How Planoly Scaled Multi-Channel Content Creation Without Sending Users to Canva
Planoly is a multi-channel social media planning and scheduling platform built for creators and small business owners. What started as an Instagram-first planning tool grew into a hub where users map out, create, and publish content across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and more, all from one calendar.
But as Planoly expanded across channels, a gap in the workflow widened: the moment a creator needed to edit a photo or video, they had to leave Planoly entirely. Planoly closed that gap by embedding IMG.LY’s CE.SDK directly into its web and mobile apps. Here’s how it came together, and what changed for the people using it.
The Challenge: Editing Lived Outside the Workflow
Planoly’s whole value proposition is flow. A creator opens the app, plans a week of posts, drags assets onto a calendar, and schedules everything to publish across half a dozen channels. The experience is meant to feel continuous, from the first idea to the last scheduled post.
Editing broke that continuity. When a user needed to crop a video for a TikTok, resize an image for a Pinterest pin, or tweak a caption overlay, Planoly had no native way to do it. They sent users out to a separate tool, most often Canva, and asked them to come back when they were done. For Ben Morton, Product Manager at Planoly, that hand-off was the problem.
Canva breaks the workflow. IMG.LY exists everywhere that Planoly exists.
The cost wasn’t just an extra browser tab. Every detour out to an external editor was a chance to lose momentum, lose context, or lose the user altogether. And the friction was sharpest exactly where Planoly was growing fastest, on mobile, where bouncing between apps to finish a single post is far more disruptive than on desktop.
It’s really disruptive to the workflow that most of our users follow.
As Planoly added channels, the problem multiplied. Each platform has its own aspect ratios, formats, and creative conventions. The more channels Planoly supported, the more editing its users needed, and the more often they were being pushed out the door to do it.
Why They Chose CE.SDK
Planoly’s first instinct was not to outsource the decision, but it quickly became one about focus. Building a full photo and video editor in-house, and then maintaining it across web and mobile as platform requirements shifted, would have pulled the team deep into a domain that wasn’t its core product. Morton was clear-eyed about that.
I did not want to become an expert in design tools.
So the team evaluated the editor SDKs on the market against two criteria that mattered most for Planoly: how much creative capability they offered out of the box, and how quickly they could be embedded into an existing product without a multi-quarter integration effort. CE.SDK won on both.
IMG.LY came up as the one that was going to be easiest for us to implement and the most feature rich.
That combination, breadth of features plus ease of integration, was the deciding factor. Planoly needed an editor that could match the range of creative work its users did across five-plus channels, but it needed that editor to slot into the product rather than become the product.
How They Implemented CE.SDK
The implementation centered on a single principle: editing should happen where planning happens. Rather than linking out to a hosted editor or opening a separate experience, Planoly embedded CE.SDK directly inside its web and mobile apps, so the editor opens in the same surface the creator was already working in.
That gave users one editing experience, consistent whether they were planning a campaign at their desk or fixing a post from their phone between meetings. The same tools, the same UI, the same muscle memory, in both apps.
The thing that surprised the team was how fast it came together. Embedding a feature-rich editor across two platforms is the kind of project that can sprawl into quarters. It didn’t.
The turnaround from deciding this is what we wanted to do to implementation was a very short timeline.
Just as important was what the integration didn’t demand afterward. Planoly didn’t have to staff up a team to babysit an editor or chase platform changes. The relationship with IMG.LY stayed light.
Our relationship feels very low maintenance.
The Results
The most visible result is the one that doesn’t show up at all: the trip to Canva. Creators no longer leave Planoly to edit. A photo that needs cropping, a video that needs trimming, a graphic that needs a text overlay, all of it now happens inside the app, in the same session as planning and scheduling.
That closed the loop Planoly had always wanted to close. Plan, edit, publish, in one continuous workflow, across every channel the platform supports. The benefit lands hardest on mobile, where eliminating the app-switching that used to interrupt every edit makes the difference between a post that gets finished and one that gets abandoned.
And because the editor is embedded identically in both apps, Planoly’s users get a single, predictable editing experience wherever they work. No relearning a different tool when they switch from desktop to phone.
Overall Impact
The visible win for Planoly’s users is obvious: they stay in one place, from first draft to scheduled post. The less-visible win is for Planoly itself.
By embedding CE.SDK rather than building, Planoly added a deep, multi-format editing layer to its product without taking on the burden of being a design-tool company. The engineering focus stayed on what Planoly does best, planning and scheduling across channels, while the creative engine, and the maintenance it would otherwise have required, came from IMG.LY. A short integration timeline and a low-maintenance partnership meant Planoly got a richer product without diverting its roadmap to build and sustain one.
The result is a platform where editing finally lives where everything else already did, and a team that never had to become experts in design tools to get there.
