Introduction
If you’re reading this article, you are probably choosing between Tome and Beautiful.ai as two products that could help you create presentations using AI.
Creating presentations is a great way to use AI at work or school because it frees you up to focus on the story and content behind the presentation, rather than the formatting and design work to make pretty slides.
For this comparison, we spent hours evaluating both apps in detail to help you make a decision on which tool is best for you.
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Tome vs. Beautiful.ai at a glance
In case you don’t want to read the entire in-depth review, here is a quick summary of how the products compare:
Key Differences between Tome and Beautiful.ai
Tome and Beautiful.ai are both standalone apps that help customers create presentations using AI. They are both PowerPoint or Google Slides replacements that offer users a new interface to create presentations.
The key difference between Tome is in their approach to how people build presentations:
- Tome is more focused on new formats and beautiful designs for “storytelling”
- Beautiful.ai is more focused on using AI to make traditional presentations easier
Tome AI describes itself as “AI that moves your ideas forward,” and they have a heavy emphasis on using AI as a storytelling and communication tool. Rather than only creating traditional presentations, Tome can also be used to create small websites and video narrations on top of your presentation.
Beautiful.ai, on the other hand, describes itself as “generative ai presentation software for the workplace.” They focus on marketing features like smart templates, auto slide formatting, and team features to make presentations look consistent.
While both of these tools can create presentations using AI, Beautiful.ai’s presentations look more like traditional PowerPoint slides, and Tome’s presentations have a unique aesthetic that may appeal to certain users.
How is AI storytelling software different from AI presentation software for the workplace?
To the average presentation maker, it may sound like Tome and Beautiful.ai are similar apps, but they actually offer very different products.
What is an AI storytelling software, and how does Tome fit into this category?
Tome’s goal is to make storytelling simpler. Their product aims to be “more engaging than a deck and easier to build than a web page.” The idea behind Tome is that a user can give share ideas with the Tome AI interface, and the AI will help construct the text, images, and layouts to best express the user’s ideas.
The evolution of Tome
Tome was originally founded in 2020 as a next-generation presentation tool to compete with PowerPoint and Google Slides. Their main selling points were the ability to automatically create aesthetic slide layouts and better interactive embeds and data integrations.
After the success of ChatGPT and other generative AI products, Tome invested heavily in AI and focused their product and marketing efforts around the ability to use AI to create these next-generation presentations.
What is generative AI presentation software for the workplace, and how does Beautiful.ai fit into this category?
Presentation software helps users create slide decks. The most common presentation software that today is PowerPoint and Google Slides, which have billions of users. These tools allow you to combine text, images, charts, and other graphics into slide layouts that are easy to present.
Generative AI presentation software is a new type of presentation software that uses AI to help users create presentations. Beautiful.ai and Tome both offer generative AI presentation software.
The evolution of Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai was founded in 2015, with the intention to compete with PowerPoint and Google Slides by making it easier to make presentations. Instead of asking users to drag text boxes and shapes around to create slides, they decided to simplify the design process to make it easier to build slides.
Over the last few years, they have evolved and added generative AI into their tool, so customers can use their “DesignerBot” to create new slides and presentations using AI.
How to choose between Tome and Beautiful.ai
Here are the most important factors you should consider when choosing between Tome and Beautiful.ai:
- Usability: How easy is the tool to use? Is it compatible with other presentation tools?
- AI quality: Which tool creates higher quality AI outputs from a content and design perspective?
- Customization: Which tool meets your needs for branding and customization?
- Collaboration: Which tool is better for collaborating with coworkers and customers?
- Pricing: Which tool offers pricing that works for me?
Evaluating Tome and Beautiful.ai: a feature-by-feature comparison
Usability
Tome
Tome has a sleek interface, and it is new, but familiar to people who have used tools like PowerPoint and Canva. Once you find the menus, it’s relatively easy to navigate your presentation and add new content to a slide by dragging and dropping it wherever you want. Unfortunately, you can’t make very fine adjustments to content like you can on a PowerPoint slide, but the convenience of the auto-layouts makes up for that.
Tome’s AI features also feel like a native part of the product, and you can quickly find them from the start menu or using the Ctrl+K bar at the bottom of every screen.
In terms of usability, the biggest drawback is the inability to export tomes to other document formats. If you need to collaborate with someone who uses PowerPoint or Google Slides, Tome is not compatible with those tools. This forces you to only create presentations in Tome, which can be limiting if you are working with customers or coworkers in other tools. You can, however, export tomes to PDF as part of the Pro plan for $20 per month.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai has a more dated interface, but the general user flow, where users are presented with a simplified version of a presentation tool like PowerPoint or Google Slides, is similar to Tome. Beautiful.ai slides also allow users to add content to a slide, and the slide will automatically rearrange itself into the best layout. However, compared to Tome, there are more restrictions to the type of content a user can add to a slide.
One additional feature in Beautiful.ai, however, is a simplified menu of visual options for the slide layout, so it’s easier to quickly select the type of slide a user wants and fill it in with text later. Beautiful.ai also offers free-form “elements” that do not change the layout of the slide.
In Beautiful.ai, the AI features are also relatively easy to use and produce good results. However, the AI can feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the app, and there can be some complexity around which slides can use AI and which slides cannot use AI.
In terms of compatibility with other tools, Beautiful.ai also allows users to export slides to PowerPoint and Google Slides.
What’s missing
Both Tome and Beautiful.ai are standalone presentation apps. This means that you have to build your presentation in their apps, rather than using the presentation tools you are already familiar with. It also means you cannot use your existing slides or templates.
If you are looking for a way to use AI on pre-existing slide decks, Plus AI is an alternative to Tome and Beautiful.ai that works as an add-on in Google Slides. Because Plus is integrated into Google Slides, you don’t need to learn new tools, and you can add it in to your existing workflow.
AI quality
Tome
Tome’s presentations feel similar to the aesthetic of their app. They look futuristic and “AI-powered,” including the style of their AI-generated images.
The general quality of the AI-produced outputs is good, and the content typically matches the layout and style of the slide. Tome does a nice job of providing different slide types in a presentation, so there is also a good visual variety in the outputs.
There are also AI features to rewrite and edit content to make sure it matches the styles you are looking for. However, you cannot use free-form AI commands to ask for a specific style or tone if you’d like to customize the AI based on your existing content.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai’s AI presentation feature is called “DesignerBot,” and it lives in a separate part of the tool from the core presentation editor. It feels like it was added to the product at a later point in time, but it produces relatively high quality outputs using the Beautiful.ai slide templates.
Similar to Tome, the text matches the slide layouts, and the content makes sense. Compared to Tome’s AI outputs, the Beautiful.ai outputs feel more like they are aiming to produce a “traditional” slide deck vs. a “storytelling tome”. However, the actual bullet points and sentences are very comparable between the two tools.
What’s missing
Just as the best camera is the one you have with you, the best AI is the one that is easily available in the tools you use every day. Because the AI outputs across many of the AI presentation tools are relatively similar, focus on selecting the AI tool and app that you will use every day.
If you prefer designing presentations with Beautiful.ai or Tome, you should invest in learning how to use their AI tools.
However, if you are a Google Slides user, consider looking into Plus AI. Plus AI can be your AI copilot at each step of the presentation workflow. It starts with generating outlines, continues with AI tips on how to improve your slides, and a set of AI tools you can use to reformat your slides, insert new slides, and rewrite slides - all directly inside of Google Slides.
Customization
Tome
Tome has a number of different themes and templates you can choose from. Themes are collections of colors while templates are collections of specific slides with designs. In Tome, after you set a “workspace default” theme, everyone on the team will automatically use the same colors and fonts.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai also offers a number of different ways to customize the look and feel of your slides, from uploading logos to selecting the colors you’d like. Because their system is more oriented towards users who are creating traditional presentations, it’s also easier to make the slides look like a company’s existing slide deck.
What’s missing
Many organizations prefer to minimize the number of slide templates and applications their people use, while also producing content that is on brand.
Plus AI allows enterprise customers to upload custom branded templates, so there is no need to change the way they work in order to adopt AI in their presentations. They also offer a self-service theme designer for customers who want to customize their slides.
Collaboration
Tome
Tome offers the basic sharing features that you would expect in a web-based presentation editor and viewer. In addition to the basic sharing settings, Tome also allows users to look at engagement data on their slides and record a selfie-style video to narrate the slides.
When shared with someone who does not have edit access to a tome document, tomes become interactive websites that users can navigate with their mouse and arrow keys.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is more optimized around team features like shared slide and template libraries, the ability to collaborate on presentations together, and team billing.
In addition to the ability to see analytics on shared presentations, in Beautiful.ai, users can customize what the recipient of a presentation can do with it (e.g., collect emails, allow copying, allow PDF download, etc.).
What’s missing
If your team or colleagues collaborate in Google Slides or PowerPoint, the biggest challenge to adopting either of these tools may be the hurdle of asking everyone to learn a new tool. The ideal solution would be to continue collaborating using Google Slides but add all of the AI functionality on top of the existing tool.
Plus AI lets you share custom AI instructions and slide templates with your team, so everyone can leverage all of the AI features while making presentations 100% compatible and accessible to executives and customers who only use Google Slides.
Pricing
Tome
Tome has one premium plan called Tome Pro, which costs $20 per user per month, or $16 per user per month when billed annually. This includes unlimited AI, unlimited tomes, and custom branding in themes.
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is a relatively expensive subscription at $45-50 per user per month. Note: It looks like they offer a $12 per month plan, but that is only available with annual billing for $144 or monthly at $45 per month.
What’s missing
If you’re looking for a tool to help with AI presentations, you probably use AI for other tasks as well. These monthly subscriptions can quickly add up if you need a lot of different tools.
Instead of paying for an AI writing tool, an AI presentation tool, and AI tools for everything else, take a look at Plus AI, which includes an AI presentation maker for Google Slides and an AI writing tool for Google Docs for one price ($15-25 per month).
What customers say about Tome and Beautiful.ai
Here’s what customers say about Tome:
- “I tried using your solution I am negatively surprised by how dysfunctional it is. For any early stage startup this could be in line with expectations but you guys got an extraordinary praise and amount of funding, from some of the most well known entrepreneurs & investors. spent an hour trying it out. made a document. besides pretty and clean design there is really nothing that makes it great. It's not even good...it is inflexible. not intuitive. can't download the pdf.”
- “Love!!! Super intuitive drag and drop, sleek design, and a huge time saver with with Figma embed. An added bonus of responsive design -- finally no more squinting and pinching and re-positioning.”
- “Nice ads, but totally useless product. Basically it is a scam to get you pay for a year subscription, nothing more.”
Here’s what customers say about Beautiful.ai:
- “Templates make it easy to create great looking slides… [but] occasionally you want to nudge something and the template does not allow for that”
- “When you just need a slide deck quick, it is great…. [but] no option to tune things”
- “It has made my life so much easier in terms of making slides… [but] I didn’t like the way slides are converted to PowerPoint. The fonts don’t match up, also every little thing in Beautiful.ai is converted as a shape, like bullet point”
Tome vs. Beautiful.ai: Which is best for you?
The bottom line if you are choosing between multiple AI presentation makers, you should choose the one that best fits your use case:
- If you are looking for a design-first PowerPoint replacement and don’t need advanced editing capabilities, start with Tome.
- If you are looking for a PowerPoint or Google Slides replacement that makes traditional presentations using AI, start with Beautiful.ai.
- If you want to keep using Google Slides or PowerPoint, but you want the latest AI tools and features, try Plus AI.
