Introduction
You’re probably reading this article because you are evaluating Beautiful.ai and Slides AI as two tools to help you generate slides and presentations using AI.
It’s great that you are looking for opportunities to use AI to speed up your workflows, and making better presentations is a great way to take advantage of AI at work and school.
We’ve spent a lot of time evaluating both apps in detail, to help you make a decision on which tool is right for you.
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Beautiful.ai vs. Slides AI at a glance
In case you don’t want to read the whole detailed review, here is a quick summary of how the products compare:
Key Differences between Beautiful.ai and Slides AI
Beautiful.ai calls itself “generative ai presentation software for the workplace.” They emphasize features such as smart templates, auto slide formatting, and team features to make presentations look consistent. And they have a heavy focus on businesses and business users.
Slides AI describes itself as an “AI-powered text to presentation tool.” They emphasize the ability to turn text into slides, along with a set of tools to search for citations, find icons for your slides, import stock images, and rewrite text. Their pricing is more targeted at non-business users with plans that start at $8-10 per user per month.
While both of these tools can create presentations using AI, you might be wondering how “Generative AI presentation software” is different from an “AI-powered text to presentation tool” and which product better suits your needs.
How is generative AI presentation software for the workplace different from being an AI-powered text to presentation tool?
To the average presentation maker, it might sound like Beautiful.ai and SlidesAI are very similar tools, but they are actually quite different.
What is generative AI presentation software for the workplace, and how does Beautiful.ai fit into this category?
Presentation software is software that allows you to create slide decks. The most common presentation software that people use today is PowerPoint and Google Slides. These tools allow you to combine text, images, charts, and other graphics into slide layouts that are easy to present. Generative AI presentation software is a new category of software that uses AI to help users create presentations.
The evolution of Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai was founded in 2015, as a new type of presentation software to compete with PowerPoint and Google Slides. Instead of asking users to drag text boxes and shapes around to create slides, they decided to simplify the design process to make it easier to build slides.
Over the last few years, they have evolved and added generative AI into their tool, so customers can use their “DesignerBot” to create new slides and presentations using AI.
What is an AI-powered text to presentation tool, and how does Slides AI fit into this category?
In contrast to Beautiful.ai, Slides AI does not offer its own presentation software. Rather, they allow users to create presentations inside of Google Slides. This means you do not need to use a separate app to create your presentations using AI, and you can continue using all of the features of Google Slides.
The evolution of Slides AI
Slides AI was founded in 2023 and grew with the AI boom around tools like ChatGPT. Their primary product was a tool that allowed users to turn text prompts into presentations. Rather than retrofitting their presentation software with AI, they built an add-on for Google Slides that allowed users to output their AI presentations in Google Slides.
Since their initial launch, they have added more features to their product, both AI features and other workflow tools to help users make presentations faster.
How to choose between Beautiful.ai and Slides AI
Here are the most important factors you should consider when choosing between Beautiful.ai and Slides AI:
- Compatibility: Do you want to use a standalone app like Beautiful.ai or continue using Google Slides with the Slides AI add-on?
- AI quality: Which tool creates higher quality AI outputs from a content and design perspective?
- Customization: Which tool meets your needs for branding and customization?
- Collaboration: Which tool is better for collaborating with coworkers and customers?
- Pricing: Which tool offers pricing that works for me?
Evaluating Beautiful.ai and Slides AI: a feature-by-feature comparison
Compatibility
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is a standalone app, so instead of creating presentations in PowerPoint or Google Slides, you will need to create your presentation in Beautiful.ai and export them if you need to share them with someone.You will also have to learn features for creating and editing presentations because the functions are not the same as Google Slides and PowerPoint.
Slides AI
Slides AI is a Google Slides add-on, so it works right inside of Google Slides, and you can continue using Slides AI slides like they are a normal presentation. Unfortunately because it is an add-on, it is not as easy to edit existing slides as Beautiful.ai, which has its own presentation software.
What’s missing
Because Beautiful.ai is not directly compatible with Google Slides, it’s hard to work with existing slides, and you have to create your current slides from scratch to use the AI features. If you are looking for a way to use AI on pre-existing Google Slides, Plus AI offers a slide library to help you reformat and transform existing slides into branded slides that are customized with your brand colors and logo.
AI quality
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai’s AI presentation functionality is called “DesignerBot,” and it lives in a separate part of the tool from the core presentation editor. It feels like it was added to the product at a later point in time, but it produces relatively high quality outputs using the Beautiful.ai slide templates. The text generally feels like it matches the slide layout, and the content makes sense.
Slides AI
SlidesAI allows you to generate a presentation from a text prompt or a document. The overall output from the AI is very basic. Generally, every slide follows the same structure of three bullet points, but they do not feel contextual with the slide, and the layouts seem to be selected randomly, rather than based on the content of the slide.
What’s missing
Ideally you want to find a product with high-quality AI that integrates into your existing workflow, so there is not a separation between the AI steps and the non-AI steps.
Plus AI was built to be your AI copilot at each step of the presentation workflow. It starts with generating presentation outlines, continues with AI tips to improve your presentation, and a set of AI tools you can use to reformat your slides, insert new slides, and rewrite slides.
Customization
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai offers several ways to customize the look and feel of your slides, from uploading logos to selecting the colors you’d like.
Slides AI
Slides AI has a basic theme editor that allows you to choose the colors of your presentation and a logo.
What’s missing
Many organizations would prefer to minimize the number of “slide templates” and applications their teams use, but they need to produce content that is on brand and compatible with their existing workflows.
Plus AI allows enterprise customers to upload custom branded templates, so there is no need to change the way they work in order to adopt AI in their presentations. They also offer a self-service theme designer for customers who want to customize their slides.
Collaboration
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai has several team features like shared slide and template libraries, the ability to collaborate on presentations together, and team billing. However, Beautiful.ai typically introduces more friction into the presentation collaboration process because someone needs to ask other team members to begin using a new tool.
Slides AI
Slides AI makes it relatively easy to collaborate with people because Slides AI presentations are shareable as Google Slides links. However, collaborators are not able to access the same AI features.
What’s missing
Most people are too busy to sign up for new tools and learn how to use new features all of the time, and they would prefer to just stick with their existing tools. The best of both worlds here is the ability to collaborate using Google Slides but retain all of the AI functionality.
Plus AI lets you create custom AI instructions and branded templates that can be shared with your team to let people who use Plus to leverage all of the AI features while making presentations 100% compatible and accessible for executives and customers who just want to keep using Google Slides.
Pricing
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is an expensive monthly subscription oriented towards businesses at $45-50 per user per month. Note: It looks like they offer a $12 per month plan, but that is billed annually at $144 or monthly at $45 per month.
Slides AI
Slides AI is one of the cheaper AI presentation tools, with monthly plans starting at $10-20 per user per month. Note of caution: Users on Google Workspace report it is very difficult to cancel their Slides AI subscriptions.
What’s missing
If you’re looking for a tool to help with AI presentations, you probably use AI for other tasks as well. These monthly subscriptions can quickly add up if you need a lot of different tools.
Instead of paying for an AI writing tool, an AI presentation tool, and AI tools for everything else, take a look at Plus AI, which includes an AI presentation maker for Google Slides and an AI writing tool for Google Docs for one price ($15-25 per month).
What customers say about Beautiful.ai and Slides AI
Here’s what customers say about Beautiful.ai:
- “Templates make it easy to create great looking slides… [but] occasionally you want to nudge something and the template does not allow for that”
- “When you just need a slide deck quick, it is great…. [but] no option to tune things”
- “It has made my life so much easier in terms of making slides… [but] I didn’t like the way slides are converted to PowerPoint. The fonts don’t match up, also every little thing in Beautiful.ai is converted as a shape, like bullet point”
Here’s what customers say about Slides AI:
- “It's very useful and helpful when you are busy with something else and you also gotta make a presentation. But they should definitely increase the free plan usage limit.”
- “I have been trying to cancel this subscription for 4 months still getting charged and no return email. Very frustrated please cancel.”
- “It's trash, and they won't let me cancel the subscription. I tried twice now and been charged twice…”
- “This is completely useless. It creates very basic slides which are of no use. No matter what the wording is, it generates the same pattern.”
Beautiful.ai vs. Slides AI: Which is best for you?
The bottom line if you are choosing between Beautiful.ai and Slides AI is you should choose the one that fits your use case:
- If you just want to try out one presentation, and you would rather not learn how to use a new tool, Slides AI is probably cheaper and easier to get started.
- If you are looking for a full PowerPoint or Google Slides replacement with AI features, Beautiful.ai has many of the business-focused features to create and edit presentations.
- If you want to keep using Google Slides, but you want the latest AI tools and features, try Plus AI.
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