Beautiful.ai and Gamma are two of the most popular choices for AI presentation makers. Both promise to simplify the process of creating slides and decks, especially if you have limited design experience.
To help you decide between the two, we tested Beautiful.ai and Gamma extensively to understand the strengths and limitations of each app. For a more holistic comparison, we also looked into their pricing structures, reviews, and ratings.
Read on to find out which one is the better fit for your presentation needs.
Beautiful.ai vs. Gamma At A Glance
Here's a quick breakdown of how Beautiful.ai and Gamma stack up to each other. Read on for the full comparison.
Key Differences Between Beautiful.ai and Gamma
Beautiful.ai and Gamma are similar to many of the other AI presentation makers. For example, both let you create slides from text prompts. They also help automate the slide design process for you, from picking the right slide layouts to finding the right visuals and graphics.
Their distinct approaches, however, means Beautiful.ai and Gamma will appeal to different types of users:
- Beautiful.ai is focused on traditional presentations, with a simple workflow based on smart templates and design automation
- Gamma is for users looking for unconventional ways to package their ideas into non-traditional slides, documents, and websites
With Beautiful.ai, you can use their pre-built templates or let the AI generate slides for you. The templates come with themes, layouts, graphics, and text you can restyle in a few clicks. This makes it possible to finish a new deck in a few minutes.
Gamma, however, has its sights set on creating a "new medium for presentation idea." It recognizes that the way we communicate and collaborate has evolved, and like the app's founder says, “slides were built for a different era of work.”
As such, Gamma caters to professionals looking for modern ways to package and deliver their ideas. The ability to "publish" slides as a website highlights this focus.
What's missing? Beautiful.ai and Gamma are both PowerPoint replacements. If you are looking for a way to generation presentations using AI but want to continue using your traditional presentation tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides, you should try using Plus AI. Plus AI is an add-on for PowerPoint and Google Slides and creates native slides inside of your existing tools, so you don't have to worry about switching everyone over to a new tool.
The Difference Between How Beautiful.ai and Gamma Approach Presentations
Even with the same topics and prompts, you'll get very different results from Beautiful.ai and Gamma:
How Beautiful.ai Approaches Presentations
The goal of Beautiful.ai is to save users time and effort by auto-generating decks using AI. Its main tool is the DesignerBot, which is able to generate full presentations from a short description.
Beautiful.ai also offers smart templates for common uses like pitch decks, business proposals, media kits, and creative portfolios. These professionally designed presentations are ready to use and fully editable.
How Gamma Approaches Presentations
Gamma's features are designed for a "modern" work style. Instead of only presenting slides at your computer, their flexible presentations are also mobile-friendly and can be published as websites.
Gamma also integrates with some of the most popular work apps like AirTable, Google Drive, and Figma. And aside from creating slides and docs, you can also design and launch websites straight from the platform. This makes Gamma useful for a wide range of business use cases.
How to Choose Between Beautiful.ai and Gamma
If you're trying to choose between Gamma and Beautiful.ai, evaluating the following criteria can help with your decision.
Ease of Use: It is easy to figure out how the app works, even for those who've never used AI slide generators before? Will it complement your existing workflow?
AI Content Generation: How well does the AI understand your prompts and what's the quality of the design and content it generates?
Content Creation Options: Aside from generating slides, what else can you create with the app?
Visual Assets: Does the app offer a good variety of visual assets like diagrams, metrics, and charts? Can you customize them to fit your brand and content?
Price: Do the app's features justify its price? Is there a free trial so you can explore the platform without immediately making a financial commitment?
Evaluating Beautiful.ai and Gamma AI: A Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Ease of Use
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai greets new users with a minimalist screen, and the only accent is the blue "Create Presentation" button. Hover over that and you'll see all the ways you can generate a deck. It's a clever way to get users to jump right into creating their first AI presentation.
Using the app's AI slide generator, DesignerBot, is fast and easy. Just type what kind of presentation you want to make and the AI will draft a complete deck in seconds. After that, you're automatically taken to the Beautiful.ai editor.
Those new to AI presentation makers will likely find Beautiful.ai's editing interface difficult to grasp. For instance, the tools only have icons and the labels won't appear unless you hover over them, adding an extra step that feels unnecessary.
Even then, most of the labels don't clarify what the tool is for. For instance, there's an [ABC] icon that says "Add Element." Clicking on it opens another icon toolbar with generic labels like "Box," "Circle," and "Capsule."
Users may eventually end up wasting time just trying to figure out how Beautiful.ai works, which ultimately defeats the purpose of an AI-powered presentation maker.
Gamma
Gamma's interface feels more user-friendly. The workflow starts by guiding you through a series of screens with intuitive instructions. Gamma's AI will assist you with writing your prompt, creating an outline, picking a theme, and generating your presentation draft.
At first, Gamma's slide editor feels easy to use. You can edit content by clicking on text. To add elements like videos, text blocks, and graphs, drag them from the left toolbar and drop into your slide. Gamma will automatically adjust the layout so everything still looks good with a nice balance.
Like we discovered in our Gamma review, the app starts to have a steep learning curve as you discover more editing tools. There's an AI chatbot, slash commands similar to notion, an AI toolbar between slides, plus a mini toolbar for every single slide element.
This can become quite overwhelming for non-designers. And if your goal is to create presentations quickly, having to learn how to use Gamma's myriad tools may not be a good use of your time.
What's Missing
AI presentation makers are supposed to make the process effortless. If you're a Google Slides or PowerPoint user, switching to standalone apps like Gamma or Beautiful.ai can force you to learn a whole new platform.
Plus AI offers advanced AI features like Beautiful.ai or Gamma. But since it's a Google Slides add-on, you get to use AI presentation tools along with your favorite templates and workflows.
AI Content Generation
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is able to generate presentation content from simple text prompts, which can be a timesaver.
When asked to create "a pitch deck for a train ticketing mobile app", it produced a deck including key slides you'd expect like problem statement, business model, and market opportunity. The slide content was generally relevant to the topic of a train ticketing mobile app.
One thing to keep in mind though is that Beautiful.ai doesn't generate an outline before filling in the slides. Both the content and structure is up to the AI. This can result in irrelevant or off-topic content, especially for niche and technical subjects.
You can upload web pages and files to give the AI more direction, but this assumes you have material to provide. If not, you'll have to settle for the AI's best guess.
Beautiful.ai offers some basic AI editing tools to help you generate, rewrite, or tweak content and fix grammar/spelling mistakes.
However, the quality is mostly a miss. The rewrite feature just paraphrases text and often makes it longer and less relevant. The grammar tool didn't work at all. Either it replaced the selected text with "The text has no spelling or grammar errors" or just corrected a letter or two and ignored other errors.
Overall, Beautiful.ai' AI content generator is okay for starter presentations, especially for general topics. As for editing, you'll likely have to do it yourself.
Gamma
Gamma's AI content generation starts with a prompt, similar to Beautiful.ai. However, Gamma takes a more structured approach. It first generates an outline, which you can review and edit before proceeding to create the full presentation.
Gamma's AI seems to produce more relevant and detailed content compared to Beautiful.ai. It can handle more complex topics and generates slides with a good balance of text and visual elements.
Gamma also offers an AI chatbot that can help with content creation and editing. You can ask it to expand on points, suggest improvements, or even generate new slides based on your input.
We did notice that Gamma's AI content generator has a tendency to repeat itself when we tried creating decks about different topics. This might also lead to extensive editing, especially when you need to create slides with related topics or under the same category.
What's Missing
Beautiful.ai and Gamma's AI content tools are okay for general topics, but may not be enough for highly specialized ones. You also need to feed them extremely detailed prompts to get relevant content.
In contrast, Plus AI is specifically trained for professional use cases such as board decks, pitches, client proposals, QBRs, etc. For example, you can use Plus to quickly convert a Word doc to a PowerPoint, so you can turn a paper or an article into a presentation.
Content Creation Options
Beautiful.ai
While Beautiful.ai can only create slides, it does offer several starting points. You can let the AI generate the deck for you or use one of their pre-made templates.
If you already have custom team templates, you can also reuse them for a new deck. Beautiful.ai also allows you to upload an existing PowerPoint presentation as an input.
There's an image generator within Beautiful.ai, but it didn't process prompts effectively during our testing. They're either generic or look weird, which is a common issue with AI image generators.
If you're okay with using stock images, Beautiful.ai has a big image library source from Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels.
Gamma
Aside from classic slides, Gamma can also create documents and web pages. However, they all look very similar to each other in terms of style and structure. So if you want to create truly unique presentations, be ready for a lot of manual design and formatting work.
Gamma has more input options, which means you can give it a ton of context. You can use a prompt, upload your notes and outline, or import docs, webpages, and full presentations to generate more precise content.
Gamma has a built-in AI image generator, but the results are not very usable especially for professional use.
It's prone to common issues with AI-generated images such as distorted body parts and graphics that don't make sense.
Because all Gamma decks are pre-filled with these AI images, you'll have to delete them manually and replace them with your own graphics.
What's Missing
In theory, the ability to create other content formats inside AI presentation makers is a good one. But in reality, this can simply result in an overloaded app with subpar tools. We saw this in the quality of AI images from both Beautiful.ai and Gamma.
Plus AI, on the other hand, enhances the content creation capabilities of familiar tools like Google Slides and PowerPoint. This means you can use advanced AI features while still using workflows and tools you and your team already know.
In addition, the ability to use AI inside Google Slides means you can spend less time learning new tools and more time with your customers.
Visual Assets
Beautiful.ai
As a design-focused app, Beautiful.ai has an excellent collection of visual assets. There's a wealth of icons available and you can change the color to fit the theme of your slide.
Beautiful.ai's native integration with Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash gives you unlimited access to millions of high-quality photos and videos, complete with a search bar.
The thing is, Beautiful.ai simply pulls the free images from these sites, so most of them look like your typical generic stock photos. They're mostly good for fillers. If you need more specific visuals, you'll need a paid account on those sites.
The highlight of Beautiful.ai is what it calls the "Inspiration Gallery." It's a collection of professionally designed templates across various categories such as sales, startups, and HR/Training.
These fully-customizable templates look great out of the box, with striking color palettes that extend to charts, graphs, icons, and other elements in the slide.
For branding, you can upload your own images, fonts, and icons. Unfortunately, Beautiful.ai doesn't allow importing themes from Google Slides or PowerPoint.
Gamma
Gamma offers even more ways to create eye-catching presentations. Aside from access to Unsplash, you can also import GIFs and grab images from URLs.
You can combine them with other media like videos, which you can embed from sites like Loom, TikTok, Wistia, and Vimeo.
Gamma's third-party integrations let you embed visuals and content from other apps. Embed entire webpages, Google Forms, your Figma designs, Airtable databases, and more.
Note that using them inside Gamma requires you to connect your accounts separately. Some of these are paid apps as well, so unless you're willing to pay, you won't be able to use them for your presentations.
What's Missing
While Gamma and Beautiful.ai offer many ways to style your slides, the sheer number of new options can be overwhelming. If you're trying to put together a last-minute presentation, Plus AI lets you just use your existing workflows and assets, so you can keep everything in PowerPoint or Google Slides without worrying about how to upload all of your assets into a new tool.
Price
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai offers two plans: Pro and Team. A Pro account costs $12 and gives you unlimited slides, AI content generation, and full access to the Inspiration Gallery. The Pro plan doesn't have collaboration features.
Using Beautiful.ai with a team can get very expensive at $50 a month per user. Some people may not find it worth the price though, since it doesn't add much to the basic features.
You only get the ability to co-edit slides with other people, create your own asset library, and add your company theme.
The good news is that Beautiful.ai now offers a free trial so you can explore the app before you commit to a paid subscription. You'll need to input your banking details so make sure to cancel before the trial ends to avoid getting charged.
Gamma
Gamma offers two subscription plans: Gamma Plus at $10 a month and Gamma Pro for $20 a month. The catch is that only Plus users get access to the latest AI models. Pro users are restricted to older models, which can result in lower-quality presentations.
You can try Gamma for free by signing up for an account. You'll receive 400 AI credits with no credit card required.
Keep in mind that every AI action will consume credits. For example, generating a full deck costs 40 credits, so use them wisely.
What's Missing
Beautiful.ai and Gamma subscriptions lock you into one tool. If you want to use AI for other things, like inside Google Docs, you'll have to pay for a separate app.
With Plus AI, you get two AI tools for the price of one. For just $15 to $25 a month depending on your plan, you get both an AI presentation maker in Google Slides and an AI writing assistant in Google Docs.
What Customers Say About Beautiful.ai and Gamma
Here's what customers have to say about Beautiful.ai:
- I personally struggle with adding too much text to my presentations. 🥲 I spend literally hours trying to strike the right balance between text and visuals, but this new feature has made that process so much faster. I'm now able to focus on my message and let the software do the rest, which has saved me a lot of time and frustration. Thank you DesignerBot! 🤘
- It was ok, the AI piece was minimal, helped with some formatting and picture placement. Not noticeably easier to use than MS Powerpoint or Google Slides. Average.
- Lack of customization, customer support - limited images that support a corporate setting. AI capabilities are completely useless - it’s the same content/ layout over and over.
- I use this tool for both work and school; it's excellent at pulling together beautiful presentations without worrying about the small formating details that can be frustrating on PowerPoint.
Check out what users have to say about Gamma:
- I love this product! I use it for all of my work presentations and it's even helpful to organize my personal life. Docs / presentations have been time killers for years for me. No longer!
- I think for me the biggest issue has been formatting text and utilising the text space optimally as Gamma still lacks some of the core functionality that you’ll find in Google Slides or similar (text spacing etc)
- Gamma is a presentation wizard! It's like having a design-savvy AI sidekick that elevates my presentations to a whole new level. The text-to-presentation feature is a game-changer, making my life so much easier. It's become my go-to tool for wowing my audience, and I can't imagine going back to the old ways.
- Would like to see a few more themes as the ones at present are virtually identical but different colours.
Beautiful.ai vs. Gamma: Which Is Best For You?
At this point, we hope you have a better idea of how each tool works and what it offers. Here's a summary to help you decide:
- If you want slides with amazing visuals and don't mind writing your own content, choose Beautiful.ai.
- If you want to create more than slides and need a versatile tool for various content types, choose Gamma.
- If you want to use AI in Google Slides or PowerPoint, consider Plus AI as an alternative.
Ultimately, the best choice depends on your specific needs, workflow, and the type of presentations you typically create. Sign up for the free trials of each tool to see which one fits best with your work style and requirements!
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