When it comes to using technology for putting forward ideas before a group of people, there’s hardly a medium that’s better than presentations. From educational institutions to corporations, presentations are used everywhere, and that too in a myriad variety of ways. And even though there are quite a few presentation tools available out in the wild, the web based Prezi is one of the most popular among them.
Utilizing a uniquely distinct zooming user interface, Prezi lets you create stunning looking presentations on a virtually unbounded canvas, as opposed to the traditional “slide” based approach. Other features include cloud-saving of presentations, multi-user collaboration, and image editing tools. But as incredible as Prezi is, it’s not the only one.
That’s right, there are numerous Prezi alternatives, both online and desktop based, that you can use to create engaging presentations, and enthrall your audience. So why wait? Get reading, and find out more about them all.
Best Prezi Alternatives: Online Tools
1. Slides
Loaded with tons of features, Slides is a power packed Prezi alternative. Its online editor lets you create presentations having everything from text and images, to tables and code, all of which can be granularly edited. The created presentations (called decks) can either be shared publicly, or made private. You can export presentations for offline viewing, and even broadcast them in real-time. You can also export decks as PDFs, and sync them to Dropbox. Other features include Google Analytics support, forked presentations, revision history, and much more.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $6/month, Free plan available
2. Haiku Deck
If you’re looking for a simple yet impressive Prezi alternative, Haiku Deck is just what you need. It comes with a bunch of templates for creating specific type of presentations, such as Press Releases, Professional Profiles, and Social Media Reports. Not just that, you can access over 40 million Creative Commons images for using in your presentations. You can create multiple presentation decks, and embed playable YouTube videos into them. A unique feature of Haiku Deck is the Zuru (beta), which makes use of artificial intelligence to transform PowerPoint files into amazing presentations. There’s even an iOS app for creating presentations on your iPad or iPhone.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $5/month, Free plan available
3. Emaze
What sets Emaze apart from the rest is its impressive collection of presentation themes/templates, which include 3D zoom animations and video backgrounds. The created presentations can be downloaded both as videos, or as PDF files. For professional and business users, Emaze offers features such as analytics support, customized brand templates, and multi-user collaboration on presentations. Emaze even makes it possible to import your existing PowerPoint presentations, and make them better using the available templates.You can also share the presentations over all popular social networks, and specify access permissions (e.g. view, download) for them granularly.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $9/month with 14 day free trial, Free plan available
4. PowToon Slides
It’s not exactly the easiest to use, but there’s little denying the fact that PowToon Slides is probably one of the most feature-laden Prezi alternative you can find. From marketing/sales to training, and from education to greeting cards, PowToon Slides has hundreds of templates for everything. It lets you add graphs, shapes, audio, video, and a lot more to your presentations. You can specify transition duration and animations for the slides as well. Once created you can directly upload your slides (as videos) to video sharing services like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as download them in multiple formats such as PDF and MP4. The paid level accounts even let you download slideshows as HD videos, and include other features like royalty free music and third party transfer rights. That said, PowToon’s pricing is a bit on the higher side.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $19/month, Free plan available
5. Slidebean
Probably the most distinguishing feature of Slidebean is its extremely detailed templates, which not only include regular elements such as background images, but also content placeholders for a full presentation outline. As an example, a “Company Intro” template will have content fields like About us, What we do, and things like that. You can also add custom elements such as quotes, line charts, tables, and videos to your presentations. Slidebean even lets you search and add Creative Commons images and icons for adding into the presentations. Other powerful features include real-time collaboration, PDF export, and a dedicated account manager.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $8/month, Free plan (limited to creating one presentation) available
Best Prezi Alternatives: Desktop Applications
6. SlideDog
Quite unique in its approach, SlideDog lets you combine different types of elements (PPTs, PDF documents, images, and even Prezi exported presentations) into a seamless multimedia presentation. All the files are displayed as they are, without any conversion or compression of any type. SlideDog also lets you live stream presentations online, which can be viewed in browser. Perhaps the most impressive feature of SlideDog is that it lets you create interactive presentations by adding elements like polls, questions/comments, and feedback, which the viewers can respond to. Then there’s the dual-screen support, which lets the presenter easily control what elements are seen by the audience.
Platform Availability: Windows
Pricing: Paid plans start from $9.90/month, Free plan available
7. Focusky
Boasting an extraordinary set of features, Focusky gives you all the features of Prezi, and then some more. You can use it to create freely zoomable presentations, and slide elements can be rearranged by simply dragging-and-dropping them on the unbounded canvas. There’s a huge plethora of 3D transition effects makes viewing slideshows an immersive experience. From text to music, and from video to layers, there’s nothing that you can’t add to the presentations. You can also download hundreds of online templates, video backgrounds, animated characters. Focusky even lets you encrypt presentations for more security, and the presentations can be exported in a variety of formats (e.g. MP4, EXE), as well as published online. Other features include royalty free vector art, search engine optimization, and voice narration.
Platform Availability: Windows, Mac OS X
Pricing: Paid plans start from $8.33/month, Free plan available
SEE ALSO: 10 Best Online Presentation Tools
Create engaging presentations, even without Prezi!
Immersive presentation tools like Prezi have completely re-invented the whole concept of presentations, changing them from sequential slideshows to engaging visual elements that have a seamless content flow. And as discussed above, Prezi isn’t the only one of its kind that you can use. Try all these alternatives, and let us know your favorites in the comments below.
