There is not an Arial font in Canva, and the closest alternative to Arial is Arimo. Arialle is also comparable to Arial and can be used as a replacement as well.
All that said, and even with suitable replacements, what if you still really want Arial? Well, there is a way to upload fonts to Canva. On one hand, it’s incredibly easy to do so, but on the other, it requires a Canva Pro membership (which I’ll say is totally worth it.) Not to mention that you can grab 30 days for free.
Here is a comparison between Arial, Arimo, and Arialle. As you can see the sentences are all very similar if not indistinguishable from one another. (And the only reason, in my opinion, that the Arial sentence looks a bit different/bold is because I copied and pasted it from another program, where the Arimo and Arialle sentences were written in Cavna.)
If the above wasn’t proof enough, here is the official Canva Twitter account responding to a question about the best Arial replacement, just to give you some peace of mind:
Hi Jo! Arialle can substitute Arial and Glacial Indifference looks pretty close to Future. Hope that helps! 😉 ^cc
— Canva (@canva) July 12, 2017
And besides Canva being on amazing design tool, I’ll use this as an opportunity to showcase their Twitter wit since it has to do with today’s topic of conversation.
What’s a mermaid’s favorite font?
— Canva (@canva) December 3, 2020
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Arial
All in all, while there are many fonts “missing” from the design platform, there are easy-to-find and use Canva font equivalents if you just do a little extra digging.