The best presentation software in 2026

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 the same big name presentation tool 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 nearly 30 of the top presentation software solutions out there to bring you the best of the best.

The best presentation software

• Canva for a free presentation app

• Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design

• Prezi for non-linear, conversational presentations

• Powtoon for video presentations

• Pitch for collaborating with your team on presentations

• Gamma for conversational AI features

• Google Slides for Google ecosystem users

• Chronicle for AI features

What makes the best presentation app?

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).

• AI. While there's a lot of variation among AI capabilities, every app on this list offers at least some kind of AI. A lot of it is table-stakes at this point, but there are also some pretty impressive AI presentation makers out there. That said, I didn't include any apps that are exclusively AI.

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 Keynote.

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).

• Where available, I also ran through the process of generating a deck using AI.

• 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 brand settings, team features, 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

Canva (Web, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)

Canva pros:

• Excellent free plan

• Tons of amazing templates for all use cases

• Feature-rich

Canva cons:

• Some assets and templates require a paid plan

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. There's an almost overwhelming number of beautiful templates (many available for free), including those designed specifically for education or business use cases.

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. 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's AI features have grown and evolved over the last several years. They include a fully conversational AI assistant—which you'll find to the left of your presentation while you build and edit—you can ask to do things like redesign a slide, change the style of the presentation as a whole, add a background, and almost anything else you can think of. (In the screenshot above, you can see I asked Canva AI to change the primary highlight color to a bright, blueish teal, then change the background to black.)

With Zapier's Canva integration, you can orchestrate end-to-end presentation workflows across your entire tech stack. For example, you can design multi-step systems that automatically collect and transform data with AI, generate branded slides, and route presentations to key stakeholders for review. Learn more about how to automate Canva.

Canva pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $18/month for 1 user and include additional features like premium templates, stock assets, and additional AI-powered design tools.

The best presentation app for AI-powered design

Beautiful.ai (Web, Mac, Windows)

Beautiful.ai pros:

• Effortless 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.

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 15 themes, several templated slides, over 100 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.

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

The best presentation app for conversational presentations

Prezi (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android)

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 and the AI presentation generator—which is about on par with your average generative quality—offer a great jumping-off point, and Prezi's editor does a good job of making the process more approachable.

Plus, Prezi comes with video features that help 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 pricing: Free plan available with essential presentation features and limited access to AI and basic templates; paid plans start at $5/month (billed annually) and include additional features like privacy control, unlimited visual content, and a PowerPoint converter.

The best presentation app for video presentations

Powtoon (Web, iOS, Android)

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

• Expensive monthly upgrade

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 of the editor how much time is used on your current slide versus the total presentation.

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.

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.

Pricing is an important consideration here: if you pay annually, the Lite plan works out to $15/month, but if you don't want to pay the full annual price ($180/year) upfront, the monthly price jumps to $49/month—more in line with video platforms like Vimeo and Wistia than the rest of the presentation apps on this list.

Powtoon pricing: Limited free plan available; paid plans start at $49/month and include videos up to 10 minutes in length, priority support, additional storage, and more.

The best presentation app for collaborating with your team

Pitch (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android)

Pitch pros:

• Google levels of collaboration

• Assign slides to specific team members

• Capable 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 menu 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 more impressive generative AI features on this list. As with most of them, it still struggles to pull in relevant images, but I found the AI-generated written content and design to be top-notch.

Pitch pricing: Free plan offers unlimited presentations and custom templates for up to 5 members and 2 guests; paid plans start at $15/month for 1 editor and 5 guests with additional AI credits, Pitch branding removal, and more.

The best presentation app for conversational AI

Gamma (Web)

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 that offer an AI assistant to help with your presentations, 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, Claude, and Copilot users. Click on Agent on the right-hand side of the top menu bar 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. In the screenshot above, you can see I asked Gamma to challenge the data in my deck.

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.

With Zapier’s Gamma integration, you can orchestrate intelligent, end-to-end presentation workflows across your entire tech stack. For example, when there are updated rows in Google Sheets, Zapier can automatically create a presentation in Gamma and notify key stakeholders in Slack. Or you can access Gamma directly from your AI chat app with Zapier MCP. Learn more about how to automate Gamma.

Gamma pricing: Free plan includes simple presentations, 400 AI deck credits, and up to 10 cards per prompt; upgrade to the Plus plan for $12/user/month to get more monthly AI credits, up to 20 cards per prompt, and removal of Gamma branding.

The best presentation app for Google users

Google Slides with Gemini (Web)

Google Slides pros:

• Gemini AI built in

• Extensive library of templates and visual elements

• Works seamlessly with other Google apps

Google Slides cons:

• Not the most advanced without Gemini

Google Slides is a straightforward presentation app that nearly everyone has some familiarity with. It integrates seamlessly with the rest of Google Workspace, making it easy to pull in assets from across your Google account and share presentations across your team.

In previous years, Google Slides hasn't been able to compete with other, more modern apps—but in this year's testing, I was impressed with the strides the app has taken recently. Google added a number of new high-quality templates and a whole library of pre-built elements—called "Building Blocks" in the right-hand menu—including agendas, lists, data visualizations, and quotes. The interface has also seen a slight facelift, without compromising on the familiarity aspect.

The biggest upgrade comes from bringing Gemini—Google's conversational AI chatbot—into Google Slides. While Gemini can't generate an entire deck from scratch (like many other AI presentation apps), it can seamlessly pull information from Gmail threads, Google Drive—including Docs, Sheets, and Forms—and even Google Photos to generate individual slides. Simply open Gemini from the right side of the top menu, and choose from the suggested prompts or enter your own.

You'll need a paid Google Workspace subscription (Business Standard or higher) to access these features, but plans are on par with many of the other presentation apps I tested.

When you connect Google Slides with Zapier, you can orchestrate sophisticated, multi-step presentation workflows that extend far beyond Google Workspace. Learn more about how to automate all your Google apps.

Google Slides pricing: Free to use Google Slides; upgrade to the Google Workspace Business Standard plan for $16.80/user/month to get access to Gemini in Google Slides.

The best AI presentation app

Chronicle (Web)

Chronicle pros:

• Best in class generative AI

• Iterative conversational chatbot

• Flexible widget-based builder

Chronicle cons:

• Less familiar interface

• AI features still in beta

Nearly every app I tested this year offered some form of generative AI to build entire decks based on a prompt—Chronicle does it best. It isn't the only app that gives you an outline before generating the presentation, but it does generate the most impressive, narrative-driven outlines. From there, you can continue to iterate with the conversational AI (called Muse here) to refine the outline and choose a color theme before a single slide gets made.

Once it generates the slides, you'll see a preview along the right—and you can ask Muse to make changes before going into the editor to make your manual adjustments. (Despite the focus on AI generation, you can still create a manual deck, either from scratch or based on one of 30+ templates.)

The editor is a bit different than what you may be used to from a presentation app, but it's supremely clean and minimal. Slides are along the left, and actions are along the bottom. You can edit theme colors for individual slides or the entire deck, change the background, and ask the app to "remix" the content on a slide based on one of many slide layout templates—if you don't like the new version, it's one click to undo it.

The superpower of Chronicle's editing flow are the widgets: pre-built blocks for charts, tables, diagrams, iPhone mockups, embedded content, sticky notes, and more. While presenting, you can click on any of these to focus in and manipulate them on the fly.

Users of the Plus plan or higher can also access a conversational chatbot within the editor.

Chronicle pricing: Free plan includes unlimited documents, basic preset themes, and 300 AI tokens per month; upgrade to the Pro plan for $15/user/month to get 750 tokens per month, a shared workspace, and Chronicle branding removal.

What about the old standbys?

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

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 and Apple, 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.

Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint shows some promise when it comes to adding AI features into PowerPoint, but I wasn't all that impressed by those features just yet—and the upgrade required to access Copilot for PowerPoint can get pricey. The same goes for Apple Creator Studio: it adds premium templates and a few AI features, but they're much less powerful than competing AI presentation apps. Rest assured, I'm watching this space, and the next time I update this article, I'll retest to see what new features may be available.

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 names, 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.

If you're looking to expand what you can do with PowerPoint or Google Slides, apps like Marq (formerly Lucidpress), Plus AI, Slidesgo, and Simplified can help you do things like access additional templates, save branded assets, and generate AI presentations from the app you're already using.

Related reading:

• Canva AI tools to improve your design workflow

• The best online whiteboards for collaboration

• How to share a presentation on Zoom without sharing your browser tabs and address bar

• What is Google Vids?

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 May 2026.