The compatibility matrix
Two vendors, two rulebooks. Cricut's Design Space is one piece of software with one accepted-format list. Silhouette Studio is a single download that unlocks progressively as you buy upgrades — which is why a file that opens on your machine may refuse to open on a customer's.
| Format | Design Space | Studio Basic | Studio DE | Studio Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SVG | yes | no | yes | yes |
| DXF | desktop | yes | yes | yes |
| PNG | yes | trace | trace | trace |
| JPG | yes | trace | trace | trace |
| BMP / GIF | yes | trace | trace | trace |
| no | no | yes | yes | |
| STUDIO3 | no | yes | yes | yes |
| AI / EPS / CDR | no | no | no | yes |
trace = opens as a picture only; cut lines must be generated with the trace tool. desktop = Cricut's Help Center states DXF is not supported in Design Space on iOS and Android. DE = Designer Edition. Verified July 2026.
The single most consequential cell in that grid is SVG on Silhouette Studio Basic: no. Basic Edition ships free with every Silhouette machine, and per Silhouette America's own file-types article it opens STUDIO / STUDIO3, GSD/GST, DXF and fonts, and imports JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF and TIF for tracing. SVG and PDF arrive only with the paid Designer Edition upgrade. A buyer who has never upgraded will double-click your SVG and get nothing.
Business Edition is also the only edition that exports SVG, PDF, PNG and JPG. Everything below it saves to STUDIO3 — a format Cricut cannot read at all. That asymmetry is why cross-platform cut files are almost never authored in Silhouette Studio.
Vector and raster are two different products
Both programs accept both kinds of file, but they do very different things with them, and the difference lands on your customer, not on you.
A .svg or .dxf is a set of mathematical paths. The software reads those paths as cut lines. Layers built in the original artwork survive the import, so a three-colour design arrives as three separately-coloured, separately-cuttable pieces. Nothing is interpreted; nothing is guessed.
A .png or .jpg is a grid of pixels with no lines in it at all. Design Space asks the uploader to mark which pixels are background and then derives an outline; Silhouette Studio requires the trace tool to do the same job. Either way the cut path is invented from pixel edges, so it lands one layer deep and its accuracy depends entirely on how clean the edges were. Anti-aliased or feathered edges — the soft, semi-transparent halo most exports produce by default — produce a wobbling, over-detailed path.
Why a perfectly valid SVG still gets refused
SVG is a general-purpose graphics format that can describe gradients, blurs, embedded photographs and live text. A cutting machine can do exactly one thing: move a blade along a closed path. Everything in the format that isn't a path is, from Design Space's point of view, noise — and Cricut's Help Center lists these as unsupported items in uploads.
A blade cannot cut a fade. Any fill that is not a flat colour has no cut equivalent, so the shape is either dropped, rendered as a black box, or the upload is refused. Flatten to solid colours before exporting.
A clip is a rendering instruction, not a geometry change — the hidden part of the path is still in the file. The importer has no way to know which version you meant. Apply the clip destructively (Pathfinder / Boolean intersect) so the file contains only the final outline.
These are pixel operations described in the SVG rather than shapes. They have no path to follow. If the effect is part of the design, it belongs in a PNG version of the file, not the cut version.
An SVG can carry a raster image inside it. Cricut does not treat that as cuttable content. A linked image is worse: the SVG only stores a path to a file on your computer, so on anyone else's machine the artwork simply isn't there. This is the classic “it looked fine on mine” failure.
Text renders using a font file. Your customer does not have your font, and the SVG does not carry it. Convert every character to outlines (“Create Outlines” / “Object to Path”) before export — this is also the only way to guarantee the letterforms your licence actually permits you to distribute.
A stroke is a property painted along a path, not a shape. Depending on the importer it is ignored entirely — a 3 mm outline vanishes, or cuts as a single hairline down the middle of where you drew it. Expand strokes into filled shapes first.
Cricut's own advice when a file contains any of the above is blunt and worth repeating: export it as a JPG, BMP, GIF or PNG instead, and let the uploader derive the outline. Which is precisely why so many shops ship both formats.
What a cut-file bundle should actually contain
Given the matrix, a bundle that never generates a support message is not one format — it's a small set, each earning its place:
Two habits make the bundle hold up. First, name files in plain ASCII with no spaces or accents — some cutting software still chokes on them. Second, state the edition requirement in the listing itself: “Silhouette Studio users need Designer Edition to open the SVG; a DXF is included for Basic Edition.” That one sentence pre-empts the most common refund request in the cut-file category.
Getting the PNG right
The PNG in that bundle is doing real work, so it's worth sizing deliberately rather than exporting whatever the canvas happened to be. A cut file is resolution-independent; the PNG made from it is not. Decide the largest physical size the design will ever be used at, then give it 300 pixels per inch at that size — a design meant to reach 12 inches wide wants roughly 3,600 px across. If that arithmetic isn't second nature yet, DPI vs PPI, explained covers the one formula it all reduces to.
Rendering an SVG to a transparent PNG at a chosen size and density is what our SVG to PNG converter does — you set the inches and the DPI, it does the multiplication and keeps the background transparent. Keep edges hard rather than feathered on the way out, for the reasons in the raster section above, and preview the result against a dark background to catch stray semi-transparent pixels. The same discipline applies to die-cut sticker artwork, where the auto-cut path is derived from exactly those edges.
Two things worth checking before you assume
Editions change. The Silhouette Studio feature split above is what Silhouette America's file-types article documents as of July 2026. Upgrade tiers have been reshuffled before; if you are writing the requirement into a listing description, re-read the vendor page rather than trusting a blog post from three years ago.
Maximum upload size is not a number we can quote. Neither vendor publishes a hard file-size ceiling for uploads in a place we could verify, so any specific megabyte figure you see repeated online should be treated as unconfirmed. What is observable is that very large or very path-dense SVGs upload slowly and can time out — simplifying paths before export is a reasonable precaution, not a documented requirement.
Verified July 2026. Vendor documentation changes without notice.
Primary sources: Silhouette America Support, “File Types and Features” — the per-edition open/import lists, the Designer Edition SVG and PDF unlock, the Designer Edition Plus embroidery formats, and Business Edition's AI/EPS/CDR support and SVG/PDF/PNG/JPG export. Cricut Help Center, “How to upload images into Design Space” — the accepted upload list (.svg, .dxf, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif), the vector/basic-image split, and the note that DXF is not supported on iOS and Android; Cricut Help Center, “Image uploads: unsupported items” — pattern and gradient fills, clipping masks, filters and effects, linked images and unconverted text, and the advice to re-export as a raster format instead. Cricut's Help Center blocks automated retrieval, so both Cricut articles are cited as published at the linked addresses rather than re-fetched here. No verified figure exists for a maximum upload file size in either program; that is flagged as unconfirmed above rather than estimated.