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We sat down with Ben Morton, Product Manager at Planoly, to discuss how the team approached creative editing as the platform evolved from an Instagram-first planner into a multi-channel workspace and why keeping creation embedded in the planning workflow became a critical product decision.
Planoly helps creators and small businesses plan, create, and publish social media content across multiple platforms. For its users, creation is not a separate task; it is part of the planning workflow. Tools that require switching contexts introduce friction and slow the process down.
As Planoly expanded beyond Instagram, the team needed to give users more creative control over photos and videos without breaking that workflow. External tools, including integrations with products like Canva, required users to step outside Planoly to edit content and then return, disrupting momentum and often forcing adjustments once content was reviewed in context.
By embedding IMG.LY’s CreativeEditor SDK directly into its web and mobile applications, Planoly made photo and video editing a natural extension of planning and scheduling. Users could adjust visuals where decisions are made, without leaving the product or losing focus. Editing became part of the flow rather than a separate destination.
This approach enabled Planoly to:
- Give users creative control without forcing them out of the planning workflow
- Keep planning, editing, and publishing in a single continuous experience
- Offer consistent photo and video editing across web and mobile
- Avoid the cost and complexity of building and maintaining editors in-house
“Canva breaks the workflow. IMG.LY exists everywhere that Planoly exists.”
About Planoly
Planoly began as one of the first visual Instagram planning tools, allowing creators and small businesses to preview how their posts would appear in a grid before publishing. From the outset, visual consistency and aesthetic control were central to the product.
Over time, Planoly expanded to support a growing number of social platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and others. Today, the platform serves users with varying levels of technical and design experience many of whom are not professional designers, but still care deeply about how their content appears.
Planoly’s goal is not to turn content creation into a complex or time-consuming task. Instead, the platform helps users stay present online while focusing on their core business, whether that is selling products, offering services, or growing an audience. Editing tools therefore need to be accessible, integrated, and aligned with how users already work inside the product.
The Challenge: Scaling Content Creation Without Breaking the Workflow
As Planoly evolved into a multi-channel platform, content creation became more complex. Each additional social network introduced different formats, aspect ratios, and expectations for how content should be presented.
At the same time, Planoly’s users remained largely the same: creators and small business owners who care about visual quality but are not professional designers. They want to make quick adjustments, see how content fits in context, and move forward without friction.
The core challenge was not a lack of editing tools, but where and how editing happened.
When editing took place outside of Planoly — even through integrations with external tools such as Canva — users were pulled out of the planning experience. Creation became a separate step, disconnected from scheduling and previewing. This made it harder to iterate quickly and maintain context, particularly when moving between devices.
The impact was especially noticeable on mobile, where users expect planning and creation to happen in a single, continuous flow. As Ben observed:
“It’s really disruptive to the workflow that most of our users follow.”
For Planoly, this clarified the problem. Creative tools needed to live directly inside the planning experience, so users could edit content where decisions are made without adding friction or complexity to the product.
Build vs. Buy: Why Planoly Didn’t Build an Editor In-House
As Planoly’s product scope expanded, the team was deliberate about where to invest engineering effort. While photo and video editing were increasingly important to users, they were not core to what Planoly set out to build.
Ben Morton was explicit about this distinction. Planoly’s expertise lies in planning, scheduling, and executing social media content not in developing and maintaining complex creative tooling. Building an editor internally would have required sustained investment in areas outside the team’s focus, from media processing and rendering to specialized editing UX.
Rather than turning editing into a parallel product effort, Planoly chose to rely on a dedicated SDK that already solved these problems well. IMG.LY’s CreativeEditor SDK allowed the team to provide robust photo and video editing while retaining ownership of the overall product experience.
This decision reduced long-term risk and operational overhead. Updates became predictable, and ongoing maintenance remained low.
As Ben summarized:
“I did not want to become an expert in design tools.”
Choosing to buy rather than build allowed Planoly to stay focused on its core product while still delivering meaningful creative capabilities to users.
Why IMG.LY: A Unified Approach to Creative Editing
When evaluating how to deliver photo and video editing within its product, Planoly focused on finding a solution that could support a consistent experience across platforms.
What stood out with IMG.LY’s CreativeEditor SDK was its ability to handle both photo and video editing through a single, cohesive integration. This simplified how editing capabilities were introduced and maintained across web and mobile environments.
From a product perspective, this meant fewer moving parts and a clearer understanding of how editing fit into the overall experience. From an engineering standpoint, it reduced integration complexity and made updates easier to manage over time.
Equally important was the speed of implementation. According to Ben, IMG.LY was both feature-complete and straightforward to integrate, allowing the team to focus on refining the user experience rather than solving low-level editing problems.
“IMG.LY came up as the one that was going to be easiest for us to implement and the most feature rich.”
Canva and External Tools: Where Embedded Editing Makes the Difference
Planoly has long supported integrations with external design tools, including Canva, and continues to do so for users who prefer them. However, as Ben explained, these tools serve a different role than embedded editing inside Planoly.
The distinction is not about feature quality, but workflow fit.
External tools are optimized for standalone creation. Planoly, by contrast, is optimized for planning, scheduling, and publishing content in context. When editing happens outside the product, users must shift focus away from planning and then return, interrupting momentum.
As Ben noted:
“It’s really disruptive to the workflow that most of our users follow.”
This disruption is amplified on mobile, where users expect to move fluidly between planning and creation. Canva’s lack of native integration in Planoly’s iOS app further reinforced the need for an embedded editing solution that works consistently across devices.
IMG.LY’s CreativeEditor SDK exists wherever Planoly exists — on web and mobile — allowing users to edit photos and videos directly inside the planning flow. This keeps creation, previewing, and scheduling connected, preserving context and reducing friction.
Implementation Experience: Fast and Low Overhead
From the outset, Planoly aimed to integrate creative editing without introducing long implementation timelines or ongoing maintenance burden. According to Ben, IMG.LY’s CreativeEditor SDK made that possible.
Once the team aligned on the product direction, the path from evaluation to implementation was short. Engineering was able to move the editor into production without extensive iteration or rework.
Ongoing maintenance remained minimal. Updates to the SDK required little effort, allowing the team to adopt new functionality without disrupting the broader product roadmap.
“The turnaround from deciding this is what we wanted to do to implementation was a very short timeline.”
Working with IMG.LY: Responsive and Uncomplicated
Beyond the technical integration, Planoly valued IMG.LY’s responsiveness and clarity as a partner. Communication was direct and efficient, with questions answered quickly and without unnecessary process.
When clarification or support was needed, IMG.LY provided practical guidance that the team could act on immediately. Product updates and new features were communicated clearly, keeping Planoly well informed as the editor evolved.
As Ben put it:
“Our relationship feels very low maintenance.”