AI Presentation Makers Compared:
6 Tools Tested on the Same 10-Slide Deck

How We Tested

We created a standardized brief: a 10-slide startup pitch deck for a fictional SaaS company. The brief included a title slide, problem/solution slides, a market opportunity slide with specific numbers, a product demo section, a competitive landscape, a team slide, financial projections with a table, a timeline, a pricing slide, and a closing CTA. Same content, same word count, same data points — fed into every tool.

We evaluated each tool on five criteria: AI generation quality (how well it interpreted the brief), design consistency (did all 10 slides look like they belonged together), export reliability (PPTX and PDF quality), editing flexibility (how easy it was to fix what the AI got wrong), and value for money at each pricing tier.

Testing happened over about three weeks in early 2026. We used each tool's paid tier to avoid free-plan limitations skewing results. Where a tool had multiple paid tiers, we used the lowest paid plan unless a feature was locked behind a higher tier.

Side-by-Side Comparison Table

Prices reflect February 2026 rates. G2 scores from public listings. "AI Quality" is our subjective assessment based on the standardized 10-slide test.

Gamma AI — The Structured Overachiever

Gamma was the only tool that produced a 10-slide deck where every slide felt intentionally designed. The AI correctly interpreted our financial projections as a table (not a bulleted list, which is what three other tools did), placed the competitive landscape in a clean matrix format, and picked a color scheme that didn't need adjusting.

The free tier gives you enough room to test — roughly 400 AI credits, which covers about 10 presentations. But free exports carry a Gamma watermark and you can't download as PPTX. The Plus plan at $10/month removes the watermark and unlocks exports. Pro at $20/month adds unlimited AI credits and custom fonts, which matters if you're producing decks for clients with brand guidelines.

Where Gamma falls short: it's not great at highly creative, narrative-style presentations. If you want cinematic transitions and full-bleed imagery on every slide, Tome handles that better. Gamma's strength is structured, information-dense decks — the kind most professionals actually need for boardrooms and investor meetings.

Tome — The Creative Wildcard

Tome generated the most visually striking deck in our test. The AI paired our content with atmospheric stock imagery, used bold typography, and created a narrative flow that felt more like a mini-website than a traditional slide deck. For creative briefs, brand storytelling, and thought leadership presentations, Tome's output genuinely impressed us.

The problem is consistency. Our financial projections slide came out as a wall of text with numbers buried in a paragraph. The competitive landscape was a simple bulleted list instead of the matrix we specified. When Tome's AI nails the interpretation, the result is gorgeous. When it doesn't, you spend more time fixing the output than you would have spent building from scratch.

Export is another weakness. Tome's native format is web-based, and the PDF export sometimes drops layout elements. PPTX export quality is unpredictable — text boxes shift, background images crop differently, and animations don't carry over. If you need to send a deck to someone who'll open it in PowerPoint, this is a real issue.

At $16/month for Pro, Tome is priced between Gamma's two tiers. The free plan is extremely limited — you get a handful of AI-generated pages before hitting the paywall.

Beautiful.ai — Design Guardrails Done Right

Beautiful.ai has a philosophy that sets it apart: instead of giving you a blank canvas, it constrains your design choices to prevent ugly outcomes. Every element snaps to a grid. Color palettes are curated. Font pairings are pre-approved. The result is that even if your content is mediocre, the slides look professionally designed.

For our 10-slide test, Beautiful.ai handled the data-heavy slides surprisingly well. Financial projections rendered as a proper table. The competitive landscape got a 2x2 matrix. The team slide auto-formatted headshots into a clean grid. Around 60 smart slide templates cover most business scenarios, and the AI picks relevant ones based on your content.

The trade-off is flexibility. If you want to drag an image to an unconventional position or overlap elements for a creative effect, Beautiful.ai actively resists. The design guardrails that prevent ugly slides also prevent unusual ones. For teams that want consistency across dozens of decks (sales teams, for example), this is a feature. For creative directors, it's a straitjacket.

No free tier — that's notable. Pro starts at $12/month, which is competitive, but the Team plan jumps to $40/month per user. For a 5-person team, that's $200/month for presentation software, which is harder to justify.

Pitch — Built for Teams, Not Solo Creators

Pitch is the only tool here where the collaboration features are genuinely better than the AI generation. Real-time co-editing, commenting, version history, and presentation workflows feel polished in a way that reminds you of Figma's collaborative approach. If your bottleneck is three people trying to edit the same deck simultaneously, Pitch solves that cleanly.

The AI generation, however, is a step behind Gamma and Beautiful.ai. Our test deck came out looking decent — clean typography, reasonable layout — but the AI struggled with the financial projections (rendered as a bulleted list) and the competitive landscape (flat text, no visual structure). Pitch has over 100 templates, which helps, but the AI's ability to pick the right one and populate it intelligently is less refined.

Pricing is where Pitch gets interesting. The free tier is genuinely usable — unlimited presentations, basic AI features, and support for small teams. Pro at $8/month per user is the cheapest paid option in this comparison. And it exports natively to Google Slides, which none of the other dedicated tools do.

Canva AI Presentations — The Swiss Army Knife

Canva's AI presentation features are an add-on to an already massive design platform. If you're already paying $13/month for Canva Pro (for social media graphics, documents, videos, and everything else Canva does), the AI presentation tools come included. That makes Canva the obvious choice for anyone who doesn't want a separate subscription just for slides.

The AI generation produced a serviceable deck. The template library is enormous — over 1,000 presentation templates — and the AI picks reasonable starting points. But the actual AI-generated content felt more generic than Gamma or Beautiful.ai. Our financial projections slide got a basic table, but the styling was bland. The competitive landscape was a grid of colored boxes with text, which worked but didn't feel polished.

Canva's real advantage is the ecosystem. Need an icon? Stock photo? Animated element? It's all there in the same editor. Export to PPTX, PDF, MP4 video, or even animated GIF. For teams that need presentations alongside all their other design work, Canva eliminates tool-switching friction.

The downside: Canva presentations look like Canva presentations. There's a certain visual flavor — rounded corners, pastel gradients, geometric shapes — that you'll recognize instantly. For internal use this barely matters. For client-facing decks at a Fortune 500, the Canva aesthetic can undermine credibility.

SlidesAI — Budget Pick with Caveats

SlidesAI works as a Google Slides add-on, which is both its strength and its limitation. You install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace, paste your content into a sidebar, and it generates slides directly in Google Slides. No new editor to learn, no files to export — your deck is already in the Google ecosystem.

In our test, SlidesAI produced the weakest output. Slides were functional but visually flat. Typography choices were safe to the point of being forgettable. The AI correctly structured roughly 7 out of 10 slides, but the financial projections came out as a bulleted list and the team slide was a plain text block with names. About 15 built-in themes offer limited variety.

At $10/month for Pro, SlidesAI is the cheapest dedicated AI presentation tool. The free tier gives you 3 presentations per month with a 2,500-character input limit. For internal status updates, weekly team meetings, and quick educational decks, SlidesAI does the job. For anything a client or investor will see, you'll want to spend more time manually improving the output — or use a different tool entirely.

Genuine Downsides Across the Board

After testing all six, there are problems that affect the entire category — not just individual tools.

• •Data visualization is still weak: None of these tools reliably converted tabular data into proper charts or graphs. Financial projections were either rendered as tables (acceptable) or bulleted lists (not acceptable). If your deck is data-heavy, you'll still need to build charts in Excel or Google Sheets and paste them in.
• •Branding customization is shallow: You can change colors and fonts in most tools, but truly matching a corporate brand guide — specific spacing rules, approved photography styles, mandated chart formats — requires manual work that the AI doesn't handle. Beautiful.ai comes closest, but even it can't import a full brand guidelines document and apply it.
• •PPTX export quality varies wildly: If your workflow ends with someone opening the file in PowerPoint, test the export before committing to a tool. Tome and SlidesAI had the most export issues. Gamma and Beautiful.ai were the most reliable.
• •AI "creativity" is a double-edged sword: The more creative a tool's output (Tome), the less predictable it is. The more predictable (Beautiful.ai), the less creative it is. No tool has solved this tension. You're choosing a point on the spectrum, not getting both.
• •Pricing adds up in teams: Most tools charge per-user. A 10-person team on Beautiful.ai Team pays $400/month for presentation software. At that point, hiring a freelance designer for key decks might deliver better results at a similar cost.

Which Tool Fits Your Use Case

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