entered product details and images.
Create campaigns: users choose a product, review the campaign brief, then generate a set of marketing assets.
Edit and export: the generated creatives can be refined by changing the image, headline, description, call-to-action, typography, visual elements and layout.

For businesses selling physical products, Pomelli also includes a Photoshoot feature that can turn simple product photos into studio-style or lifestyle imagery. Generated images can be edited, animated, saved into Business DNA, downloaded, or used to start a campaign.

Is Pomelli free?

For now, yes. Google’s Pomelli Help Center says users can “currently use Pomelli at no charge” and can create “several hundred image and video generations.” Google also notes that future updates to usage caps will be reflected in the Help Center, so the free status should be treated as current beta availability rather than a permanent pricing promise.

That makes Pomelli notable because Canva’s own pricing page continues to separate its Free and Pro tiers. Canva Free remains available at US$0 for one person, while Canva Pro is listed at US$144 per year for one person on Canva’s pricing page snapshot. Pomelli’s current pitch is different: fewer broad design-suite features, but deeper automation around brand extraction and campaign generation.

Where Pomelli is available

At launch, Google said Pomelli was available as a public beta experiment in English in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Google’s current availability help page lists English as the supported language and says Pomelli is available to users aged 18+ across a much larger set of countries and territories, including the United Arab Emirates, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India and many others.

Google still flags feature restrictions: product availability may differ by country, and certain image types may not be supported. In other words, even where Pomelli is available, the exact feature set may vary.

Pomelli vs Canva: the real comparison

Pomelli is easy to compare with Canva because both tools help non-designers create visual marketing content. But they approach the problem from opposite directions.

Area	Pomelli	Canva
Core idea	AI campaign generation based on a business’s website and brand profile	General-purpose visual design platform with templates, assets and editing tools
Best fit	SMBs that need fast, branded marketing campaigns and product creatives	Individuals, teams and brands creating many types of designs across channels
Brand system	Business DNA extracted from website, images, colors, fonts and values	Brand kits and templates, with broader manual control and collaboration options
Outputs	Campaign creatives, photoshoots, websites, brand books and downloadable assets	Social graphics, presentations, documents, videos, ads, print assets and more
Status	Google Labs beta experiment, currently free with generation caps	Mature commercial design platform with Free and paid plans

The biggest advantage for Pomelli is automation. A bakery, salon, clinic, local retailer or service business can potentially feed in its website and receive campaign concepts that already reflect its colors, images and tone. That is a different starting point from searching template libraries or manually building a brand kit.

The biggest advantage for Canva is breadth and maturity. Canva remains a full design environment with large template libraries, collaboration workflows, stock assets, presentations, documents, video and many other formats. Pomelli is promising, but it is still an experiment focused mainly on marketing campaigns and brand-aware business content.

Important limitations

Google is clear that Pomelli is early. The company says it may take time to get things right and asks users for feedback. Google’s Help Center also notes that some websites may not work if they use bot-blocking systems such as captchas. There are safety restrictions on generated content, and some categories or prompts will not be supported.

Another important detail: sharing Pomelli images and videos to Google Ads does not launch an ad campaign. Google says users must still launch ad campaigns directly from Google Ads. Pomelli can help create the creative material, but it does not replace campaign management.

Why it matters

Pomelli shows how Google is moving AI tools closer to the practical workflows of small businesses. The product is not just a chatbot or image generator; it is a packaging of brand analysis, campaign ideation, asset generation and export into one marketing workflow.

If Google continues building Pomelli, the pressure on Canva and other design platforms will not come only from image generation quality. It will come from workflow compression: turning a company’s existing web presence into a repeatable marketing engine. For SMBs that cannot afford agencies or dedicated designers, that is the part that could make Pomelli feel less like a design toy and more like a business tool.

For now, Pomelli is best viewed as a free beta experiment worth testing, not a complete Canva replacement. But it is a serious signal that Google wants a larger role in the AI-assisted marketing stack — from brand identity to creative production to Google Ads handoff.