Presentations and slide decks are one of the best ways to share information with customers, coworkers, students, and friends. However, it takes a long time to design and create a professional presentation, and it’s not easy to start a new presentation from scratch.
Luckily, using a free AI presentation maker can help you create new slide decks in minutes. AI presentation software is software that helps users direct generative AI to create, design, and edit presentations, so you can focus on telling your story, instead of formatting slides.
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The best AI presentation software
- Best for Google Slides users: Plus AI
- Best for PowerPoint users: Microsoft 365 Copilot*
- Best for non-traditional slides users: Gamma
- Best for simple designs: Canva Magic Design
- Best for brainstorming: ChatGPT
(* Note: Microsoft 365 Copilot is not yet generally available. Instead, we recommend using Plus AI and exporting to PowerPoint)
How we chose the best free AI presentation tools
Choosing the right AI presentation software depends on a variety of different factors, such as your existing presentation tools, your typical presentation style, and how you like to work with coworkers and colleagues. For this guide, we tested out every presentation tool by providing them with the same prompt in order to compare the AI outputs from each tool.
Create a pitch deck for EducAIte, an AI company that helps teachers create custom lesson plans for students
We’ll show you all of the outputs and assess each tool in four areas:
- Compatibility - how does the tool fit into your existing workflows and processes?
- Content quality - does the AI generate valuable and useful text content?
- Layout and design - does the layout make sense for the purpose of the presentation and does it look visually pleasing?
- Usability - how much work would it require before someone can present the content?
(Also, we should mention that all of the tools in this guide have free trials, so you can try them out and see the outputs for yourself!)
Best AI presentation software for PowerPoint and Google Slides
Many AI presentation tools function as standalone apps. This means that if you normally use Google Slides or PowerPoint to collaborate with your customers and coworkers, you need to convince everyone to switch to a new app to work on presentations together and start sending clients unfamiliar links.
The best part of using AI presentation tools that are integrated in Google Slides and PowerPoint is that you don’t need to learn how to use a new tool, and you don’t have to worry about changing how you collaborate and communicate with your customers and coworkers.
Here are the presentation tools that allow you enhance your existing Google Slides and PowerPoint workflows with AI.
Plus AI
Plus AI can generate full presentations or single slides, rewrite your slides, and reformat content on a slide into a new layout in seconds. It can also help you design a new theme for your slide deck using AI.
Plus AI stands out from alternatives in the market in several ways:
- Works within Google Slides - no need to use a new tool.
- Focused on generating presentations that can be used in a professional or academic setting.
- Comprehensive AI slide editing features - add single slides, rewrite slides, or reformat content on slides. All powered by AI.
- Create themes to match your company or school brand.
- Co-writes presentations with users by incorporating AI into every part of the presentation making process.
- Can Incorporate Plus's Snapshot technology to automate regular data updates.
Content quality - Plus AI generated an appropriate amount of text for a presentation. It feels like Plus AI has a better understanding of the overall presentation and different slide layouts than other AI tools and is able to generate content accordingly. Additionally, when it gets the content wrong, the Rewrite feature lets users automatically adjust the text on a slide using AI as well.
Layout and design - Plus AI supports 100+ slide types out of the box, so there is a good variety of slide layouts, and the appropriate formats can be applied to each slide. In addition, the layouts generated have a professional look and feel, which can be easily customized with your own brand colors, logo, and style.
Usability - As a Google Slides AI, Plus makes it easy to edit and apply the finishing touches to your presentation directly in Google Slides. The Remix and Rewrite features are useful for getting the presentations to a finished state much quicker than doing it manually, and the “Plus Tips” are helpful to know where to start revising a presentation. One of the best parts of using Plus AI is that you will be able to continue using native functionality like Undo/Redo on all of the AI-generated content.
Pricing - Free option with paid plans starting at $15/month
Link - Plus AI
MagicSlides
MagicSlides is also an AI presentation add-on for Google Slides. The tool allows users to turn text into presentations, generate presentations from prompts, and adjust formatting using generative AI. MagicSlides is relatively light on features compared to other AI presentation tools on the market, but it does offer some valuable features:
- Works within Google Slides so users don’t have to learn new tools.
- Turns text into presentations. Users can provide MagicSlides with up to 6,000 characters of text from which MagicSlides creates a summary deck.
- Edit the fonts and colors of the presentation within MagicSlides.
Content quality - The MagicSlides content is very light and without much context, making the output feel somewhat generic.
Layout and design - As illustrated below, there is no variance between the slide formats, which all follow the text and image layout. This layout can be useful, but rarely for all slides in a presentation.
Usability - The light content and lack of variance in slide formats mean that a user would need to spend a long time getting the presentation ready for professional or academic use.
Pricing - Free option with paid plans starting at $16/month
Link - MagicSlides
SlidesAI
Like Plus AI and MagicSlides, SlidesAI is built into Google Slides, letting users leverage generative AI within Google Slides. SlidesAI initially launched with the ability to generate presentations from longer text documents, and recently added the ability to generate presentations using shorter prompts. Other features include:
- Image suggestions - SlidesAI will suggest images for specific slides.
- Paraphrasing text - if you’re not happy with how something is written SlidesAI can rewrite the text for you.
- Text-to-slides - SlidesAI allows users to copy/paste existing text and turn it into a presentation.
Content quality - Similar to MagicSlides the AI-generated output is light on context and functions mostly as headers.
Layout and design - SlidesAI has more variance in outputs, but the use of formats feels somewhat random. For example, the Case Studies slide below has been set up as a process slide rather than simply listing out the case studies.
Usability - Being generated within Google Slides continues to be a big benefit, however, getting this presentation ready for a work or school event would likely require switching some slide formats and adding much more context and information to the slides.
Pricing - Free option with paid plans starting at $10/month
Link - SlidesAI
Best AI presentation generator for non-traditional slides users
Over the last few years, we’ve seen several new tools competing with Google Slides and PowerPoint to be the best way for people, companies, and students to communicate their ideas. Several of these products also have AI presentation capabilities, and they often work quite well for users who are not regular presentation users.
Gamma
Gamma offers an alternative to the traditional presentation formats that we know from PowerPoint and Google Slides. Where Gamma stands out is the ability to generate content beyond presentations.
The Gamma app allows users to generate documents and webpages in addition to presentations, providing an alternative to a broader suite of productivity tools. Features include:
- Templates to help users shape their presentations quickly.
- Analytics to track views, engagement, and conversions on the AI-generated materials.
- Interactive elements, such as live Q&As or polls to engage the audience.
- Keeping in line with the professional use cases, Gamma allows users to brand their presentations.
- Integrations are key for any professional tool. Gamma integrates with a range of 3rd party tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Dropbox.
Content - Despite Gamma’s non-traditional format, the output generated by the AI is relatively similar to what you would expect in a traditional presentation. The text is created in easy-to-understand layouts, and it makes sense.
Layout and design - Gamma provides varied output formats depending on the content of each slide. In this example, this is a process slide, and the AI has correctly chosen a timeline layout.
Usability - The output generated by Gamma is relatively close to usable once the presentation is generated. However, Gamma is a standalone app, which means you will be making presentations within Gamma. If you want to collaborate with others or export as PowerPoint, it likely requires several extra steps (see below).
Pricing - Free options with paid plans starting at $10/month per user.
Link - Gamma
Tome
Tome brands itself as a new “storytelling” tool, and it also has built many AI features in to their product. Tome sets itself apart with a distinct "dark mode" aesthetic and a set of features beyond AI presentation generation:
- A simple user interface to create well-designed pages.
- Note-taking capabilities, including the ability to organize notes into notebooks for categorization and searchability.
- Cross-device syncing allows users to access their notes and notebooks across all their devices.
Content - The text generated by Tome makes sense, and Tome also provides helpful editing features to add new context after generating the presentation. However, Tome’s presentations are written in long paragraphs and full sentences. This is uncommon, particularly for professional audiences, who are used to bullets and more structured content.
Layout and design - Tome’s focus on storytelling is evident in the presentation structure, which consists of pages with a dark background and colorful images. Tome’s AI generates unique images, which is great for the visual impact, however, sometimes text on images fails (as in the example below).
Usability - Tome is an alternative way to present information and “stories,” departing from traditional slide decks. This makes it a good option for users who feel that the current way of presenting isn’t ideal. Additionally, Tome’s AI-powered editing features make editing relatively easy. On the other hand, Tome probably isn’t the right choice for customers who need to send PowerPoint decks or collaborate with others in Google Slides.
Pricing - Free option with paid plans starting at $8/month
Link - Tome
Simplified.com
This AI presentation tool is part of a broader suite of generative AI offerings, including copywriting, video editing and graphic design. Simplified is best at generating presentation templates, which users can then flesh out with their own content.
Simplified’s AI Presentation tool is straight-forward to use and has some interesting features, including:
- Video presentation – you can turn presentations into videos, allowing you to create easy presentation-style video content.
- Creativity level – this feature allows you to tell Simplified what style of presentation you want, i.e. whether you want something splashy and creative or something simple and straight-forward.
Content - The text output generated by Simplified’s AI is dense text in paragraphs. On a traditional slide, you would expect bullet points and structured content, rather than full sentences in large blocks of text. It would be difficult for an audience to consume this much text during a presentation, but it could be used if the slides are shared for remote consumption.
Layout and design - Simplified’s slides have a somewhat professional feel with matching text and background colors, however, all slides come in the same text + image format. As mentioned previously, this format can be useful, but it would be rare for a professional presentation to only have one slide format.
Usability - You would need to cut down some of the text provided by Simplified’s AI in order to make the slides presentable, however starting with a good amount of context is helpful. Simplified’s biggest drawback is simply the fact that you are limited to presenting on Simplified’s platform or PDF format - there is no option to export as a PowerPoint presentation or Google Slide deck.
Pricing - Free options with paid plans starting at $24/month for 5 users.
Link - Simplified.com
Best AI presentation generator for simple designs
Canva Magic Design
Canva is a design-first tool, and this is no different for their AI slide generator. As would be expected for Canva the slides are text-light and focus is on aesthetics – for example, you can choose between many themes before generating the slides, which is not a common option for generative AI slide deck tools.
The features of Canva’s AI slide generator are largely focused around AI-based suggestions to improve the presentation:
- Auto-adjustments involve Canva automatically adjusting design elements to fit the chosen layout. These are the kinds of features to be expected from a design-first platform like Canva.
- Suggestions – the AI will suggest colors, styles, fonts, images and layouts that best suit your presentation to make sure the final outcome looks as good as possible.
Content - Canva has always been a design-first tool, so text content does not appear to be emphasized by the AI slide generator. The output functions more as a template for users to add their own slides after. For example, this slide would be a great lead-in to a more detailed section about industry trends.
Layout and design - Canva is designed to look good, and generally the slides created by Magic Design look good. However, as mentioned above the slides really function more as section covers rather than standalone slides. There are also examples such as slides 2 and 9 where the design appears to be missing - likely due to a glitch on content generation.
Usability - One of the first things you will notice when you open Magic Design is that you are limited to 100 characters in the prompt. This doesn’t leave much room to write a helpful prompt for the AI and results in very content-light slides.
Canva does allow for PowerPoint exports and is a good presentation tool in its own right. So if you are simply looking to create nice-looking section covers Canva’s Magic Design tool can provide that, but it requires a lot of additional work to get the slides ready to present.
Pricing - Free options with paid plans starting at $13/month per user.
Link - Canva Magic Design
Best AI presentation software for brainstorming
Can you use ChatGPT to make a presentation? Sort of! One of the best ways to use AI is to help brainstorm new ideas and generate outlines. While you can do this in a tool like Plus AI, it may be faster to do this with a tool like ChatGPT.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the swiss army knife of AI tools, and you can ask it to generate a presentation outline with bullet points for you.
Content - The text generated by ChatGPT is quite good, and it can follow instructions to give you titles and bullet points, or expand on the text with longer sentences and paragraphs as well.
Layout and design - You can ask ChatGPT for ideas on slide layouts and formats, although because it is a chat-based model, it will not create actual presentation slides for you.
Usability - You can also ask ChatGPT to write VBA code in order to turn these presentation outlines into PowerPoint presentations, but in general we find it is a better tool for brainstorming than to actually generate finished presentations.
Pricing - Free options with ChatGPT Plus plan at $20/month
Link - ChatGPT
What next? How to make great presentations using AI
If you’re looking for more advice on how to make your slides look good or how to best use AI in Google Slides, we’ve created a library of resources to help you get started. You can also get up and running with Plus AI in just a couple of minutes and try all of these tips out for yourself!
