Few people outside the tech industry know this, but back in the 1980s, PowerPoint was a Mac-only program. That is, until Apple sold PowerPoint to Microsoft for just $14 million back in 1989. Fast-forward a few decades to the 2020s, and PowerPoint PowerPoint is without a doubt the most well-known slide creation program in the world. It’s now an inalienable feature of Microsoft’s Office suite, and has a market share of roughly ~25% in the presentation app market. Nice move, Apple.
Now, we’ll never know how much Apple’s brass has lived to regret selling the presentation maker to Microsoft right before the companies’ rivalry heated up. What we do know is that in 2003, Apple launched Keynote, a slide maker meant to claw away at PowerPoint’s market share. Keynote failed miserably in this regard, as the app’s presentation market share sits at a mere 0.1%.
But did Keynote fail to gain acclaim because PowerPoint — and more importantly, Microsoft Office — was already a staple in offices and classrooms across the world, and the hill was too steep to climb? Or did it simply worse than its more-established Microsoft contender?
Believe it or not, plenty of designers prefer Keynote over its better-known counterpart, mostly thanks to its emphasis on graphics, and a minimalistic, uncluttered interface. But few use Apple’s slide maker professionally because sharing the presentations with PowerPoint users gets problematic due to compatibility issues. And that’s a hurdle Apple has not been able to overcome.
Even so, we thought we’d take the two tech giants’ slide makers for a test drive and see how they compare. Spoiler alert: PowerPoint’s market share will likely remain out of reach for the foreseeable future.
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What is Microsoft PowerPoint?
PowerPoint is Microsoft’s presentation making program. It’s been part of the Office suite of tools ever since Apple sold the slidemaker in the late 1980s, and is now available as a desktop and web-based version in the Office 365 ecosystem.
Microsoft PowerPoint has an advanced selection of slide creation, design, and editing tools. These characteristics, along with its integration with other Office tools, make PowerPoint an appealing program for users in various fields. Although it was originally designed for business users, PowerPoint is now also staple in educational and institutional settings.
What is Apple Keynote?
Keynote is a presentation maker Apple launched in 2003 as part of its iWork suite, and comes preinstalled on all MacOS devices. This presentation maker has a focus on graphics, a clean interface, and advanced animation options — qualities that make it a strong hit among designers and other creative professionals.
Unlike PowerPoint, which has an extensive assortment of settings and features, Keynote is relatively simple to operate, even for novice presentation creators. It integrates seamlessly with other productivity apps in the Apple ecosystem, but the integration sputters when you try using Keynote slide decks in PowerPoint. This compatibility issue has kept Keynote from breaking into the presentation market among business and educational users.
PowerPoint vs. Keynote comparison at a glance
User interface comparison
PowerPoint user interface
Once you open PowerPoint, the user interface greets you with all the features you need to start building your slide deck quickly. Slide formatting is usually a time-consuming task. PowerPoint tries its best to alleviate the tedium by starting you off with a basic default template where the headers and body text are preformtted, and inserting media is just a click away:
The left sidebar is home to PowerPoint’s slide sorter, where you can add, delete, and scroll through the deck:
Meanwhile, the right sidebar features PowerPoint’s Designer, a feature that lets you quickly select from a range of slide templates and themes:
If you’re not experienced with PowerPoint, you’ll need some time to master navigating through transitions, animation, inserting different media, file protection options, and the myriad other features that appear in the top ribbon. Some users find all these options overwhelming. But from our experience, dedicating some time to playing around with the ribbon is a surefire way to learn how to find your way around the interface comfortably. Despite the sheer number of functions and settings, they’re organized well and the ribbon has a similar format to that of other Microsoft programs:
The more serious UI issues tend to appear when you create a presentation on one device, then open it on another with a different version of PowerPoint. At times, the compatibility issues are severe enough to distort text, graphics, and formatting. To avoid facing these issues head-on while trying to present, it’s best to open the PowerPoint file on the device you’ll use to give the slideshow and see if the deck looks the way you want it to.
Keynote user interface
Keynote’s user interface is decidedly less cluttered than PowerPoint’s. Once you select a template, you’ll see the title slide with preformatted header and body text, much like you would in a PowerPoint presentation:
The interface sidebars follow the same format adopted by PowerPoint (likely because they’re familiar to most users), with the slide sorter on the left and design options on the right:
The minimalism of Keynote’s interface becomes evident once you glance at the top ribbon. Unlike PowerPoint’s, which is home to hundreds of functions and settings, Keynote’s ribbon comes off looking clean and simplistic. Using the buttons there, you can control the presentation, add slides, insert media, comments, and objects, and access formatting and animation features:
If you’ve never used Keynote before, you won’t need to “learn” this part of the interface — it’s arranged so intuitively that finding the function you need takes little mental effort.
Features comparison
PowerPoint features
PowerPoint is ram-packed with features you can use to create, format, edit, present, share, and protect slideshows. With third-party apps like Plus AI, you can even use PowerPoint to generate slide decks automatically from as little as a single prompt.
Slide creation features
When building slide decks in PowerPoint, you get access to a massive assortment of features that facilitate slide design. For example, the Insert tab offers an impressive range of ways to add images, videos, audio, shapes, and text to a slide:
Conveniently, PowerPoint allows you to mark up slides and create your own drawings right in the presentation, instead of inserting them as an image. You can do so using features under the Draw tab:
No presentation is complete without effective and engaging slide transitions and effects. You’re able to add transitions between the slides in the deck using PowerPoint’s Transitions tab. Microsoft’s slide maker offers a good selection of transitions, ranging from run-of-the-mill effects like Fade-In to more unique ones, like “Fall Over:”
To add some oomph to the slides themselves, use the Animations tab. Here, you can make slide elements and appear and disappear in various creative ways. Likewise, the Animations tab lets you use effects emphasize graphics or text:
AI slide generation features
If you’re trying to make sleek, professional presentations, PowerPoint equips you with all the tools you need to do so. What Microsoft’s slide maker doesn’t give you is time. Designing and formatting slide layouts, writing slide content, choosing graphics, and navigating PowerPoint’s many settings are immensely laborious tasks that leave you little time to hone the deck’s message and rehearse the presentation itself.
Fortunately, PowerPoint works with Plus AI, an add-in that can auto-generate presentations using artificial intelligence:
Install Plus AI as an add-in in PowerPoint, and you’ll be able to make and edit presentations with speed and efficiency.
In PowerPoint, Plus AI lets you make presentations in three ways. If you don’t know where to start, just type in a prompt that describes the presentation:
Plus AI will generate a presentation outline you can review and edit:
Then, the slide maker will create a presentation-ready PowerPoint slide deck for you:
Another way to automate the PowerPoint creation process is to upload an entire document or copy-paste chosen parts of text from it into the Plus AI add-in:
Plus AI will process the document, map information to slides, choose suitable layouts, and produce a complete PowerPoint presentation in its output:
Finally, if you have a presentation outline and content ready, you can prompt each slide individually in Plus AI. This way, you retain full control over the content of your PowerPoint deck, while letting AI handle tasks like formatting, layouts, and graphics:
Intrigued by the prospect of injecting AI into your slide creation workflow? Find out more on how to use AI in PowerPoint.
Slideshow setup features
Creating a presentation is a tough job, but setting up the slideshow is an equally vital task. Again, PowerPoint fits you out with all the tools you need to give a powerful presentation. Under the “Slideshow” tab, you get an array of options that let you set up the slide show:
One of the handiest features is “Rehearse slide timings,” which lets you rehearse the slideshow in presenter mode and adjust the timing of each slide as you see fit:
You can also record bits of the presentation and even rehearse the slideshow with a coach.
Presentation security features
PowerPoint affords several effective ways to protect your presentations from unauthorized use with a number of features. Some, like PowerPoint’s Read-only and Mark as Final features, are meant to discourage editing by users with whom the presentation author shared the PPT file. Others, like password encryption and digital signatures, offer more robust security measures that preserve the presentation’s integrity and validate its authorship.
One downside to PowerPoint’s protection features is that they don’t stay consistent between platforms. The Windows desktop version of the app has the most comprehensive selection of these tools, while its MacOS counterpart only has the Read-only and password encryption functions. Meanwhile, the web-based PowerPoint app gives you control over viewing and editing permissions, but these features look different than on desktop. If you use PowerPoint on different platforms, this miscoordination can easily leave you confused.
Keynote features
Keynote has a far less exhaustive feature selection than PowerPoint; but whether having fewer functions is a negative is really up to you. Ultimately, you still get all the tools you need to create and present professional slide decks, but the more compact array of options makes it easier to navigate the app. On the other hand, there are fewer effects, little you can do to configure or rehearse the slideshow, and not as many ways to share and protect the presentations.
Another noticeable drawback is that Keynote doesn’t offer a means of using an AI-powered slide maker assistant. Some AI presentation apps let you export presentations as a Keynote file. But there’s no way to use AI in the app the way you’d use Plus AI in PowerPoint.
Below is a deeper dive into Keynote’s features.
Slide creation features
Like PowerPoint, Keynote allows you to insert images, videos, audio, and other types of media into the slide deck. What stands out about Keynote is how easy it is to just choose the file you want on your computer and insert it. Where PowerPoint wants you to specify what type of file you’re inserting, all you need to do on Keynote is click “Choose” under the Media tab, and insert any saved file you like:
Under Keynote’s Format tab, you’ll find powerful design tools that easily rival PowerPoint’s. For one, you have several ways to transform how the slide, or any graphic or text element on it looks.
For instance, you can mix up slide layouts:
Change slide backgrounds:
And tweak the graphic assets on a slide:
These features aren’t unique to Keynote, and PowerPoint’s got them, too. But it’s refreshing to have all the formatting options so accessible and not have to worry about scouring through various menus to find the graphic editing function you need.
Much like PowerPoint, Keynote lets you add effects to how slides and objects appear, disappear, and behave when they’re on the screen. These features are called “build-in”, “build-out,” and “action,” respectively, and they’re housed under the Animate tab.
However, the slide transition styles are limited compared to PowerPoint’s, as are the object and “action” effects. It’s a relatively insignificant drawback in the grand scheme of things, and you still get plenty of ways to invigorate the presentation with animation features:
Slideshow setup features
Unlike PowerPoint, Keynote’s slideshow preparation tool suite is quite modest. The only things Apple’s presentation lets you do to get the deck ready for the big day is decide whether the slideshow starts, whether it loops, and if it restarts after being idle:
You can also delay the effects and change the slide size. It’s not clear how useful these features are compared to, say, rehearsing the slide timings the way you would in PowerPoint.
Presentation security features
Apple Keynote offers a single, yet robust method to protect a presentation you’ve made — by encrypting it with a password:
Password encryption is a reliable way to ward off unauthorized use or changes. However, there isn’t a less restrictive way to dissuade users from editing, like PowerPoint’s read-only setting.
Design and templates
PowerPoint design and templates
PowerPoint’s most vital design feature is the Designer. This AI-powered feature is configured to automatically generate and suggest themes and layouts based on the text you type on the slide and the graphics you add. In theory, it means that your selection of themes is virtually unlimited. In practice, it’s not always so.
You can easily get Designer brainstorming themes even before you add anything to the first, blank slide:
Simple presentation topics likewise elicit great design ideas quickly from Designer:
On the other hand, more sophisticated topics can cause PowerPoint’s AI design assistant to draw a blank:
You can still get around this glitch by exploring themes under the Design tab, or formatting the backgrounds manually.
If you’re not happy with the designs offered by PowerPoint, you can explore Plus AI’s library of professional presentation templates, or even create your own custom templates with corporate branding.
Keynote design and templates
Keynote doesn’t have an AI-powered design assistant like PowerPoint, but it does equip you with a decent library of attractive templates. Whether you’re looking for a more minimalist theme, or want to go all out with bold colors, there’s probably a theme that suits your fancy:
In some cases, you might find that despite the attractive colors of the chosen template, the slides themselves look a little bare-bones and repetitive — it’s almost like false advertising. For example, click on this template:
And here’s how the slides will look:
Thankfully, the layout-changing feature can help you jazz the slides up:
And if you’re looking beyond color for ways to enliven the slides, consider trying Keynote’s dynamic themes. These add some motion to the slide backgrounds.
Pricing
PowerPoint pricing
PowerPoint has a convoluted pricing structure that’s not easy to decipher at a glance. That’s because the slide maker comes bundled with other Microsoft Office products, and the pricing differs depending on whether you’re buying the program for personal or business purposes, along with other factors.
Here’s a basic overview of PowerPoint’s pricing structure as of the time of writing:
- Standalone one-time purchase: $179.00, includes PowerPoint only
- Part of the Personal package: $69.99 per year, includes all Office apps and is meant for a single user
- Part of the Family package: $99.99 per year, includes all Office apps and can be used by 6 people
- Business packages: $6.00 to $22.00 per user, per month, depending on the package
All business packages, as well as the home Family plan come with a month-long free trial.
Keynote pricing
Keynote is a free program that comes pre-installed on Apple devices. You don’t need to pay to use Keynote as long as you’re a licensed user of the Apple device.
Final verdict: Is PowerPoint or Keynote the better slide maker for you?
PowerPoint and Keynote are both capable of producing quality presentations. However, if you’re making slide decks often for work or school, PowerPoint is probably a better choice. Given PowerPoint’s widespread use, it’s just much easier to make and collaborate on PPT presentations. What’s more, PowerPoint has a definitive upper hand over Keynote when it comes to the selection of features and themes.
Crucially, PowerPoint works with AI add-ins like Plus AI, which help enhance your productivity by auto-generating presentations; you can’t get the same AI-powered productivity boost from Keynote.
That said, if you have a Mac and are looking for a free presentation app for personal, or occasional business use, Keynote will more than suffice. Not only does the program come installed on Apple devices, it also takes little time to master — unlike PowerPoint, which can overwhelm new users with its gargantuan suite of tools.
