Free presentation software can be a great resource for meetings and events. But some people do not realize their many options out there. And some may not know some simple and extremely effective strategies to build and deliver their presentation.
If you’re looking to spice up your next meeting, adding a visual aid can do a lot more than just bringing a little sparkle to your presentation.
Whether you’re a student looking to score an A+ on your next project or a working professional looking to impress your boss, presentation software can help.
Research shows that 65% of people are visual learners, which means not only can a visual aid make your presentation stand out, it can help others learn better in the process.
Benefits of Presentation Slide Software
Visual: Visualizing information helps your readers see what you’re explaining.
Versatile: It incorporates photos, illustrations, sketches, and even video if it’s posted online.
Interactive: You can embed links and jump around the document itself or out to the Internet.
Tablet-ready: Its aspect ratio makes it easy to load onto devices.
Spreadable: Its modular nature allows slides to be incorporated into other decks and spread throughout the organization.
Shareable: Platforms like SlideShare™ make it embeddable and shareable.
Presentation software can be a great publishing tool. The ability to integrate words, visuals, and other interactive elements like hyperlinks and video are a few of the key attributes of a slide doc.
First, it’s a practical alternative to professional design software, which is expensive and takes years to learn well. Why make that investment when a tool you use every day will work for most of your communication needs? Granted, professional designers serve a great purpose. Designers spend years learning the effective display of information. For high-stakes collateral of any kind, nothing can replace a designer’s ability to visually guide and engage the reader.
Second, presentation software is pervasive. PowerPoint® is installed on more than a billion computers worldwide.
You’d be surprised by the number and quality of ideas that begin in presentation software. Many people use it to create concepts and strategies, and plenty of great ideas trickle out of these apps.
Lastly, very few tools allow you to pick up entire pages, rearrange them, easily merge them into existing documents, or save them into their own file. The ease with which you can accomplish these tasks with presentation software makes it the perfect platform for spreading information. I’ve seen slides we helped create for a client in one part of the company come back to us repackaged in a deck from a completely different department. It’s a testament to presentation software’s unique ability to facilitate and spread ideas.
Presentation Software – CustomShow
Summary – presentation software program used mainly for businesses and companies with more than 25 employees that need a robust presentation software solution. With over 40 years of rich presentation history, the presentation software company was created out of the presentation design agency, Sales Graphics. The software allows companies and organizations to build better custom branded presentations that look light years better than your typical PowerPoint presentation. We would consider ourselves a great sales enablement tool because sales professionals benefit a great deal from the software.
Perfect For – Marketing Teams, Sales Teams, Sales Professionals, Marketing
Professionals, CEO’s, Design Agencies
Other Review Sources – Smart Selling Tools, Techradar, TrustRadius, G2 Crowd, Finances Online
Website: www.customshow.com
SlideRocket Marketing Software
Summary – Clearslide purchased Sliderocket several years ago. If volume sales are important to you, Clearslide could be a good tool for you. There is more emphasis on sales and tracking than the presentation creation side of the software. After going through a series C $50 million round of funding, the company is focusing more on sales enablement more broadly and less on presentations specifically. Nonetheless, the tool is worth reviewing.
Advantages – Can upload files from Keynote, Powerpoint, PDF, Excel, and other formats; good metrics; online delivery; slide sharing
Disadvantages – Interface is complex and limited in the ability to create “better-looking presentation”; video isn’t seamlessly integrated into presentations.
Perfect For – High Volume Sales & Marketing Organizations
Other Review Sources – Edward Mendelson from PC Mag; Jessica Still at Gigaom
Prezi (Personal)
Summary – The mothership of PowerPoint alternatives, they’ve been around for many years. Leveraging the concept of ZOOM and transitions to new spaces on a slide, they give the effect that the presentation has not moved to a new slide. Prezi provides people with creating better style and effect in their presentations. Prezi uses the concept of Pathway Points instead of slides to give the visual cinematic appeal of their presentations. These guys just raised another $50 million in November to compete with Microsoft.
Advantages – Present on multiple devices; can share with coworkers; can be used by practically anyone; easy to learn how to use; cost-effective; can work on the presentation offline;
Disadvantages – Very template-driven – always looks like Prezi; cannot easily customize slides or repurpose presentations; can cause motion sickness.
Perfect For – Educators; Keynote Speakers; Organizations; Students
Other Review Sources – Erez Zukerman From PCWorld; Edward Mendelson of PCMag
Prezi For Business
Summary – The mothership of PowerPoint alternatives, they’ve been around for many years. They decided to make a stronger push for the business market. Thus, they came out with Prezi for Business. Lots of companies already use Prezi for one-off presentations like conference keynotes, town halls, and investor pitches, but this version is trying to target the managed and repeatable presentations of sales and marketing teams.
Advantages – Better for teams; good for collaborating.
Disadvantages – Very template-driven – always looks like Prezi; hard to edit by non-designers; not easy to repurpose content.
Perfect For – Medium-sized companies that require limited customization by the sales team.
Other Review Sources – G2Crowd, Medium
Slideshark
Summary – Taken directly from the horse’s mouth, SlideShark is an app used by sales professionals and other presenters worldwide to present and share PowerPoints via their chosen devices. Its features include cloud storage integration, sharing and tracking views, broadcasting or presenting over the web, creating annotations on the slides, and of course presenter mode.
Advantages – Can present PowerPoint slides anywhere; cloud-based; free but paid version is known as a Business pro; can be utilized for webinars
Disadvantages – unable to customize presentations; primarily a delivery system (good and bad thing).
Perfect For – sales and marketing professionals; individual business owners.
Other Review Sources – Dylan Herx of AppStorm; Phillip Michaels of ComputerWorld, EdShelf, Engadget
Haiku Deck
Summary – This is a template-based platform that allows people to create elegant-looking presentations. The software comes with 35 many templates and over 35 million stock photos that can be used within the slide templates. This platform is a step between a company like CustomShow and Powerpoint.
Advantages – easy to use; fast onboarding process
Disadvantages – cannot do offline work with the App; cannot truly Customize presentations any way you want
Perfect For – students; educators; presenters in general
Other Review Sources – Joel Mathis of MacWorld; JR Bookwalter of MacLife, PCWorld
SlideDog
Summary – Known as a presentation launch pad, SlideDog mainly takes all of your documents, presentations, pictures, or video and places them into a playlist that can be moved around and presented seamlessly. You can upload just about any type of file from videos down to other presentation software devices such as Prezi.
Advantages – Make transitioning smooth; can share across multiple devices; live to poll; free version
Disadvantages – Not used for creating presentations
Perfect For – People who want to present more seamlessly across multiple documents; individual presenters
Other Review Sources – FPPT Overview, The Balance
Powtoon – Animation Presentation Software
Summary – Probably one of the leaders in the DIY presentation animation space, Powtoon allows consumers to create presentations and videos that are animated, interesting, and engaging. It is not difficult to learn how to use and the software is a breath of fresh air to those looking to create presentations that are different and engaging.
Advantages – Ease Of Use; Truly Customizable Animated Presentations
Disadvantages – Not suitable to live presentations (but that’s OK)
Perfect For – Educators (Check out their new app for educators); businesses that want to create a service/product video; small business professionals; trainers
Other Sources – Sarah Perez of TechCrunch; Cathy Moore’s Blog, Brightcarbon Review
Keynote – Powerpoint Alternative
Summary – One of the standard-bearers in the presentation software space, Keynote is meant to allow presenters to create customizable presentations. It comes with 30 themes that you can start with and pre-stock photos.
Advantages – Present on multiple devices (Apple owned); easy to share; PowerPoint friendly; inexpensive; allows for animations.
Disadvantages – Can only be used for MAC (ios systems); fairly template driven; no slide library
Perfect For – Business owners and individuals
Other Sources – Joe Kissell of MacWorld; John Martellaro of The Mac Observer
MediaShout
Summary – To switch things up a bit MediaShout is a presentation software tool for religious institutions and churches. It is a powerful platform that can be utilized by churches of all sizes and combines. The software works well with the team that is managing the media and productions during any religious service but particularly during the sermon.
Advantages – Stage mirroring; announcement deck; great with video; add scripture from 65 different bibles; include sermon points; sound and music enabled
Disadvantages – Hmmm…we’re not going there.
Perfect For – Religious institutions and churches
Other Sources: Gavin Courtney From Church App, Church Tech Today
Kineticast
Summary – Built mainly for B2B salespeople, Kineticast is a cool presentation tool that enables salespeople to be more effective in their sales and geofencing marketing advertising. Their process includes creating the presentation (uploading files), emailing your list of contacts, and then tracking the results. The purpose of this tool is to create customized messages with slides that are meant for specific prospects.
Advantages – Enables sales professionals to improve the effectiveness
Disadvantages – Cannot create customized presentations (wasn’t built for that anyway though).
Perfect For – B2B Sales Professionals; Possibly Marketers
Other Sources – Rich Bohn of SellMoreNow
Knowledge Vision
Summary – Knowledge Vision is one of the newest players on the block when it comes to creating better-looking presentations that are customizable. The company has a collection of software tools that are combined into 1 that companies can use. You can also create videos within the software package.
Advantages – Complete Package of Production Tools; Cloud-Based; Analytics; Live Webcasting
Disadvantages – Maybe too many tools; Could be challenging to learn
Perfect For – Business; Producers; Digital Agencies
Reviews – G2Crowd, CrowdReviews, Finances Online
Visme
Visme allows you to make professional presentations & infographics online. The tool is relatively easy to use and comes with 1000’s templates & graphics. It’s relatively new software and is geared more toward infographics rather than presentations, but it’s a great tool.
Reviews – CMSCritic, SelfMadeSuccess
GoAnimate – Video Presentation Software
Summary – One of Powtoon’s biggest competitors, GoAnimate is all about animated video presentations. You can create DIY professional animated videos without having to hire a video producer. It is integrated with other software sales apps and is a solution that can be interesting for budget-busting video animation companies. Of course, there are other whiteboard animation companies, but GoAnimate does showcase another alternative.
Advantages – Great For Video; Cost Effective; Think Product Videos
Disadvantages – Only Video Centered (Not a real disadvantage though)
Perfect For – Business; Producers; Digital Agencies
Other Sources – Joe Ganci of Learning Solutions Mag, Editing Insider
Wink – Powerpoint Alternative
Summary – Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel, etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles, etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Advantages – Free; multilingual; good support
Disadvantages – No ‘undo’ feature, audio compatibility issues
Perfect For – Individuals and small businesses who just need to create simple animated tutorials and software demonstrations.
SnagIt
Summary – Offers advanced features and extra tools for organizing, simplifying, and editing screen captures. If you produce Windows screenshots on a regular basis, SnagIt is a great tool for that.
Advantages – Easy-to-use screen capture program,
Disadvantages – Windows only
Perfect For – Window’s screen shot-ers
Other Sources – Tom Negrino of MacWorld
Camtasia
Summary – Camtasia Studio is an integrated suite of applications for producing professional videos of on-screen activity.
Advantages – 5 applications provide solutions for end to end video production, multiple output options
Disadvantages – Costly for the value; for windows only
Perfect For – Creating Video demonstrations for customer support, employee training, and product presentations.
Other Sources – Daniel And Sally Grotta of PCWorld
Camstudio – Video Presentation Software
Summary – Free and simple, straightforward program to record screen activity to AVI or SWF format.
Advantages – Free
Disadvantages – no movie editing, hard to use annotation tools
Perfect For – Recording basic activity for webinars and basic presentations
Other Sources – Michael Muchmore of PCMag
Slidesnack
Summary – Mainly used for sharing presentations and not necessarily building presentations, Sldiesnack can still be an effective tool for people.
Advantages – Free; great for sharing
Disadvantages – not great for building presentations.
Perfect For – great for teams and collaborating
Reviews – Ed Tech Reviews, Presentation Guru
Articulate Presenter
Summary – Articulate Presenter is a program that acts as an add-on to Microsoft PowerPoint. It capitalizes on what PowerPoint can do already, and provides several added features, such as quizzing, narration, and other interactive features
Advantages – Supercharges the existing functionality in PowerPoint; narration syncs easily to screen animation; functionality is super intuitive
Disadvantages – Content positioning is imprecise, takes ages to publish the content, Published files are BIG
Perfect For – Educators; Individuals
Windows Movie Maker
Summary – freeware video editing software by Microsoft. It is a part of the Windows Essentials software suite and offers the ability to create and edit videos as well as to publish them on OneDrive, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.
Advantages – Free, simple to use for beginners, great for photo slideshows
Disadvantages – Only one video track, freezes and crashes randomly, lots of versions that aren’t compatible with each other
Perfect For – Essentially Anyone; Video Production
Other Sources – Michael Muchmore of PCMag
Slideshare
Summary – Allows easy sharing of presentations between businesses and consumers
Advantages – Easy embedding in websites, great for sharing audio and video, custom privacy settings
Disadvantages – Must use other programs to create and edit material, atypical transitions, cannot track views
Perfect For – Students, teachers, small and large businesses that want public-facing content to reach consumers
Other Sources – Tanya Lewis of PR Week US
Reviews – GetApp, best company
VisualBee
Summary – Automatic graphic designer for PowerPoint’s presentations that designs a Showcase automatically with just some clicks
Advantages – Easy to Use, Fast, User-Friendly UI, Attractive Templates
Disadvantages – Getting appropriate images requires some selection by hand. Some features are redundant to PowerPoint’s own.
Perfect For – Individuals
Other Sources – Jill Duffy of PCMag, Indezine
Projeqt
Summary – Project gives creatives the ability to weave together stories dripping with style and personality from Flickr photos, RSS feeds, tweets, YouTube or Vimeo videos, and any media stored on your computer.
Advantages – freemium model, create professional-looking, branded, shareable, and embeddable presentations without much fuss
Disadvantages – very few layout options
Perfect For – students, creative industry
Other Sources – Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable
Emaze
Summary – The Emaze user can easily build sophisticated presentations with little effort. The company’s vision was to free up users from having to spend time studying and preparing the presentation tool so that they can better spend their time concentrating on the actual content of the presentation
Advantages – Cheap, designed for ordinary users,
Disadvantages – Will does not work smoothly on older computers with low computing power
Perfect For – Basic user base, current PowerPoint users wanting better visualization
Other Sources – Avishay Bassa of Geektime
Libre Office
Impress is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Creating and editing slides is very versatile thanks to different editing and view modes: Normal (for general editing), Outline (for organizing and outlining your text content), Notes (for viewing and editing the notes attached to a slide), Handout (for producing paper-based material), and Slide Sorter (for a thumbnail sheet view that lets you quickly locate and order your slides).
Preseria
Summary – Now we’re in the world of conferences. Preseria is all about presenters uploading their presentations and organizing your conferences. This can be a nifty tool if you’re managing large conferences where you have several presenters.
Advantages – Great for Sharing; can Organize and gather content seamlessly
Disadvantages – Can’t create custom presentations.
Perfect For – Event Coordinators; Conference Leaders
Proclaim – Church Presentation Software
Summary – Now we’re in the world of churches. Proclaim is all about pastors and assistants uploading their presentations and having the functionality to make any changes to them in order to provide an experience to people listening and watching the sermon.
Advantages – Incredible software for sharing and collaborating with teams of people who are working on the presentation; Organize and gather content seamlessly; Comes with a remote app that can be controlled by your iPad.
Disadvantages – Can’t create super customized presentations, but they can be fairly unique.
Perfect For – Churches; religious institutions
Reviews – Church Tech Today
Reallusion
Summary – Moving back into animation, this software is pretty nifty. You can create animated figures for your presentation in a shorter period of time. Great for presenters to quickly add animated avatars and comic effects into PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Doc, and other presentation software
Advantages – Full editing capabilities; well-categorized content libraries; added to other presentations
Disadvantages – Can’t create presentations within the software, however, Reallusion does have other software in its suite that can do this.
Perfect For – Individuals; Business; Keynote Speakers; Designers
Other Sources – NYC Post Production Reviews
Focusky
Summary – Focusky helps mainly with creating animation presentations as well as presentations in HTML5 format.
Advantages – Full editing capabilities; can present from anywhere; animation capabilities; import PowerPoint slides
Disadvantages – May not have as much functionality as CustomShow but is great for individuals; mainly for animation, not traditional presentations
Perfect For – Individuals; students; teachers
Slides
Summary – To finish off the list, slides.com is cloud-based presentation software that allows for easy collaboration,
Advantages – Full editing capabilities; can present from anywhere; cloud-based; comes with analytics; incorporate HTML and CSS in the presentations
Disadvantages – May not have as much functionality as CustomShow but is great for individuals
Perfect For – Individuals; students; teachers
Slide Bean
Summary – A new kid on the block, Slidebean has a dynamic means of creating slides for presentation givers. Their thing is that they have slides that design themselves. You add the content, and the slides create themselves.
Advantages – Ease of use; quick to develop presentations; plenty of templates to choose from
Disadvantages – May not have as much functionality as CustomShow but is great for individuals; not best for teams; not entirely customizable
Perfect For – Individuals; students; teachers
Reviews – Finances Online, Ethos3
Canva
Canva seems to be a new kid on the block as a presentation software tool that is offered for free. Canva provides 100’s of initial templates for users to choose from and have developed a simple process for people to walkthrough:
- Open Canva and select the “Presentation” design type
- Choose from hundreds of professionally designed layouts
- Upload your own photos or choose from over 1 million stock images
- Fix your images, add stunning filters and edit text
- Save and share
The way Canva monetizes its business is by way of its marketplace in which it sells templates, icons, and photos to people looking for even more advanced customization. Not for the B2B player, but can be great for B2C consumers.
Zoho
Zoho offers a great interface for people who want to design eye-popping presentations. Zoho is pretty broad in its software and service offerings ranging from document management tools to collaboration and sharing. Their pricing on the document management side can be as low as $5/month/user. Doesn’t really compete in the B2B space, but nonetheless is a great player with many benefits including transferring to PowerPoint, analytics, bulk file uploads, and much more.
Reviews – FitSmallBusiness, PCMag
DocketZoom
Docketzoom helps you bring to life highly interactive presentations that enhance buyer perception. With DocketZoom you can easily create an appealing presentation that delights and engages your audience. Its inbuilt analytics helps you understand critical user insights to formulate better content strategies.
Instant Magazine
Instant Magazine allows you to create interactive publications which make your content come alive. It is one tool, for all platforms, for all devices. Get the best reading experience on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Personalized and fully measurable.
Reviews – Crunchbase
Totus Marketing
Instead of building presentations from scratch, users can compile pre-approved slides (individual or multiple) into a customized PowerPoint presentation that suits their needs. Users can construct presentations from a selection of approved slides and even add personalization and customization where allowed by site administrators.
Reviews – SoftwareInsider
NCH Software
NCH Software allows you to easily design effective slideshow presentations with this free software.
- Present ideas and arguments to persuade an audience
- Free alternative for Microsoft® PowerPoint ** presentations
- Visually support speeches and oral presentations
Enhance any presentation with visuals and multimedia examples of the information, ideas, and arguments you are presenting.Panopto
At Panopto, the company believes that video can have a transformative effect on learning. So they built a video platform that helps businesses and universities improve the way that they train, teach, and share knowledge. Panapto acts as a video presentation software package that allows consumers to manage, live stream, record, and share videos across your organization.
Reviews – SteamingMedia, FinancesOnline
Genial.ly
Genially is a helpful tool for creating visual media, such as presentations, infographics, mind maps, and more. The focus with Genially is interactivity, and nearly everything created with this tool can include interactivity. It also includes real-time collaboration and animation. In addition, statistics help you measure whether your presentation is effective.
Reviews – Tutsplus
FlowVella
FlowVella is another presentation app with several benefits and features including it being mobile-first, offering privacy and security, analytics, autoplay videos, and a vast array of collaboration tools. FlowVella has native apps for Mac, iPhone & iPad, yet presentations can be viewed via any web browser. FlowVella is great for sales presentations, training, kiosks, digital brochures, portfolios, product guides, formal and informal education, and much more.
Reviews – TechCrunch, Engadget
Slide Bureau (NOTE: CLOSED)
Summary – Slide Bureau is an interesting software device. It is mainly used for iPads, but it does allow for people to create presentations that are more customized than your traditional PowerPoint slide. The interface is centered on pre-made templates but they are categorized to fit the profession and overall need of the slide.
Advantages – Easy to use this presentation platform
Disadvantages – Limited to only iPads; cannot truly brand and create presentations more customized than the templates that are given
Perfect For – Educators; Individual Professionals
Other Sources – Benjamin Romano of XConomy; Taylor Soper of Geekwire
Next steps to choosing a free presentation software
When choosing the right software solution for you, think about what capabilities are most important to you. Do you require multiple user accounts? Is cloud access an absolute must? These answers will help guide you to the right product.
That’s not to say that you’ll find the right software among the products listed here. Most free software offerings are good for small single-person teams or companies just starting out. If your team requires more than one seat or several teams working on the same software license, you may want to consider investing in a paid plan.
Conclusion
Do you often need to give presentations for work or college? If so, you likely tried using PowerPoint at some point. PowerPoint is great when working with stuck-up, annoying managers who aren’t satisfied with anything less than an hour-long presentation. However, it can be time-consuming trying to create each slide in only the right color only to have them emailed back with comments about needing to change something.