best presentation app for windows 10

The Best Presentation Software

Beyond PowerPoint, our top-rated presentation apps make slideshows (animated videos, Q&As, and collaborative brainstorming sessions) easy to create and a pleasure to consume.

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized , has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

Table of Contents

Our top tested picks, microsoft powerpoint, apple keynote (for mac), google slides, best for students and knowledge workers, pros & cons.

• Most feature-rich of any presentation app
• Supports collaboration
• Excellent presenter tools
• Designer feature takes the mystery out of creating aesthetic presentations
• Huge number of bells and whistles, which can encourage bad presentations
• Tough to master

Bottom Line

PowerPoint is a presentation-software juggernaut with a couple of fun tricks up its sleeve. Thanks to new tools like Designer, a live camera view, and a suite of collaboration tools, it remains the best in its class.

Best for Engaging Video Presentations

• Creates engaging presentations
• Helps non-artistic types make professional materials
• Ample selection of beautiful templates
• Easy to use
• Templates don’t allow for a lot of customization
• Collaboration support could use improvement
• Limited export options; best when used online

With its non-linear approach and excellent live video features, Prezi empowers anyone to create engaging presentations online, no graphic design degree needed.

• Free slideshow creation tool.
• Solid collaboration features.
• Excellent audience question submission tool.
• Easy to learn to use.
• No desktop app.
• Cannot export to video.
• No audio import.
• Limited transitions and effects.

Google Slides is a reliable and free presentation app. It has strong collaboration capabilities, including the option to take audience questions as you present, but is missing a few features found in PowerPoint.

• Enables nonexperts to easily make animated videos.
• A welcome alternative to slide decks.
• Good interface and tools for adding custom images and voice-overs.
• Limited collaboration features.
• Heavy reliance on templates may make videos formulaic.
• No snapping guidelines for aligning, centering.
• Must first export to embed and reupload any time the presentation changes.

With PowToon, anyone can make video animations instead of drab slide decks to use for presentations, training, and more. You don't have to be an expert in video editing, but you do need deep pockets.

Let's say you have a whole bunch of information, and you need to convey it to a group of people. Maybe those people are in your office or classroom, in the boardroom of a company you're going to visit, or scattered throughout the world, connected by the internet. Presentation apps can handle the whole process. First, they let you put your material into a format that's right for sharing with others, usually—but not always—a slideshow. Then, they enable you to present the material, whether that's using a projector and screen onsite; or offsite with a portable projector ; or online in real time; or even online but asynchronously, at the leisure of each audience member. A few of the very best apps even have tools for taking questions from the audience and tracking how many people online watched your presentation.

The term "presentation app" used to be synonymous with Microsoft PowerPoint, a part of the Microsoft Office suite. While PowerPoint is still one of the strongest players in the field, many other apps have entered the space, bringing with them innovative ways for changing how we format and present information. This subclass of productivity apps , which used to be best known for inducing snoring during meetings, has grown tremendously to give presentation creators new ways of making their information more palatable, easily digestible, and sometimes downright entertaining.

The Best Slideshow Creation Apps

The slideshow format is the classic presentation option, and the best two apps in this category are Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote, which is a part of the former Apple iWork suite (the apps are now only available separately). Both are Editors' Choice apps.

PowerPoint has by far the most, well, everything. It has the most effects, transitions, supported formats, and so forth. You can use it as a desktop app or in a web browser. It supports real-time collaboration, though with some limitations, as I'll explain later. PowerPoint has a lot of features, even a few that help people who are bad at laying out slides do it better.

PowerPoint, for all its glory, has a few weaknesses, and price is a big one. Apple Keynote is an excellent alternative for Mac users, and one that costs a lot less. In fact, it comes preinstalled on new Macs purchased on or after October 1, 2013, meaning most users pay nothing extra for it. If you have an older Mac and do need to buy it, the price is a low one-time fee of $19.99—less than a fifth of the cost of PowerPoint's $109.99.

The Most Innovative Presentation App

PowerPoint and Keynote are slideshow apps, and some people find that format inherently limiting. They pigeonhole you, the argument goes, into thinking about the information you have to present in a linear way. In fact, many people can't imagine a presentation that isn't a linear slideshow. But that's not your only choice.

The best alternative for getting you thinking differently is Prezi, another Editors' Choice among presentation apps. It's by far the most innovative presentation tool. Prezi is a cloud-based service that completely ditches the idea of sequential slides. Instead, what you create with Prezi is a giant canvas of ideas and information. You present your work by zooming in and out on different areas of the canvas, as if directing a camera. The effect is surprisingly dynamic and engaging, and its price is reasonable, at $10 per month.

Prezi also doubles as a collaborative brainstorming space. One alternative use for this app is to have multiple people share their ideas in real time on the canvas. Whether the final results ever have to be shown to anyone else is entirely up to you.

Another app that throws slide decks to the wind is PowToon. Instead of slides, you create animated scenes so that the final product looks more like a video than a standard presentation. You don't have to have any high-tech animation skills to use it, though you do need deep pockets, as it is expensive, at $89 per month. There's a free version, but it's very limited.

The Best Free Presentation App

While PowerPoint has a limited free version and Keynote is often free for Mac owners, there's a free presentation app that I like perhaps even more: Google Slides. Google Slides, a third of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides suite of office apps (which is in turn part of Google Drive (Try it Free at Google Store) ), is free for anyone with a Google account. It's only available as a Web app, but it's stable and quick, nonetheless. One feature I especially like in Google Slides is the ability to generate a link where audience members can submit questions to a presenter in real-time. It adds a wonderful interactive component to your pitches.

Best Collaborative Presentation App

The aforementioned Google Slides is only available as a Web app, and, partly for that reason, it handles collaboration better than other presentation apps. Because your Google Slides presentations are always saved to Google Drive by default, they're always available to share. That's not the case with PowerPoint and Keynote, two apps that also support collaboration (Keynote's collaborative features are in beta as of this writing). With those apps, you have to make sure you take the extra step to save your presentation to a cloud storage space, such as Microsoft OneDrive ($5.00 Per User Per Month at Microsoft 365 for Business) or Apple iCloud Drive ($0.00 at Apple.com) , for the collaborative features to work. It can get confusing if you've been saving the file locally with the desktop app and now have to make a copy to share.

Collaboration in Google Slides works the same as it does in other G Suite apps. The familiar interface is there. When two or more people simultaneously edit a file, you'll see your collaborators' cursors on screen, color-coded to their name and picture (or initials) in the upper right corner. Prezi is also one of the best presentation apps for collaboration, largely because it mimics the G Suite implementation and design.

PowerPoint and Beyond

Presentation apps are a critical piece of any office suite , and there's a good chance that most anyone who needs to convey information to a group of people—whether it's other employees, potential customers or clients, a university class, or any other group of people—will need to give the occasional presentation. Whether you love standing up and giving a live talk, or you'd prefer to let people consume your prerecorded wisdom via the internet, there's a tool for you. There's no denying that PowerPoint is the king of the hill, but that doesn't mean it's your only choice.

Check out the table above, read the capsule reviews below and click through to the full reviews to learn more about your choices for presentation apps. Do you have a strong opinion about one of the apps listed here (or one that we missed)? Let us know in the comments.

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and deputy managing editor, software.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work , which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon .

Read Jill's full bio

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Further Reading

The best presentation software in 2024

These powerpoint alternatives go beyond the basics..

The latest presentation apps have made it easier than ever to format slides and create professional-looking slideshows without giving off a "this is a template" vibe. Even standard PowerPoint alternatives have updated key features to make it easier than ever to collaborate and create presentations quickly, so you can spend more time prepping for your actual presentation.

If, like me, you've used Google Slides unquestioningly for years, it's a whole new world out there. The newest crop of online presentation tools go way beyond the classic slideshow experience, with new features to keep your audience's attention, streamline the creation process with AI, and turn slide decks into videos and interactive conversations.

I've been testing these apps for the past few years, and this time, I spent several days tinkering with 25 of the top presentation software solutions out there to bring you the best of the best.

The best presentation software

What makes the best presentation app, how we evaluate and test apps.

When looking for the best presentation apps, I wanted utility players. After all, slideshows are used for just about everything, from pitch decks and product launches to class lectures and church sermons. With that in mind, here's what I was looking for:

Pre-built templates. The best presentation tools should have attractive, professional-looking templates to build presentations in a hurry.

Sharing and collaboration options. Whether you plan to share your webinar slides later, or you just want to collaborate with a coworker on a presentation, it should be easy to share files and collaborate in real-time.

Flexibility and customization options. Templates are great, but top presentation apps should enable you to customize just about everything—giving you the flexibility to build exactly what you need.

Affordability. Creating compelling presentations is important, but you shouldn't have to bust your budget to make it happen. With capable free tools on the market, affordability is a top consideration.

Standalone functionality. There's no reason to use multiple tools when one can do it all, so I didn't test any apps that require and work on top of another presentation app like PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Familiar, deck-based interface. For our purposes here, I only tested software that uses slides, with the familiar deck-based editor you expect from a "presentation" tool (versus, for example, a video creation app).

Beyond that, I also looked for presentation apps that brought something unique to the table—features above and beyond what you can get for free from a legacy solution like PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Here's what my testing workflow looked like:

I went through any onboarding or guided tutorials.

I created a new deck, scanning through all available templates, noting how well-designed they were (and which were free versus paid).

I added new slides, deleted slides, edited text and images, and played around with other content types.

I changed presentation design settings, like color schemes and background images.

I reviewed and tested the sharing and collaboration options.

I tested out presenter view (when available).

After my first round of testing, I went back into the top performers to test any unique or niche features, like AI, brand settings, and interactive content. With that, these are the best presentation apps I found—each one really brings something different or radically easy to the table.

The best presentation software at a glance

The best free presentation software

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Canva pros:

Excellent free plan

Tons of amazing templates for all use cases

Feature-rich

Canva cons:

The AI tools aren't groundbreakingly useful

Canva offers one of the most robust free plans of all the presentation apps I tested. The app delays account creation until after you've created your first design, so you can get started building your presentation in seconds. Choose from an almost overwhelming number of beautiful templates (nearly all available for free), including those designed specifically for education or business use cases.

Anyone who's accidentally scrolled too far and been bumped to the next slide will appreciate Canva's editor interface, which eliminates that problem altogether with a smooth scroll that doesn't jump around. Choose from a handful of preset animations to add life to your presentations, or browse the library of audio and video files available to add. And Canva also has a number of options for sharing your presentation, including adding collaborators to your team, sharing directly to social media, and even via QR code.

Present directly from Canva, and let audience members submit their questions via Canva Live. Once you share a link to invite audience members to your presentation, they can send questions for you to answer. As the presenter, you'll see them pop up in your presenter view window, so you can keep the audience engaged and your presentation clear. Alternatively, record a presentation with a talking head bubble—you can even use an AI presenter here—to share remotely.

Canva pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $120/year for 1 user and include additional features like Brand Kit, premium templates and stock assets, and additional AI-powered design tools.

The best presentation app for AI-powered design

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Beautiful.ai pros:

True AI design

No fussing around with alignment

Still allows for customization

Beautiful.ai cons:

No free plan

If you're like me, editing granular spacing issues is the absolute worst part of building a presentation. Beautiful.ai uses artificial intelligence to take a lot of the hassle and granular design requirements out of the presentation process, so you can focus on the content of a presentation without sacrificing professional design. If I needed to make presentations on a regular basis, this is the app I'd use.

Many apps have recently added AI design features, but Beautiful.ai has been doing it for years—and they've perfected the experience of AI design, ensuring the tool's reign as the most streamlined and user-friendly option for AI design.

The editor is a little different from most presentation apps, but it's still intuitive—and you'll start off with a quick two-minute tutorial. When creating a new slide, scroll through "inspiration slides" to find a layout you like; once you choose, the app will pull the layout and automatically adapt it to match the design of the rest of your presentation.

With 10 themes, several templated slides, over 40 fully-designed templates, and more than 20 different color palettes to choose from, Beautiful.ai strikes a perfect balance between automation and customization.

While Beautiful.ai doesn't offer a free plan, paid plans are reasonably priced and offer sharing and collaboration options that rival collab-focused apps like Google Slides. And speaking of Google, you can connect Beautiful.ai with Google Drive to save all your presentations there.

Note: I re-tested the generative AI feature (called DesignerBot) this year. It's great for adding individual slides to an existing presentation—automatically choosing the best layout and matching the design to the rest of the deck—but as with most other apps, it struggled to pull in relevant images.

Beautiful.ai pricing: Plans start at $12/month for unlimited slides, AI content generation, viewer analytics, and more. Upgrade to a Team plan for $40/user/month to get extra collaboration and workspace features and custom brand controls.

The best presentation app for conversational presentations

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Prezi pros:

Doesn't restrict you to standard presentation structure

Lots of customization options

Prezi Video lets you display a presentation right over your webcam video

Prezi cons:

Steep learning curve

Struggling to squeeze information into a basic, linear presentation? Give Prezi a try. Unlike nearly all other presentation apps on the market, Prezi Present doesn't restrict the structure of your presentation to a straight line. The editor focuses on topics and subtopics and allows you to arrange them any way you want, so you can create a more conversational flow of information.

With the structural flexibility, you still get all the same customization features you expect from top presentation software, including fully-editable templates. There's a learning curve if you're unfamiliar with non-linear presentations, but templates offer a great jumping-off point, and Prezi's editor does a good job of making the process more approachable.

Plus, Prezi comes with two other apps: Prezi Design and Prezi Video. Prezi Video helps you take remote presentations to a new level. You can record a video where the presentation elements are displayed right over your webcam feed. Record and save the video to share later, or connect with your video conferencing tool of choice (including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet) to present live.

Prezi's generative AI feature works ok, but it's more useful as a wireframe. When I asked it to create a presentation about the Stanley Cup Playoffs, for example, the resulting content read a lot like a student writing a term paper in the broadest strokes possible to avoid doing any actual research.

The best presentation app for video presentations

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Powtoon pros:

Timing automatically changes based on the content on the slide

Can toggle between slideshow and video

Can orient presentation as horizontal, vertical, or square

Powtoon cons:

Limited free plan

Powtoon makes it easy to create engaging videos by orienting the editor around a slide deck. Editing a Powtoon feels just like editing a presentation, but by the time you finish, you have a professional video. 

You can edit your slides at any time, and when you hit play, a video plays through your deck—the feel is almost like an animated explainer video. Each slide includes the animations you choose and takes up as much time as is needed based on the content on the slide. Powtoon figures the timing automatically, and you can see in the bottom-right of the editor how much time is used on your current slide versus the total presentation. If you ever want to present as a slide deck, just toggle between Slideshow and Movie.

You'll likely need to subscribe to a paid plan to get the most out of Powtoon—like creating videos longer than three minutes, downloading them as MP4 files, and white-labeling your presentations—but doing so won't break the bank. Plus, you'll unlock tons of templates complete with animations and soundtracks.

One of my favorite Powtoon features is the ability to orient your video: you can choose horizontal orientation (like a normal presentation) or opt for vertical (for mobile) or square (for social media). When your presentation is ready, you can publish straight to YouTube, Wistia, Facebook Ads, and any number of other locations.

The best presentation app for collaborating with your team

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Pitch pros:

Google levels of collaboration

Assign slides to specific team members

Excellent generative AI feature

Pitch cons:

User interface is a little different than you're used to

Need to collaborate on presentations with your team? Pitch is a Google Slides alternative that gets the job done. As far as decks go, Pitch includes all the beautifully-designed templates, customizability, and ease of use you expect from a top-notch presentation tool. But the app really shines when you add your team.

The right-hand sidebar is all about project management and collaboration: you can set and update the status of your deck, assign entire presentations or individual slides to team members, plus comment or add notes. Save custom templates to make future presentations even easier and faster.

You can also invite collaborators from outside your company to work with you on individual decks. And if you opt for a paid plan, Pitch introduces workspace roles, shared private folders, and version history.

Pitch also offers one of the most impressive generative AI features on this list. It still struggles to pull in relevant images, but I found the AI-generated written content and design to be top-notch.

The best presentation app for conversational AI

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Gamma pros:

Creates fully fleshed-out presentations from a prompt

Conversational chatbot-like experience

Can still manually edit the presentation

Gamma cons:

Not as much granular customization

I tested a lot of apps claiming to use AI to up your presentation game, and Gamma's conversational AI features were head and shoulders above the crowd.

Simply give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document or article—approve the outline, and pick a theme. The app will take it from there and create a fully fleshed-out presentation. It's far from perfect, but Gamma produces a very useful jumping-off point. (Last year, it was by far the best, but this year, other apps are catching up.)

Here's the key: Gamma is much more geared toward the iterative, chatbot experience familiar to ChatGPT users. Click on the Edit with AI button at the top of the right-hand menu to open the chat, and you'll see suggested prompts—or you can type in your own requests for how Gamma should alter the presentation.

Once you've done all you can with prompts, simply close the chat box to manually add the finishing touches. While you do sacrifice some granular customizability in exchange for the AI features, you can still choose your visual theme, change slide layouts, format text, and add any images, videos, or even app and web content.

The best presentation app for audience engagement

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Mentimeter pros:

Tons of audience engagement features

Simple for participants to interact

Mentimeter cons:

Less granular customizability

Bit of a learning curve

If you need to engage with an audience during your presentation, Mentimeter makes that easy. The app is designed around interactive elements like quizzes, surveys, Q&As, sliders, and more (even a Miro whiteboard!).

Each of these is included in a number of different, professional-looking templates, so you can build a fully interactive presentation super quickly.

When it's time to present, your audience members can scan the QR code with their phone cameras or type in the URL and access code to participate. There's one code per presentation (so they won't have to do this on every slide), which gives access to each slide as you move through the presentation.

There are two main drawbacks to this one, though. First, there's a bit of a learning curve and less familiar editing interface (but I found it pretty easy to learn with some practice). The other drawback is that you can't get as granular with the visual customization as you can with many other presentation tools.

The best presentation app for generative AI

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Top-tier generative AI features

Simple, customizable templates

Intuitive doc-style editor

There's definitely a learning curve

Tome is one of the new additions to this list that I'm most excited about. If you're looking for generative AI that just genuinely works , it's definitely worth a look. The editor is a bit more stripped down than most presentation apps but intuitive nonetheless—it's almost a cross between your standard deck editor and a Notion-style doc.

To generate an AI deck, click Generate with AI in the top right, and either write your own prompt or choose from the example prompts that cover a handful of common use cases, like sales enablement and company pitches. Edit or approve the suggested outline, then generate the full presentation.

From there, you can edit each slide as a doc via the right-hand menu—without limits on how much information you can include. During the presentation, you simply size down any slides that take up more than the standard amount of space. It's super simple but somehow feels revolutionary in a presentation app.

What about the old standbys?

You might notice a few major presentation players aren't on this list, including OGs Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides. These apps are perfectly adequate for creating basic presentations, and they're free if you have a Windows or Mac device or a Google account.

I didn't include them on the list because the presentation space has really developed in the last several years, and after testing them out, I found these behemoths haven't kept pace. If they weren't made by Microsoft/Apple/Google, I might not even be mentioning them. They're pretty basic tools, they're behind the curve when it comes to templates (both quantity and design), and they don't offer any uniquely valuable features like robust team collaboration, branding controls, video, and so on.

In any case, if you're reading this, you're probably looking for an alternative that allows you to move away from one of the big 3, and as the presentation platforms featured above show, there's a ton to gain—in terms of features, usability, and more—when you do.

What about PowerPoint and Google Slides add-ons?

While I focused my testing on tools with full feature-sets—those that can serve as your sole presentation tool—there are a ton of add-on tools you can use atop big name tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Related reading:

This post was originally published in October 2014 and has since been updated with contributions from Danny Schreiber, Matthew Guay, Andrew Kunesh, and Krystina Martinez. The most recent update was in April 2024.

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Kiera Abbamonte

Kiera’s a content writer who helps SaaS and eCommerce companies connect with customers and reach new audiences. Located in Boston, MA, she loves cinnamon coffee and a good baseball game. Catch up with her on Twitter @Kieraabbamonte.

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17 Presentation Apps and PowerPoint Alternatives for 2024

Written by: Chloe West

If you’re putting together a new presentation, you’re likely looking for the perfect presentation apps to help you design, present and share it effectively.

Well, you’re in luck. We’ve put together a list of the best presentation apps for both desktop and mobile that can help you to seamlessly create and produce your presentation.

Plus, we’ve put together a list of pros and cons for each to help you determine which presentation apps will work best for you. After all, you don’t want to put on a boring and ugly presentation.

Jump into our list of 17 presentation apps. You’ll find desktop apps, mobile presentation apps and presentation apps for iPad. All are valuable PowerPoint alternatives to help you create and present a beautiful and engaging slideshow.

Putting together your presentation can be design and content-heavy. If you can, edit and produce multiple slides on mobile and do the heavy lifting on the computer or laptop. iPads are also good for the main part, depending on the app’s functionality. Use the mobile versions for smaller edits and presenting the slides to an audience.

Let’s start with Visme–the best app for presentations that empowers you to design beautiful presentation slides .

Visme is a cloud-based graphic design software that allows designers and non-designers alike to create beautiful and professional presentations, infographics, social media graphics and more.

It has millions of design assets, including stock photography and video, animated vector icons, data visualization tools, hundreds of fonts, and preset color themes. Visme also offers a vast range of templates for presentations of any style; slideshow, video or interactive.

When looking at presentation design, you also want to make sure you’re going to come out with a beautiful and engaging slideshow. With pre-designed templates and themes with hundreds of slide layouts to choose from, you’ll find the perfect design in Visme to fit your content.

What sets Visme apart from other presentation apps and software is that it’s not just a presentation-making tool ; it’s a full-scale content authoring platform.

The AI presentation maker enables you to create stunning and professional-looking presentations with a text prompt. With the AI text generator , you can create drafts for your presentation. The tool is handy for proofreading and other content-related tasks.

Your Visme presentation editor has a wide variety of features for making many types of content, from classic static designs that you can share or print to interactive digital experiences that can be collaborated on, shared and tracked .

If you're looking for apps for interactive presentations, Visme is also your best bet.

Try the various interactivity options , like hyperlinked elements, video embed, audio upload and recording features.

Learn more about creating a presentation in just five minutes by watching this video below:

• A drag-and-drop editor and thousands of templates that allow users with any level of graphic design experience to create visually appealing presentations.
• Built-in library of free icons, illustrations, characters, fonts, images, shapes and other graphic elements—both static and animated.
• Use the AI-image tool to generate professional-quality photos, paintings, pencil drawings, 3D graphics, icons, abstract art, and more.
• Unblur and upscale images, remove unwanted backgrounds, erase and replace objects with the AI Edit tools .
• Find design assets and create projects faster using the Visme Shortcuts.
• The ability to present your slideshow online or download it as PDF, HTML5, or PPTX so you can present it without an internet connection.
• Beautiful animation and transition options that won’t overwhelm your audience.
• Brand kit and branded templates feature to help you store your brand elements for later use.
• Organize your work, share custom templates and collaborate with other team members.
• Manage roles, tasks, progress, deadlines and corrections all in one place with the workflow feature .
• Use the Visme App on iPad and iPhone.
• Track presentation performance with integrated analytics.
• Master Layout helps create a presentation that carries a base design across all slides.
• Create and store content blocks and slides to use across other presentations.
• Use Dynamic Fields to autofill updated information across slides and presentations.
• Due to the large amount of design elements and slide layouts involved, there can be an initial learning curve when first using the software.

Create a stunning presentation in less time

• Hundreds of premade slides available
• Add animation and interactivity to your slides
• Choose from various presentation options

Sign up. It’s free.

2. Google Slides

Everyone has heard of Google, right? So it’s no surprise that Google Slides is one of the more popular presentation apps and PowerPoint alternatives available.

But popular does not always mean best. While the service is free to any Google account holder, its slide layouts are basic at best and its design capabilities are extremely limited.

However, if you need a quick and to-the-point presentation, Google Slides can be a great option since it’s free and has next to no learning curve. If you’ve used PowerPoint, you know how to use Google Slides.

• Free for anyone with a Google account.
• Easy to use for creating a basic presentation.
• Users can collaborate in real time and make comments and edits throughout the slides.
• Integrate with all Google workspaces, including Google Meet.
• Limited design capabilities.
• Essentially a PowerPoint clone.

Another popular presentation app is Prezi. The main feature that Prezi is known for is allowing its users to easily create non-linear presentations.

This type of presentation can be highly engaging for your audience because instead of side-to-side transitions, you can create a pan and zoom effect each time you switch over to another slide.

While this type of presentation can be a fun change of pace for your audience, Prezi’s slide design options are not very visually appealing, and non-linear presentations can still be created in many other presentation makers by linking slides.

Prezi templates are also an excellent starting point for creating stunning presentations.

• Can create engaging and non-linear presentations.
• Embed interactive elements like video and audio into your presentations.
• Can only create non-linear presentations, which can actually cause motion sickness in some viewers.
• Non-linear presentations can also be created in other presentation software, making the need for Prezi obsolete.

Canva is a well-known cloud-based graphic design software , but it's not too popular for presentations. While it still has the “capabilities” for presentation design, it's main focus is on social media graphics.

As a creative presentation app, it offers a few visually appealing slide templates and you can create designs in the correct presentation dimensions.

There are a few static chart options and Canva also has tons of graphic elements to choose from, such as photos, shapes and icons, so you can still create static presentations in their software.

• Beautiful premade presentation templates to choose from.
• Graphic elements like photos, shapes and icons to spice up your design.
• No content blocks or slide library available to save larger pieces of content and reuse later.

5. Venngage

Venngage is first and foremost an infographic maker.

Similarly to Canva, they have added basic capabilities for creating presentations , but their design dashboard isn’t nearly as robust as some other presentation apps and software on this list.

While there are a number of presentation templates available for each of their plans, Venngage also doesn’t offer any type of animation or transition features for moving from slide to slide.

When it comes to creating a presentation, Venngage is in the same boat as Canva. Both certainly can be used to create a presentation, but they aren’t ideal, and they don’t offer as many features as a presentation app meant for building slideshows.

• Well-designed templates to get you started on your presentation design.
• Icons and photos to choose from for use in your slideshow.
• Not created with presentations in mind, so while it’s possible to create one, it’s not ideal.

6. Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai is a presentation maker that was created to focus on presentation design, like Visme. But while it’s meant for creating presentations, it doesn’t offer full-range design capabilities.

Instead, you’re given eight different themes with about 60 slide layouts to choose from that keep elements snapped into place, regardless of how you might want to customize your slides.

While this software is a great way to “stay in the lines,” per se, with your presentation design, it doesn’t allow you to design your presentation the way you want. If you’re trying to create a slide that falls outside of their parameters, you’re stuck.

• Visually appealing templates and slide layouts to choose from in your presentation.
• Easy to use drag-and-drop editor that allows you to quickly slide your points around on your slide to re-order them.
• Don’t have full-range design capabilities on your slide. You’re stuck only designing in the areas the software lets you design in.
• No free plans. Basic plan starts at $12 a month.

7. Slidebean

Slidebean advertises itself as an AI-powered presentation maker. It allows users to separate the content and design of its slides, inputting content in one section and adjusting the slide design in a separate area.

When creating a presentation in Slidebean, once you add your content into the text boxes, you can switch over to the design section and have their AI automatically assemble your content pieces around the page in a way that makes sense.

You’re also able to refresh different AI designs until you find one that you like. Although this can be helpful for those who don’t really want to worry about their design, it is extremely limited, and they don’t have a lot of templates to choose from.

As one of the best business presentation apps, their templates also focus on startups and entrepreneurs , so if your presentation doesn’t have that focus, your selection is limited.

• No need to worry about design at all.
• It’s a comprehensive pitching tool for entrepreneurs, not just a presentation maker.
• Doesn’t give you full range of design capabilities.
• Has limited templates.

8. Infogram

Infogram is another cloud-based graphic design software that tries to do everything, including presentations, but really wasn’t built for that specific purpose.

There are less than 50 available premade templates and they aren’t very well designed. Redeeming qualities include the fact that animation and transition features are available, as well as data visualization tools .

While there are icons and photos to choose from, most of them are premium and not available for use in the free plan.

• Animation and transitions available for your slideshows.
• Charts and graphs to add into your slides.
• Limited presentation templates available.
• Many graphic elements are premium only.

9. Zoho Show

Looking for good ​​presentation editing apps? Zoho Show is one you should take a look at.

Zoho Show is a presentation-making app from the Zoho family of Work and Business apps. What once was a simple presentation maker is now a full-fledged collaboration tool for making presentations with impact. Zoho presentations can be static or animated; the level of interactivity is up to you.

Create and share Show presentations on any Mac or PC plus device using iOS and Android operating systems. Zoho Show also has many integrations with other apps for better productivity. The minimalistic UI is a positive addition to the editor.

Use on any device. Mac, PC, iOS, Android. Large selection of premade templates for every industry. Available to create both online and offline. Lots of integrations.

It makes more sense to use the Zoho suite than Show on its own. You can’t buy just Show; subscriptions are for groups of apps. Not enough data visualization features.

10. Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is a web and mobile-based app that allows you to create and edit presentations. It works well for making some on-the-go edits to a presentation you’ve previously created.

You can even download the app onto your smartphone or tablet to create full presentation decks straight from your mobile device. It also syncs presentations between your computer and phone apps, making it easy to create and edit in different areas.

The biggest caveat is that its presentation template design is outdated and not very pretty.

• Syncs between your desktop and mobile apps, allowing you to create and edit in different areas.
• Presentation templates are not professionally designed.
• Design dashboard is outdated.

11. Keynote

Keynote is another presentation editing app that offers both desktop and mobile versions. It’s exclusively available for iOS smartphones, tablets and computers as it’s the Apple version of PowerPoint.

You can create presentations right on your mobile device and get them ready to present on your computer, which can be handy.

You can download the app from the Apple App Store for $9.99. It does come on most Macs and Macbooks automatically, but you’ll have to purchase it for your smartphone or tablet.

• Allows you to create and edit presentations on both your mobile device and computer.
• Keynote is designed for Mac. To use it on PC, you need a workaround.
• Similar to PowerPoint, so it doesn’t really focus on the design of your presentation, just gives you the ability to create one.

12. Flowvella

Flowvella is a downloadable desktop and mobile app that allows you to create interactive presentations wherever and whenever you need to. While it’s a fast and efficient app, it lacks some of the features any good presentation needs.

Since it’s a downloadable app, users are able to work on their presentations without WiFi.

It creates an online link for you to present your slideshow from any device, and offers analytics for you to see who has viewed your presentation.

• Has offline editing capabilities.
• Has analytics for you to view presentation performance.
• Used by museums for interactive displays.
• Must have space on your phone or computer to download the app.
• Simple technology with outdated features.

The app has integrations with other platforms like Chart Mogul and Brandfetch. Presentations on pro plans have analytics features and better image and video capabilities.

• Lots of beautiful templates to choose from.
• Pricing is affordable

Presentations are all you can create on Pitch.

14. Showpad

Showpad is another app that works well for sales teams. It allows users to put together various types of content and share it with a tablet user for them to scroll through and annotate.

This can be very useful for sales reps that are on the go with meetings and appointments , so they can easily share their screens with potential customers and walk them through the process.

The app is available on both Android and Apple devices, so there aren’t limitations to which smartphones and tablets will have access.

• Can share and annotate various types of content on the go.
• Caters to sales teams, so it isn’t an all-in-one presentation maker.

15. SlideShare

LinkedIn’s SlideShare app is a great way to share and view presentation content on the go. You can create your presentation in any online software, like Visme , export it and upload it onto SlideShare.

You can then use the mobile app to share your presentation and help get the word out. You can also view other presentations and learn more about a certain topic.

There are millions of professional presentations that have been published on SlideShare, so it’s a great community of slideshows to watch and save.

• Great for viewing and sharing your presentations.
• Provides an embed code for sharing on your website.
• There are millions of presentations published on the platform, so you’ll have to do a lot of self-promoting to get yours seen.

If you’re looking for apps for online presentation but with advanced video capabilities, here’s a great pick.

Vyond is a video presentation app with solutions for all industries and education. If you’re looking for a simple presentation, Vyond isn’t for you. This app creates engaging video presentations with talking characters and moving parts. Each slide is an animated scene, and they all come together as a group to make an animated video.

Choose characters, scene backgrounds and props from a large library of design assets. Use their text to speech feature to add easy voiceovers and narrations. Collaborate with your team to create video presentations for sales, training, pitching and more.

• Making animated presentation videos is easy.
• The features and editing controls don’t have a high learning curve.
• Monthly fees are high
• You can’t create anything else apart from video presentations.

17. Presentation Timer

Presentation Timer can be helpful both during your prep time and actual presentation time. This app lets you set a timer for how long your presentation will be and it will change the screen color based on how much speaking time you have left.

Using an app like this can be very helpful when you’re rehearsing your content so that you don’t go over on time, and you know which anecdotes you can fit in.

Just make sure when you’re giving your actual presentation, you can see your phone screen so you’ll know when you’re running out of time.

• Gives you a heads up when you’re getting close to the end of your speaking time.
• You have to be within eyeshot of your phone, so you won’t be able to do much moving around the stage or speaking area.

Choose Your Favorite Presentation Apps

There you go. We’ve rounded up some of the best apps for presentations. Which one of the desktop and mobile presentation apps is your favorite?

Some are perfect for creating your presentation, while others can be helpful for presenting and sharing your slideshow.

The Visme presentation app lets you access thousands of branded and premade themes and templates , graphic elements, animations, transition effects and more to create the perfect presentation.

Easily create an interactive presentation with audio, video, popups and hotspots and share it as a live link. Your viewer will be able to see the presentation as an interactive flipbook or slideshow. The best part? If something in the content needs to be changed, you don’t need to resend a link, your edits will show up automatically for everyone with a link.

Sign up today for a free account and take it for a test drive!

Create beautiful presentations faster with Visme.

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About the Author

Chloe West is the content marketing manager at Visme. Her experience in digital marketing includes everything from social media, blogging, email marketing to graphic design, strategy creation and implementation, and more. During her spare time, she enjoys exploring her home city of Charleston with her son.

Best presentation software of 2024

Perfect slideshows for speeches, talks, and presentations

• Best overall
• Best for media
• Best unique
• Best for branding
• Best for marketing
• Best for themes
• How we test

We list the best presentation software, to make it simple and easy to make and manage slideshow presentations to display to an audience.

Presentation software runs at the heart of business sales, management, and development, so it's important to ensure you have the best presentation software for your needs. This is especially when looking to share ideas, concepts, and workflows, and the ability to present these in a simple and understandable way is essential.

However, while presentation software has been traditionally limited to text and images, it has widened its ability to work with different media such as video and audio. 

Therefore it's important for the best presentation software to not simply be easy and simple to use, but also be able to support additional media so that presentations can be more engaging, lively, and ultimately serve their purpose in educating and updating their intended audience.

Below we've listed the best presentation software currently on the market.

We've also listed the best free presentation software .

The best office software in the world is: Microsoft 365 There are many different office software suites out there, but Microsoft Office remains the original and best, offering an unsurpassed range of features and functionality that rivals just can't match.

Even better, Microsoft 365 - previously branded as Office 365 - is a cloud-based solution which means you can use it on any computer, mobile device, or smartphone, without having to worry about compatibility. All your files are saved in the cloud and synced between devices, so you can begin work on a document at home or in the office, then continue working on it on the go.

You can sign up to Microsoft 365 here .

The best presentation software of 2024 in full:

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Best presentation software overall

1. PowerPoint

Our expert review:

Reasons to buy

For most people, Microsoft 's PowerPoint remains the original and best of all the presentation software platforms out there. While other companies have managed to catch up and offer rival products worthy of consideration, the fact is that PowerPoint's familiar interface and ubiquitous availability means it remains a favorite for the majority of people.

On the one hand, it's long been a staple of the hugely popular Microsoft Office suite, meaning that for most users this is going to be the first - and last - presentation software they are going to need to use.

Additionally, Microsoft has made PowerPoint, along with their other office products, available as free apps (with limited functionality) on both iOS and Android for mobile use, meaning it's even harder to avoid them. And this is before we even consider the inclusion of PowerPoint in Microsoft's cloud-based Microsoft 365.

It does everything necessary that you'd expect of presentation software, allowing you to add text and media to a series of slides, to accompany a talk and other presentations. There are easy-to-use templates included to help spice things up a little, but even a general user with little experience of it is likely to find themselves able to use PowerPoint without much trouble at all.

Overall, it's hard to go wrong with PowerPoint, and although Microsoft 365 has a nominal cost, the apps are free to use even if they do have more limited functionality.

Read our full Microsoft PowerPoint review .

Our Microsoft discount codes can help you save on your next purchase.

• ^ Back to the top

Best presentation software for media

2. SlideDog

Reasons to avoid.

It’s all too easy to end up creating a presentation that’s unappealing, and the last thing you want to do is make the audience fall asleep. SlideDog lets you combine almost any type of media to create a rich presentation that’s sure to keep the viewers’ peepers open, avoiding the ‘cookie cutter’ look that makes presentations seem dull.

Marketed as a web-based multimedia presentation tool, it gives you the ability to combine PowerPoint presentations, graphics, PDF files, Prezi presentations, web pages, pictures, videos, and movie clips. You can drag these into custom playlists and display them to your audience with ease.

You’re able to remotely control your presentations and playlists from your smartphone, the web, or a secondary computer, and there’s also the option to share slides in real-time. Audience members can even view your slide from their own devices by clicking a link. That’s a handy feature if you’re looking to create an immersive presentation experience.

SlideDog is probably the cheapest of the presentation software featured, with a free account that will cover the essential features. However, for live sharing and premium support, you need to upgrade.

Read our full SlideDog review .

Best unique presentation software

Prezi is one of the more unique presentation tools. Instead of presenting your graphics and text in a slide-to-slide format, you can create highly visual and interactive presentation canvases with the goal of “emphasizing the relationship between the ideas”.

Presentations can also be tailored to the specific audience, as this is a flexible platform that’s capable of skipping ahead, or veering off into a side topic, without having to flip through all the slides to get to a particular bit.

For business users, there are a variety of handy tools available. By downloading Prezi , you can build and edit presentations with your colleagues in real-time, which is perfect for companies with teams based around the globe.

When you have created a presentation you’re happy with, you can present it live (in HD) and send a direct link to viewers. There are some analysis tools here, too – you can see who’s accessed your presentation, which parts of it, and for how long. The app is available for Mac and Windows devices.

Read our full Prezi review .

Best presentation software for branding

4. CustomShow

Branding says a lot about a business, and it’s something firms need to get right from day one – from a good logo to a suitable font. CustomShow is business presentation software that puts all these elements of branding first.

Using the system, you can design and present customized, branded presentations that reflect your company and the products you offer, featuring the aforementioned logo and custom fonts. As well as this, you get a slide library and analytics to ensure your presentations are a success.

What’s more, you can import presentations into the software, and use it to tweak them further. There’s also integration with SalesForce , and because the platform is cloud-based, you can access your presentations on computers, tablets, and smartphones. 

Considering the focus on branding, this offering could be good for marketing and sales teams, and it's used by major companies such as HBO and CBS Interactive.

Best presentation software for marketing

5. ClearSlide

Just like CustomShow, ClearSlide has a niche focus for companies. The platform is targeted at firms looking to generate successful marketing campaigns, pushing sales via presentations (and more), not least through a range of analytics and metrics to work for sales and marketing.

With the product, you can upload a range of files, including PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF, and Excel. ClearSlide is integrated with other platforms, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Salesforce.

This system is pretty complex and may offer too many irrelevant features for some businesses, but you can create customized content that reflects your company and the message you’re trying to get out to customers. There are also some good metrics and analysis features, and you can sign up for a free trial before making any decisions.

The real strength of ClearSlide comes from its focus on sales and marketing data, not least being able to track user engagement alongside other metrics.

Best presentation software for themes

6. Haiku Deck

Any presentation app will allow you to personalize your slides to at least some extent, but Haiku Deck goes one step further than the competition. It comes with a wide range of themes suited to different needs, and you also get access to 40 million free images from the Creative Commons collection.

When it comes to creating a presentation, you have the option to do so on the web, which means your presentation is accessible across a range of mobile devices as well as desktops. Regardless of the device used, you’re able to select from a variety of different fonts, layouts, and filters to make the perfect presentation.

The great thing about these various customization options is that they’re categorized into different industries and use cases. For instance, you’ll find themes for teaching, cooking, real estate, and startups. Most of the features require you to be online, but hopefully, you’ll have a sturdy net connection wherever you go.

Other presentation software to consider

Google Slides  is part of the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) office platform intended as an online alternative to Microsoft Office. It may seem a little limited by comparison to PowerPoint, but as it's browser-based that means cross-platform compatibility. Additionally, it allows for collaborative work, and Google Slides really works well here. On top of the fact that it integrates with the rest of the Google Workspace apps, not least Google Drive, and you have a contender. 

Zoho Show  is another of the many, many tools and apps that Zoho has made available for business use. It also operates in the cloud so it's accessible to any device with a browser, and it also allows for collaborative work. You can also easily share the link for users to download, or provide a live presentation online. The updated version has a simpler and easier to use interface and comes with a free version and a paid-for one with expanded features.

Evernote  is normally thought of as just note-taking software, but it does provide the option to create a presentation you can share online or with an audience. In that regard, it's a little more limited than the other options in not being dedicated presentation software. However, as an easy and handy way to pull together a presentation quickly, it could serve as a backup or last-minute option, especially if Evernote is already being commonly used by you.

LibreOffice Impress  is part of the open-source suite offered as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, and comes with a powerful array of tools and editing options for your presentation, not least working with 3D images. It's supported by a large community, so it's easy to find an array of additional templates. If there is a limitation it's that it's software you download and install rather than web-based, but any presentations created should be easily portable to the web if needed.

Adobe Spark  does things a bit differently, as rather than just use images it's geared toward video as well. This makes for potentially more powerful multimedia presentations, especially as Adobe also has a big selection of photos and images available for its users. There is a free tier for core features but requires a subscription for custom branding, personalized themes, and support.

Slides  comes with a lot of features in an easy-to-use interface, and involves setting up presentations using drag and drop into an existing grid. It's also internet-based so there's no software to download, and it only requires a browser to use and access. 

Presentation software FAQs

Which presentation software is best for you.

When deciding which presentation software to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes free platforms may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a paid platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, free and budget software options can sometimes prove limited when it comes to the variety of tools available, while higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require for your presentation needs.

How we tested the best presentation software

To test for the best presentation software we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar .

We've also featured the best alternatives to Microsoft Office .

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Nicholas Fearn is a freelance technology journalist and copywriter from the Welsh valleys. His work has appeared in publications such as the FT, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, The Next Web, T3, Android Central, Computer Weekly, and many others. He also happens to be a diehard Mariah Carey fan!

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