What is Beautiful.ai?
Beautiful.ai is a native presentation tool designed to make it simple to create aesthetically pleasing slides. The tool lets you create presentations from scratch or use Beautiful.ai’s Designer Bot AI to generate a draft presentation for you. The AI generates presentations that are light on content, but give you a good starting point by providing slide formats that would be expected in the type of presentation that you’re building.
The creators of Beautiful.ai recognized that too much time is spent on alignment in tools like Google Slides and PowerPoint, so they have automated this process – just select the positioning and the app does the rest.
How to use Beautiful.ai
Step 1: Sign up at beautiful.ai
The tool does not have a free tier, but it does have a free trial. It’s worth noting that the free trial requires you to put down credit card details, so remember to cancel if you don’t want to pay. Unless you’re ready to try it out with other team members, the Pro plan is a good place to start.
This only takes a couple of minutes and will give you a good introduction to beautiful.ai’s features. This is helpful especially because the slide formatting process is very different from what you might be used to in traditional presentation tools.
Step 3: Go to the presentation section
Click “create new presentation” at the top of the screen.
Step 4: Choose how to build you presentation
You have several options on this screen, including building your presentation from scratch, starting with a template, or using Beautiful’s AI to build you a draft. For the purpose of this guide, click “Designer Bot AI” on the left side.
Step 5: Tell Beautiful.ai what you want and build your presentation
Designer Bot AI will build your presentation based on a prompt that you give it. The prompt is a description of what you want the presentation to be. Learn more about generating presentations from prompts. Beautiful.ai gives you three ways of telling it what you want:
- Write out the prompt in your own words. This will allow you to get specific about your needs. However, you may not know how to optimize your prompts for this specific AI.
- Use a pre-selected prompt. This won’t give you a lot of flexibility, but it is a great way to try it out the first time.
- Dictate your prompt. This feature should be your third choice – dictation doesn’t always pick things up right, which could result in a presentation you don’t want.
Alternatives to Beautiful.ai
While Beautiful.ai is a great tool, it won’t do everything for everyone, so we have gathered some alternative AI presentation tools below.
- Plus AI – a Beautiful.ai alternative for Google Slides
- Tome – an alternative to Beautiful.ai for a new type of presentation
- Gamma – a Beautiful.ai alternative for polished, professional presentations
- Simplified.com – a Beautiful.ai alternative for more than presentations
- Canva Magic Design – a colorful design-first Beautiful.ai alternative
- SlidesAI - another Beautiful.ai alternative within Google Slides
1. Plus AI – an AI slide maker for Google Slides
Beautiful.ai is a standalone presentation tool. This means that, e.g., Google Slides users have to change their presentation tool to Beautiful.ai. Plus AI is an AI presentation maker built on top of Google Slides, allowing for AI-generated presentations using an easy Google Slides add-on.
Plus AI is built to "co-write" slides with you rather than leave you with a template to fend for yourself. Simply put, Plus AI helps you create an outline, build a first draft, and suggest additional edits to your slides. Plus AI differs from other options by allowing you to use your own data in the presentations through Plus’s Snapshot technology. Snapshots let you grab charts from any app/tool, embed them in your slide, and refresh the data with the click of a button whenever data changes.
2. Tome – an alternative to Beautiful.ai for a new type of presentation
Beautiful.ai is an easier way to make traditional slides, aided by AI. Tome doesn’t try to recreate how to make slides, it recreates how to create presentations altogether. Tome is a storytelling and presentation tool that uses AI to rethink the traditional way of creating presentations. Tome’s alternative approach has proved to be very popular, as Tome reached 1 million users 134 days after launch, the fastest ever for a productivity tool.
Similarly to Beautiful.ai Tome allows users to build presentations based on a text prompt. The output comes out as a presentation organized by a table of contents, including text, introduction slides, and AI-generated images to go along with the slides. Tome’s aesthetics immediately stand out as much cleaner than you might expect from a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation; for example, presentations default to a black background, white text, and images that fit perfectly with this.
3. Gamma - a Beautiful.ai alternative focused on polished, professional presentations
Gamma creates presentations that have a similar look and feel to Tome, and veer away from the more traditional formats of Beautiful.ai. Gamma’s AI creates presentations that target professional users, similar to Beautiful.ai. Gamma’s focus on professional users is reflected in the business-oriented templates such as “Company Fact Sheet,” “Sales Presentation,” and “Deal Review.” Gamma also includes Q&As within presentations, custom branding, and analytics to track presentation views.
4. Simplified.com – an alternative to Beautiful.ai for more than presentations
Beautiful.ai is focused on slides, but sometimes you need an app that can do many things. Simplified falls under that category – the app includes an AI presentation generator, just like Beautiful.ai, but it also has other AI offerings, including copywriting, video editing, and graphic design.
The app has several features that differentiate it from Beautiful.ai, including the ability to turn presentations into videos. This allows you to create presentation-style video content quickly and easily. Simplified focuses on creating presentation templates, which users can use to flesh out their content.
5. Canva Magic Design – a Beautiful.ai alternative focused on colorful aesthetics
Canva is a design-first tool, and this spills into their AI slide generator. Beautiful.ai’s presentations are kept simple, but for some, they may be too simple. Canva’s AI-generated slides have a similarly simple, text-light feel to Beautiful.ai, but offer significantly more flexibility when it comes to editing.
Canva provides a hand-held experience when creating presentations. Since Canva is a design-first tool, this experience focuses on aesthetic changes. It includes auto-adjusting design elements and suggestions for colors, styles, fonts, images, and layouts.
6. SlidesAI – another Beautiful.ai alternative within Google Slides
Unlike Beautiful.ai, and similar to Plus AI, SlidesAI is built on top of an already-popular presentation tool, Google Slides. If you’re already a Google Slides user, SlidesAI and Plus AI may be good options for you.
SlidesAI keeps it simple and focuses on generating simple, image + bullet-point slides. Most people use AI-generated presentations as a starting point, which makes this structure more than enough in most cases.
