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Unlock Your Creativity: Make a Free Slideshow with These Easy Tips

Are you looking to showcase your photos or videos in a fun and dynamic way? Creating a slideshow is the perfect solution. Whether it’s for personal use or business presentations, a slideshow can captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression. And the best part? You don’t need to spend a dime to make a stunning slideshow. In this article, we’ll explore some easy tips on how to make a free slideshow that will unlock your creativity.

Choose the Right Platform

To begin your journey of making a free slideshow, it’s important to choose the right platform. There are several options available, each offering unique features and functionalities. One popular choice is Google Slides, which allows you to create and collaborate on slideshows online. Another option is Microsoft PowerPoint Online, which offers similar capabilities as its desktop counterpart.

If you’re looking for more advanced features and customization options, consider using software like OpenShot or Shotcut. These free video editing tools allow you to create professional-looking slideshows with transitions, effects, and even audio tracks. Whichever platform you choose, make sure it aligns with your needs and technical abilities.

Gather Your Content

The next step in creating an impressive slideshow is gathering your content. Collect all the photos or videos you want to include in your presentation. If you have specific themes or narratives in mind, organize your content accordingly. This will help streamline the creation process and ensure that your slideshow flows seamlessly from one slide to another.

Additionally, consider using high-resolution images or videos for optimal visual quality – especially if you plan on projecting your slideshow onto a larger screen. Remember that clear visuals can significantly enhance the overall impact of your presentation.

Add Captivating Visual Effects

Now that you have your content ready, it’s time to add captivating visual effects to make your slideshow stand out. Most free slideshow platforms offer a variety of transition effects, such as fades, slides, and dissolves. Experiment with different transitions to find the ones that best complement your content and create a smooth flow between slides.

Furthermore, consider adding animations or motion effects to specific elements within your slides. This can bring your slideshow to life and engage your audience on a deeper level. However, be cautious not to overwhelm your viewers with excessive animations – simplicity often works best when it comes to creating an impactful slideshow.

Polish Your Presentation with Audio

To take your free slideshow to the next level, consider adding audio elements. Background music or sound effects can enhance the overall ambiance of your presentation and evoke specific emotions in your audience. Many free slideshow platforms allow you to upload audio files directly into your presentation, giving you complete control over the auditory experience.

When selecting audio for your slideshow, ensure that it aligns with the tone and message you want to convey. Avoid using copyrighted music without proper permission or licensing – instead, opt for royalty-free tracks available on websites like YouTube Audio Library or Free Music Archive. This way, you can add a professional touch without infringing on any legal rights.

Creating a free slideshow doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. By choosing the right platform, gathering compelling content, adding captivating visual effects, and polishing it off with audio elements, you can unlock your creativity and make a stunning presentation that will leave a lasting impression on your audience. So go ahead – dive into the world of free slideshows and let your imagination soar.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

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The best presentation software in 2023

These powerpoint alternatives go beyond the basics..

The latest presentation apps have made it easier than ever to format slides and create professional-looking slideshows without giving off a "this is a template" vibe. Even standard PowerPoint alternatives have updated key features to make it easier than ever to collaborate and create presentations quickly, so you can spend more time prepping for your actual presentation.

If, like me, you've been using Google Slides unquestioningly for years, it's a whole new world out there. The newest crop of online presentation tools go way beyond the classic slideshow experience, with new features to keep your audience's attention, streamline the creation process with AI, and turn slide decks into videos and interactive conversations.

I've been testing these apps for the past few years, and this time, I spent several days tinkering with the top presentation software solutions out there to bring you the best of the best.

The best presentation software

Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design

Prezi for non-linear, conversational presentations

Powtoon for video presentations

Genially for interactive, presenter-less presentations

Pitch for collaborating with your team on presentations

Zoho Show for a simple presentation app

Gamma for generative AI features

What makes the best presentation app?

How we evaluate and test apps.

All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog .

When looking for the best presentation apps, I wanted utility players. After all, slideshows are used for just about everything, from pitch decks and product launches to class lectures and church sermons. With that in mind, here's what I was looking for:

Pre-built templates. The best presentation tools should have attractive, professional-looking templates to build presentations in a hurry.

Sharing and collaboration options. Whether you plan to share your webinar slides later, or you just want to collaborate with a coworker on a presentation, it should be easy to share files and collaborate in real-time.

Flexibility and customization options. Templates are great, but top presentation apps should enable you to customize just about everything—giving you the flexibility to build exactly what you need.

Affordability. Creating compelling presentations is important, but you shouldn't have to bust your budget to make it happen. With capable free tools on the market, affordability is a top consideration.

Standalone functionality. There's no reason to use multiple tools when one can do it all, so I didn't test any apps that require and work on top of another presentation app like PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Familiar, deck-based UI. For our purposes here, I only tested software that uses slides, with the familiar deck-based editor you expect from a "presentation" tool (versus, for example, a video creation app).

While many apps now offer AI features in one way or another, I found many of these features to be lacking still—they're often slow, struggle to pull in relevant imagery, and yield wildly inconsistent designs. For that reason, I opted not to make AI features a strict requirement (for now!), and I've still included apps that don't offer AI. (Of course, if you opt for one of those, you can still easily get AI-generated images from a separate tool and copy them into your presentation app of choice.)

Beyond that, I also looked for presentation apps that brought something unique to the table—features above and beyond what you can get for free from a legacy solution like PowerPoint or Google Slides. (And I opted not to test any brand new apps that are still in beta, since there are so many established options out there.)

Here's what my testing workflow looked like:

I went through any onboarding or guided tutorials.

I created a new deck, scanning through all available templates, noting how well-designed they were (and which were free versus paid).

I added new slides, deleted slides, edited text and images, and played around with other content types.

I changed presentation design settings, like color schemes and background images.

I reviewed and tested the sharing and collaboration options.

I tested out presenter view (when available).

After my first round of testing, I went back into the top performers to test any unique or niche features like AI, brand settings, interactive content, and more. With that, these are the best presentation apps I found—each one really brings something different or radically easy to the table.

The best presentation software: at a glance

The best free presentation software, canva (web, windows, mac, android, ios).

Canva pros:

Excellent free plan

Tons of amazing templates for all use cases

Feature-rich

Canva cons:

The Magic Design AI tool is still inconsistent and not super impressive

Canva offers one of the most robust free plans of all the presentation apps I tested. The app delays account creation until after you've created your first design, so you can get started building your presentation in seconds. Choose from an almost overwhelming number of beautiful templates (nearly all available for free), including those designed specifically for education or business use cases.

Anyone who's accidentally scrolled too far and been bumped to the next slide will appreciate Canva's editor interface, which eliminates that problem altogether with a smooth scroll that doesn't jump around. Choose from a handful of preset animations to add life to your presentations, or browse the library of audio and video files available to add. And Canva also has a number of options for sharing your presentation, including adding collaborators to your team, sharing directly to social media, and even via QR code.

Present directly from Canva, and let audience members submit their questions via Canva Live. Once you share a link to invite audience members to your presentation, they can send questions for you to answer. As the presenter, you'll see them pop up in your presenter view window, so you can keep the audience engaged and your presentation clear. Alternatively, record a presentation with a talking head bubble—you can even use an AI presenter here—to share remotely.

Canvas has added a number of AI-powered tools , but I wasn't super impressed by them yet. When I asked the Magic Design tool to generate a presentation from scratch, for example, the result was a bunch of unrelated images, inconsistent design, and surface-level copy. These features will likely improve in time, but for now, you're better off starting from one of Canva's many great templates.

Canva pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $119.99/year for 1 user and include additional features like Brand Kit, premium templates and stock assets, and additional AI-powered design tools.

The best presentation app for AI-powered design

Beautiful.ai (web, mac, windows).

Beautiful.ai pros:

True AI design

No fussing around with alignment

Still allows for customization

Beautiful.ai cons:

No free plan

Generative AI features aren't great yet

If you're like me, editing granular spacing issues is the absolute worst part of building a presentation. Beautiful.ai uses artificial intelligence to take a lot of the hassle and granular design requirements out of the presentation process, so you can focus on the content of a presentation without sacrificing professional design. If I needed to make presentations on a regular basis, this is the app I'd use.

Many apps have recently added AI design features, but Beautiful.ai has been doing it for years—and they've perfected the UX of AI design, ensuring the tool's reign as the most streamlined and user-friendly option for AI design.

The editor is a little different from most presentation apps, but it's still intuitive—and you'll start off with a quick two-minute tutorial. When creating a new slide, scroll through "inspiration slides" to find a layout you like; once you choose, the app will pull the layout and automatically adapt it to match the design of the rest of your presentation.

With 10 themes, several templated slides, over 40 fully-designed templates, and 23 different color palettes to choose from, Beautiful.ai strikes a perfect balance between automation and customization.

While Beautiful.ai doesn't offer a free plan, paid plans are reasonably priced and offer sharing and collaboration options that rival collab-focused apps like Google Slides. And speaking of Google, you can connect Beautiful.ai with Google Drive to save all your presentations there.

Note: I did test the newly released generative AI feature (called DesignerBot) and felt it wasn't much to write home about. It's great for adding individual slides to an existing presentation—automatically choosing the best layout and matching the design to the rest of the deck—but as with most other apps, it struggled to generate a quality presentation from scratch.

Beautiful.ai pricing: Plans start at $12/month for unlimited slides, AI content generation, viewer analytics, and more. Upgrade to a Team plan for $40/user/month to get extra collaboration and workspace features and custom brand controls.

If you're a founder looking for an AI presentation tool for your pitch deck, Slidebean is a great Beautiful.ai alternative for startups. The app offers a number of templates; a unique, content-first outline editor; and AI design help that you can toggle on or off for each slide. I didn't include it on the list mainly because of the price: the free plan is quite limited, and the paid all-access plan starts at $228/year.

The best presentation app for conversational presentations

Prezi (web, mac, windows, ios, android).

Prezi pros:

Doesn't restrict you to standard presentation structure

Lots of customization options

Prezi Video lets you display a presentation right over your webcam video

Prezi cons:

Steep learning curve

Struggling to squeeze information into a basic, linear presentation? Give Prezi a try. Unlike nearly all other presentation apps on the market, Prezi Present doesn't restrict the structure of your presentation to a straight line. The editor focuses on topics and subtopics and allows you to arrange them any way you want, so you can create a more conversational flow of information.

With the structural flexibility, you still get all the same customization features you expect from top presentation software, including fully-editable templates. There's a learning curve if you're unfamiliar with non-linear presentations, but templates offer a great jumping-off point, and Prezi's editor does a good job of making the process more approachable.

Plus, Prezi comes with two other apps: Prezi Design and Prezi Video. Prezi Video helps you take remote presentations to a new level. You can record a video where the presentation elements are displayed right over your webcam feed. Record and save the video to share later, or connect with your video conferencing tool of choice (including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet) to present live.

Prezi pricing: Free 14-day trial and a free plan that includes up to 5 visual projects; paid plans start at $5/month and include additional features like private presentations and Prezi Present.

The best presentation app for video presentations

Powtoon (web, ios, android).

Powtoon pros:

Timing automatically changes based on the content on the slide

Can toggle between slideshow and video

Can orient presentation as horizontal, vertical, or square

Powtoon cons:

Limited free plan

Powtoon makes it easy to create engaging videos by orienting the editor around a slide deck. Editing a Powtoon feels just like editing a presentation, but by the time you finish, you have a professional video. 

You can edit your slides at any time, and when you hit play, a video plays through your deck—the feel is almost like an animated explainer video. Each slide includes the animations you choose and takes up as much time as is needed based on the content on the slide. Powtoon figures the timing automatically, and you can see in the bottom-right of the editor how much time is used on your current slide versus the total presentation. If you ever want to present as a slide deck, just toggle between Slideshow and Movie.

You'll likely need to subscribe to a paid plan to get the most out of Powtoon—like creating videos longer than three minutes, downloading them as MP4 files, and white-labeling your presentations—but doing so won't break the bank. Plus, you'll unlock tons of templates complete with animations and soundtracks.

One of my favorite Powtoon features is the ability to orient your video: you can choose horizontal orientation (like a normal presentation) or opt for vertical (for mobile) or square (for social media). When your presentation is ready, you can publish straight to YouTube, Wistia, Facebook Ads, and any number of other locations.

Powtoon pricing: Limited free plan available; paid plans start at $20/month and include white-labeling, priority support, additional storage, and more.

The best presentation app for interactive presentations

Genially (web).

Genially pros:

Don't need a presenter (it's interactive)

You can set universal branding guidelines

Unlimited creations on the free plan

Genially cons:

Free plan has some limitations worth looking into (e.g., can only make public presentations)

While many presentation apps are built for presenter-led decks, Genially 's interactive features and animated templates make it easy to build a self-led presentation. A variety of interactive buttons allow you to show viewers additional context on hover, have them skip to any page of your deck, and let them navigate to external links.

This presentation program offers a bunch of searchable templates, including some for business proposals, reports, social media presentations, and more (though most of those are available on premium plans only). Genially also includes Smart blocks —templated blocks of content for elements like data visualizations and image galleries.

My favorite feature is the brand settings. Premium users can set universal branding guidelines that include your logo, color scheme, fonts, images, and backgrounds, among other options. Think of them like a custom template, created and customized by you, that the whole team can use. Once set, your team can easily create on-brand presentations that automatically apply your brand settings, without even thinking about it.

Plus, Genially supports additional content like training materials, infographics, and interactive images—all subject to your brand presets.

Genially pricing: Free plan available with unlimited creations and views and access to templates; paid plans start at $7.49/month and include additional download options, privacy controls, offline viewing, premium templates, and more.

The best presentation app for collaborating with your team

Pitch (web, mac, windows, ios, android).

Pitch pros:

Google levels of collaboration

Assign slides to specific team members

Start live video calls straight from decks

Pitch cons:

User interface is a little different than you're used to

Need to collaborate on presentations with your team? Pitch is a Google Slides alternative that gets the job done. As far as decks go, Pitch includes all the beautifully-designed templates, customizability, and ease of use you expect from a top-notch presentation tool. But the app really shines when you add your team.

The right-hand sidebar is all about project management and collaboration: you can set and update the status of your deck, assign entire presentations or individual slides to team members, plus comment, react, or add notes. Save custom templates to make future presentations even easier and faster.

You can also invite collaborators from outside your company to work with you on individual decks. And if you opt for a paid plan, Pitch introduces workspace roles, shared private folders, and version history.

The "Go live" feature is a personal favorite—with just a click on the camera icon in the top-right, you can start a live video call. Any team members who open the presentation can hop in and collaborate in real-time. 

Pitch pricing: Free plan offers unlimited presentations, custom templates, and live video collaboration; paid plans start at $8/user/month for additional workspace features, presentation analytics, and more.

The best simple presentation app

Zoho show (web, ios, android, chrome).

Zoho Show pros:

Simple and easy to use

Version history and ability to lock slides

Completely free

Zoho Show cons:

Templates are pretty basic

If you're looking for a simple, yet capable presentation app that's a step up from Google Slides, Zoho Show is a great option. It's completely free to use, offers a clean, intuitive editor, and includes a number of great templates.

While the handful of "Themes" offered are on the basic side, Zoho templates boast a more modern and professional design than much of what Google Slides or PowerPoint offer. And I love that you can set the font and color scheme for the whole template, right from the start.

The app doesn't skimp on collaboration or shareability either. You can invite collaborators via email or shareable link, and comments and version history make it easy to work together on presentations. Once you're ready to share, you can even broadcast your presentation to a remote audience right from within Zoho. Plus, you can one-click lock slides to prevent any more editing or hide individual slides to customize your presentation for different audiences.

You can even connect Zoho Show to Zapier , so you can do things like automatically create a presentation when something happens in one of the other apps you use most.

Zapier is the leader in no-code automation—integrating with 6,000+ apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more .

Zoho Show pricing: Free

The best presentation app for generative AI

Gamma (web).

Gamma pros:

Creates fully fleshed-out presentations from a prompt

Chatbot-like experience

Can still manually edit the presentation

Gamma cons:

Not as much granular customization

I tested a lot of apps claiming to use AI to up your presentation game, and Gamma 's generative features were head and shoulders above the crowd.

Simply give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document or article—approve the outline, and pick a theme. The app will take it from there and create a fully fleshed-out presentation. It's far from perfect, but Gamma produced the most useful jumping-off point of all the AI presentation apps I tested. 

Here's the key: Gamma is much more geared toward the iterative, chatbot experience familiar to ChatGPT users. Click on the Edit with AI button at the top of the right-hand menu to open the chat, and you'll see suggested prompts—or you can type in your own requests for how Gamma should alter the presentation.

Once you've done all you can with prompts, simply close the chat box to manually add the finishing touches. While you do sacrifice some granular customizability in exchange for the AI features, you can still choose your visual theme, change slide layouts, format text, and add any images, videos, or even app and web content.

Gamma pricing: Free plan includes unlimited users, 1 custom theme, 400 AI deck credits, and basic view analytics; upgrade to the Pro plan ("coming soon," as of this writing) for $10/user/month to get additional AI credits, advanced view analytics, custom fonts, and more.

What about the old standbys?

You might notice a few major presentation players aren't on this list, including OGs Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides. These apps are perfectly adequate for creating basic presentations, and they're free if you have a Windows or Mac device or a Google account.

I didn't include them on the list because the presentation space has really developed in the last several years, and after testing them out, I found these behemoths haven't kept pace. If they weren't made by Microsoft/Apple/Google, I might not even be mentioning them. They're pretty basic tools, they're behind the curve when it comes to templates (both quantity and design), and they don't offer any uniquely valuable features like robust team collaboration, branding controls, video, and so on.

Some of these companies (think: Microsoft and Google) are openly working on some pretty impressive-sounding AI features, but they haven't been widely released to the public yet. Rest assured, I'm watching this space, and the next time we update this article, I'll retest tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides to see what new features are available.

In any case, if you're reading this, you're probably looking for an alternative that allows you to move away from one of the big 3, and as the presentation platforms featured above show, there's a ton to gain—in terms of features, usability, and more—when you do.

Related reading:

8 Canva AI tools to improve your design workflow

The best online whiteboards for collaboration

How to share a presentation on Zoom without sharing your browser tabs and address bar

This post was originally published in October 2014 and has since been updated with contributions from Danny Schreiber, Matthew Guay, Andrew Kunesh, and Krystina Martinez. The most recent update was in May 2023.

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Kiera Abbamonte

Kiera’s a content writer who helps SaaS and eCommerce companies connect with customers and reach new audiences. Located in Boston, MA, she loves cinnamon coffee and a good baseball game. Catch up with her on Twitter @Kieraabbamonte.

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12 Interactive Presentation Software and Tools for 2023

Table of Contents

When you create a presentation, you want your audience to be engaged, to learn something new, to get excited, etc. But in the era of smart toasters and mobile phones in watches (wristphones), traditional linear PowerPoint presentations have lost almost all of their effect. Luckily, progress isn’t just about making once innovative things old-fashioned, it is also (and rather) about development. In the case of presentations, the development is interactivity.

What Is an Interactive Presentation?

It’s a presentation that has some content objects that you can interact with: hotspots, navigation, pop-up boxes, animations, etc. This feature helps grab the learners’ attention and keep the audience engaged.

We’ve collected the 12 best presentation software. Choose the one that works best for you and takes your student learning experience to the next level.

Comparison Chart

1. ispring suite: “a fast authoring toolkit”.

Rating: 4.7/5 – 319 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

iSpring Suite is an interactive presentation maker that lets you design engaging courses on your own or in a team, quickly and easily. It works as a PowerPoint add-in that provides tons of robust options. To make a truly interactive presentation, you can add role-play simulations, timed quizzes , screencasts, and video lectures. The tool even allows you to create video presentations by combining slides with a presenter video. You can use an existing PowerPoint presentation as a starting point and enhance it with iSpring tools or build one from scratch.

Also read:   The Ultimate Guide to Lecture Capture

To make your learning content even more visually engaging, you can create interactions. There is a set of ready-made templates that can present your content as a timeline, cyclic process, catalog, or FAQ, as well as many other options.

To save time and effort, you can use Content Library, with its more than 89,000 eLearning assets such as backgrounds, icons, and characters, that will help bring creative ideas to life. If none of the characters in the Content Library suit you, don’t worry because you can create your own in a matter of minutes. Choose the hairstyle, clothing, and accessories, set the pose and background, and your unique character is ready to interact with learners.

iSpring Suite also has an online space for teamwork and collaboration called iSpring Space. With this, users can build simple courses and knowledge checks directly in a browser, and work with colleagues on eLearning content in the cloud. Just send a course link to your colleagues, and they’ll be able to edit texts and polish the appearance of the course.

Even if you don’t get along with computers, you’ll find iSpring Suite easy to use. Just install the program, open it, and you’ll see the iSpring Suite tab on the ribbon of the PowerPoint interface. From there, you can access all the features of the software, and you won’t have to leave PowerPoint to use one or another feature. For example, unlike some other tools, you can record a screencast and synchronize it with the slides – all in one program.

iSpring Space is also extremely intuitive. All you need to do to start designing content with its tools is to create an account.

The courses you build with iSpring Suite are viewed in a player with customizable color schemes and work perfectly on any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile. You can either publish your presentation in HTML5, or upload it to any LMS because iSpring Suite supports all eLearning standards: SCORM 1.2/2004 , cmi5, xAPI , and AICC.

The courses you design with iSpring Space can be published to an LMS too. This web-based authoring tool supports SCORM and xAPI.

iSpring Suite is the best choice for small and medium businesses that need to create versatile digital learning content. It is especially great for creators who prefer teamwork and may need extended sharing options. Schools and universities might also find this tool ideal, as there are many features, such as video presentations, that make the studying process extremely engaging and effective.

Get a free trial→

How to Create an Interactive Presentation with iSpring Suite

To get started, download the iSpring Suite free trial and install it on your computer. Then, open a presentation you would like to make interactive and go to the new iSpring Suite tab in the PowerPoint ribbon. 

We’ll show you three ways to make your presentation more interactive with iSpring Suite and explain each one step by step.

Add an interaction

2. Click New Interaction in the pop-up window and select from 14 ready-made templates to present steps, timelines, and processes, or create a glossary or a FAQ. Then fill out the template with text and images.

3. Once your interaction is ready, click on Save and Return to Course .

1. To create an interactive quiz or a survey, select Quiz on the iSpring Suite toolbar.

2. Click on Graded Quiz in a pop-up window if you want to create a knowledge assessment, and choose from 14 quiz templates, including multiple-choice, true or false, sequence, and fill-in-the-blanks.

3. Type in your question and answer options.

To make the question clearer, you can add images, audio, and video to the slide.

4. When the quiz is ready, click Save and Return to Course on the toolbar.

Create an interactive role-play

You can simulate a customer service scenario and engage your audience in an interactive role-play. For example, to improve their communication skills, you can illustrate how to behave in a particular conversation.  

1. To create a new role-play, first, click the Role-Play button on the toolbar.

2. In a pop-up window, choose New Role-play and then click on the New Scene button.

3. Choose a character and a background from iSpring’s Content Library.

4. Enter the character’s expressions and possible replies. Then, simply connect each reply with a new scene.

You can also add voice-overs to make the conversation more realistic and engaging.

5. When the role-play is complete, click Save and Return to Course on the toolbar.

This is how to make a presentation interactive with iSpring. When you’ve finished the presentation, you can save it in HTML5 format to share it on the Web or as a SCORM file to upload it to any LMS.

Also read:  14 Types of Quiz Questions to Use in Your eLearning Course

                       How to Convert PowerPoint to MP4 Video on Windows & macOS

2. Nearpod: “Empowering Teachers, Inspiring Students”

Rating: 4.6/5 – 85 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Nearpod is one of the interactive presentation tools available to teachers and the educational sphere. With this software, teachers can build an interactive slideshow for an online lesson, share it with students, and monitor learner results. There are some very nice unique features, such as the ability to insert assessments into a video and thereby save the flow of the presentation or the integration with Zoom. With the latter, you can combine your interactive slideshow with an ongoing Zoom lesson, boosting overall student engagement and the effectiveness of the educational process.

Create your educational content, then log in to the Nearpod website, upload it there, and add interactive activities such as polls, memory tests, embedded videos, or quizzes. You can share your ready-made presentation with your students by sending them an access code via email, shortlink, or social media.

Presentations for classroom, distance, and hybrid lessons.

Nearpod is the best interactive presentation tool for schools, especially for distance learning.

3. Prezi: “The Most Dynamic and Engaging Presentations Ever”

Rating: 4.2/5 – 4,879 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Prezi is is one of the best online presentation tools around. Prezi Present lets you design animated content and present it over video footage. With Prezi Design, you can create all kinds of graphics, animate objects, filter images, and, on top of all this, edit your presentation the way you like.

You can create your digital presentation from a blank canvas, or use pre-designed templates from a library. If you have some ready-made PowerPoint slides, you can import those as well. When you’ve finished editing your presentation with Prezi, you can convert it into video format and use it during your speech or a webinar on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and others.

Web-ready dynamic presentations.

Prezi is the best interactive presentation program for businesses that have a creative approach. It might also be handy for marketing or sales teams as a sales presentation platform or a pitch deck creation tool because it lets you track who views the presentation and what most interests them.

4. Mentimeter: “Everybody is Heard”

Rating: 4.5/5 – 39 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Mentimeter  is an online presentation software. With this software, you can add quizzes and real-time voting to gather data, and add images and GIFs to make your presentation engaging.

Mentimeter is a cloud-based tool, meaning all you need to do to start working with it is sign up. Create presentations using templates and themes, quizzes with 13 question types, and insert images and GIFs from integrated free stock images and GIF libraries. Once your presentation is ready, just share a link with your audience.

Well-designed interactive online presentations with real-time response and data analysis.

Mentimeter is one of the best audience engagement tools for gathering feedback-based statistics at companies, schools, and universities.

5. ClassFlow: “Teaching With a Modern Touch”

Rating: 4/5 – 9 reviews ( Common Sense )

ClassFlow is a free cloud-based lesson delivery software that lets you design presentations and gauge your students’ knowledge. ClassFlow is useful for both in-person and distance learning.

To start building lessons, designing tests, and managing your classes, you need to create an account. Once you do this, all the features, such as interactive widgets, tests, and flashcards, become more available. You can use them to create presentations and then share them with your students.

In-class, online, or hybrid presentations that provide real-time statistics and can leverage a reward and badge system.

ClassFlow is free presentation software for schools and universities that don’t have a big budget but are eager to enhance their classes and keep their students engaged.

6. SlideDog: “Freedom to Present”

Rating: 4/5 – 13 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

SlideDog is an interactive presentation tool with which you can combine PowerPoint and Prezi slides, PDF files, video files, web pages, and more, into a single seamless presentation.

To create a multimedia presentation, the first thing you need to do is to drag files into a playlist pane. This will be your playback order. SlideDog doesn’t just let you combine files from other programs but also offers some interactions such as questionnaires or live chat with the audience. You can create them with this presentation software, add them to the playlist, and share your presentation.

A quality presentation that includes files in their original formats.

SlideDog is the best presentation software for people who organize meetings, conferences, and other events that involve several speakers with individual materials of different formats.

7. FlowVella: “Apple Application Creation Made Easy”

Rating: 4/5 – 4 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

FlowVella is a presentation tool for Apple devices. This software enables you to have a video, an image, text, and more, all together on one slide. FlowVella urges the user to leave traditional linear slides in the past and helps to build an engaging interactive user experience.

Download this presentation app, open it, and either start building your presentation from scratch or choose one of the ready-made templates. Easily add files of different formats with a drag-and-drop interface. Once your project is ready, save it on your device. When you need to share the presentation, upload it to the cloud and send its unique URL to your audience.

Interactive online presentations that support smart gestures such as tapping, swiping, and zooming objects.

FlowVella is one of the best interactive presentation apps for exhibitors who need to create content to arrange iPad-based kiosks for events.

8. IntuiFace: “Create Amazing Multi-Touch Applications”

Rating: 4.7/5 – 23 reviews ( Capterra )

Intuiface is a powerful tool that converts all your media into interactive content for mobile devices and multi-touch displays. Being a really complex and multifunctional program, Intuiface is an easy-to-use option for people with any level of coding skills, because it is not you who does all the mathematical job of implementing interactivity in your presentation, but the program itself.

You can start creating your presentation using pre-built templates, by importing from PowerPoint, or from a blank canvas. Perhaps, it’s better to start with a pre-built template to understand all the basics. Just choose the appropriate template, drag content objects and drop them onto the scene, and try interacting with the project. Once you get to know all the features that Intuiface provides, it will be simple to create a quality presentation using advanced options that can add even more interactivity to your content.

Presentations with media are automatically responsive to tap, swipe, and other touchscreen gestures that are available on any device.

Intuiface is the best interactive presentation software for those who want to create a “wow effect” on a multi-touch screen at exhibitions, conferences, and other events.

9. Visme: “Translate boring data into beautiful visuals”

Rating: 4.6/5 – 157 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Visme is a cloud-based tool that allows you to create interactive presentations, visualize data, and design infographics, reports, charts, and banners for websites and social media.

There are a good number of ready-made customizable templates that are divided into 4 categories: Presentations, Infographics, Banner, and Custom projects. Choose the appropriate category and select any of the templates you wish. Add interactivity by embedding polls, quizzes, video files, and more. The ready-made presentation can be shared via a link, embedded into a website, or downloaded as a picture or a PDF document.

Visually beautiful interactive presentations that can be created with minimal effort and shared both online and offline.

This is one of the best tools for educators, presenters, and communicators, especially those who prefer using ready-made templates to reduce creation time. It’s also perfect for those who usually work in a team because Visme lets you organize the project data into folders and provide role-based permissions.

10. Pear Deck

Rating: 4.4/5 – 28 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Pear Deck is a tool that helps you create incredibly beautiful and interactive PowerPoint presentations (or Google Slides) for your students, track their progress in real time, and let them answer questions anonymously so they won’t be afraid to give an incorrect answer and appear silly.

Download and then open the add-in for PowerPoint Online or for Google Slides. Create your interactive lesson from a blank canvas, or use one of the templates provided. You can add different assessments, questions with draggable answers, audio, images, videos, and more. Once the presentation is ready, launch it with Pear Deck.

A high-quality interactive presentation with lots of features to engage your students and to have them feel safe during your lessons.

This is the best interactive presentation software for schools, and educators working with children as it makes the creation of presentations simple, thanks to ready-to-go templates.

11. Genially

Rating: 4.8/5 – 16 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Genially is an online platform that lets you convert presentations on any topic and for any audience into extremely interactive and animated content.

Choose one of thousands of templates, or start from a blank canvas. You can fully customize all the templates, add files, add interactivity, and animate objects. The animation in templates is provided automatically, but if you feel like changing it, you can do so freely. When you finish your presentation, you can present it with Genially, or download it in HTML, PDF, and JPEG formats.

Highly interactive and animated presentations that can be embedded to your website, or presented in any way you desire.

Genially is one of the best interactive presentation tools for people from different professional areas who want to achieve audience engagement by presenting content dynamically, beautifully, and in a highly interactive manner.

12. Beautiful.ai

Rating: 4.8/5 – 78 reviews ( G2 Crowd )

Beautiful.ai is an online presentation maker. Although interactive features are limited to just three, Beautiful.ai’s main advantage is the fact that the designing process itself is interactive: you place an image and the software automatically sets the right width and height, so the entire slide looks beautiful. It makes it extremely easy to create and edit presentations, letting you focus on revising your speech instead of fixing the image size, number of charts, etc.

Choose the appropriate template and customize it with your images, audio, texts, and other content objects. Try working in a team and see how simple and entertaining it is on this platform. Share your presentation via a link, or export it to PPT.

Effective good-looking presentations that are easy and fun to create.

This is one of the best software for people who create or edit presentations often and want to spend less time doing that, while maintaining their work at a high level of quality. Beautiful.ai might be too limited for educational purposes, as you are not able to add assessments to your presentations with it, but if you need to pitch or show a strategy, or even teach a lesson without evaluating learners’ progress, Beautiful.ai proves effective.

How We Tested the Best Interactive Presentation Software

To provide you with reliable information on interactive presentation programs, we read through related articles, compared ratings, and signed up for the free versions of presentation makers to test-drive them. We also read customer reviews to see if our impressions of using the specific software align with the experiences of others. In our search for the best presentation software, we focused on identifying the category of users who would benefit most from a specific software solution.

FAQ on Using Interactive Presentation Software

After choosing a suitable software solution from numerous presentation platforms, you might have some practical questions about creating interactive presentations for different uses. In this case, check out a couple of frequently asked questions in that regard.

1. How can I make my presentation interactive?

Whichever interactive presentation software you use, work on them at the levels of text, visuals, and what learners can do with your presentation (such as navigating through slides and triggering certain animations).

Don’t overuse texts and make sure to supplement them with pictures, characters, and backgrounds. If possible, put large texts into a script and record a voice-over for your presentation.

2. How do I make an interactive PowerPoint presentation for eLearning?

A great way to make your presentation interactive and stimulate the audience participation is to use triggered animations. Below are the three examples of triggered animation types that you can make in standard PowerPoint.

• a hidden-object game 
• a jeopardy game
• interactive flashcards

The fastest and most robust way to make an online course out of your presentation is to convert it into one of the eLearning formats, such as SCORM, which will enable you to track how learners take your course and answer quizzes. You can make it in the abovementioned iSpring Suite, in the same PowerPoint interface.

3. What are some other popular PowerPoint alternatives for creating interactive presentations online?

Some popular PowerPoint alternatives that weren’t mentioned in our list are Haiku Deck, Google Slides, and Apple Keynote. These platforms offer great features and templates that will allow you to engage audiences and make presentations more dynamic.

4. How does Google Slides compare to PowerPoint as a presentation tool?

Google Slides is a widely used cloud-based presentation tool that offers many features that are similar to PowerPoint. It allows collaboration in real time, offers a wide range of templates, and supports the insertion of various media elements. One advantage of Google Slides is its seamless integration with other Google services, such as Google Drive. Additionally, Google Slides allows the creation of presentations online — they can be accessed and edited from any device with an internet connection, making it a convenient choice for remote or collaborative work.

Final Thoughts

We hope you found this article helpful and discovered at least one interactive presentation software that you can’t wait to try. If you need to create professional-looking courses containing slides, scenarios, screencasts, and assessments without spending time on training, start with an iSpring Suite 14-day trial and explore all of its features right now.

Fast course authoring toolkit

Create online courses and assessments in record time.

Content creator:

Helga Kolinski

iSpring editor and boots-on-the-ground author. She’s always ready to share in-depth insights on the most hardcore eLearning topics with her readers.

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The HTML Presentation Framework

Created by Hakim El Hattab and contributors

Hello There

reveal.js enables you to create beautiful interactive slide decks using HTML. This presentation will show you examples of what it can do.

Vertical Slides

Slides can be nested inside of each other.

Use the Space key to navigate through all slides.

Basement Level 1

Nested slides are useful for adding additional detail underneath a high level horizontal slide.

Basement Level 2

That's it, time to go back up.

Not a coder? Not a problem. There's a fully-featured visual editor for authoring these, try it out at https://slides.com .

Pretty Code

Code syntax highlighting courtesy of highlight.js .

Even Prettier Animations

Point of view.

Press ESC to enter the slide overview.

Hold down the alt key ( ctrl in Linux) and click on any element to zoom towards it using zoom.js . Click again to zoom back out.

(NOTE: Use ctrl + click in Linux.)

Auto-Animate

Automatically animate matching elements across slides with Auto-Animate .

Touch Optimized

Presentations look great on touch devices, like mobile phones and tablets. Simply swipe through your slides.

Add the r-fit-text class to auto-size text

Hit the next arrow...

... to step through ...

... a fragmented slide.

Fragment Styles

There's different types of fragments, like:

fade-right, up, down, left

fade-in-then-out

fade-in-then-semi-out

Highlight red blue green

Transition Styles

You can select from different transitions, like: None - Fade - Slide - Convex - Concave - Zoom

Slide Backgrounds

Set data-background="#dddddd" on a slide to change the background color. All CSS color formats are supported.

Image Backgrounds

Tiled backgrounds, video backgrounds, ... and gifs, background transitions.

Different background transitions are available via the backgroundTransition option. This one's called "zoom".

You can override background transitions per-slide.

Iframe Backgrounds

Since reveal.js runs on the web, you can easily embed other web content. Try interacting with the page in the background.

Marvelous List

• No order here

Fantastic Ordered List

• One is smaller than...
• Two is smaller than...

Tabular Tables

Clever quotes.

These guys come in two forms, inline: The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from and block:

“For years there has been a theory that millions of monkeys typing at random on millions of typewriters would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The Internet has proven this theory to be untrue.”

Intergalactic Interconnections

You can link between slides internally, like this .

Speaker View

There's a speaker view . It includes a timer, preview of the upcoming slide as well as your speaker notes.

Press the S key to try it out.

Export to PDF

Presentations can be exported to PDF , here's an example:

Global State

Set data-state="something" on a slide and "something" will be added as a class to the document element when the slide is open. This lets you apply broader style changes, like switching the page background.

State Events

Additionally custom events can be triggered on a per slide basis by binding to the data-state name.

Take a Moment

Press B or . on your keyboard to pause the presentation. This is helpful when you're on stage and want to take distracting slides off the screen.

• Right-to-left support
• Extensive JavaScript API
• Auto-progression
• Parallax backgrounds
• Custom keyboard bindings

- Try the online editor - Source code & documentation

Create Stunning Presentations on the Web

reveal.js is an open source HTML presentation framework. It's a tool that enables anyone with a web browser to create fully-featured and beautiful presentations for free.

Presentations made with reveal.js are built on open web technologies. That means anything you can do on the web, you can do in your presentation. Change styles with CSS, include an external web page using an <iframe> or add your own custom behavior using our JavaScript API .

The framework comes with a broad range of features including nested slides , Markdown support , Auto-Animate , PDF export , speaker notes , LaTeX support and syntax highlighted code .

Ready to Get Started?

It only takes a minute to get set up. Learn how to create your first presentation in the installation instructions !

Online Editor

If you want the benefits of reveal.js without having to write HTML or Markdown try https://slides.com . It's a fully-featured visual editor and platform for reveal.js, by the same creator.

Supporting reveal.js

This project was started and is maintained by @hakimel with the help of many contributions from the community . The best way to support the project is to become a paying member of Slides.com —the reveal.js presentation platform that Hakim is building.

Slides.com — the reveal.js presentation editor.

Become a reveal.js pro in the official video course.

Best free presentation software of 2023

Find an alternative to PowerPoint

• The best free presentation software in full

Best overall

Best for speed, best for functionality, best for collaboration, best user interface, how we test.

The best free presentation software makes it simple and easy to create presentations as an alternative to subscribing to Microsoft PowerPoint.

The best free presentation software of 2023 in full 1. Best overall 2. Best for speed 3. Best for functionality 4. Best for collaboration 5. Best user interface 6. FAQs 7. How we test

While PowerPoint is the market leader when it comes to presentation software, some people may be unwilling to subscribe to a Microsoft 365 subscription, especially if they don't expect to need to use it very often.

However, there are plenty of great alternatives to PowerPoint available for free that you can use. While these won't have the same advanced features as PowerPoint, they still offer a very competent platform to design most any presentation that you need.

To help you choose, we've listed below the best free presentation software currently available.

Add images to your presentations using the best free photo editor .

Google Workspace : Collaboration + productivity apps There are many different presentation software packages but Google Workspace formerly known as G Suite remains the original cloud office software and one of the best business office suites, offering a huge range of features and functionality that rivals can't match, especially when it comes to presentation software. Try it free for 14 days .

Get in touch

• Want to find out about commercial or marketing opportunities? Click here
• Out of date info, errors, complaints or broken links? Give us a nudge
• Got a suggestion for a product or service provider? Message us directly

The best free presentation software in full:

Our expert review:

Reasons to buy

Reasons to avoid.

Prezi turns the traditional approach to presentations on its head. Instead of creating slide after slide, this presentation software gives you a single giant canvas. You can add blocks of text or images, or even create miniature slides. During your presentation, you can seamlessly fly around the canvas and zoom in to look at individual chunks of content.

For how complex Prezi seems, it’s impressively simple to use the platform. The only major divergence from Microsoft PowerPoint is that you need to add animated paths from one part of the canvas to another. The tools for this are fairly straightforward, especially if you’ve ever used an animation or video editing software.

Of course, this type of presentation structure isn’t always ideal. Prezi makes it hard to visualize structured data like financials, which can make it difficult to use in business applications. Some viewers also might not appreciate the fly-around animation style that’s inherent to the presentation software.

Read our full Prezi review .

Canva is perfect for making speedy presentations right in your web browser. This software offers a handful of free layouts to help you get your slideshow started, and it’s easy to customize the templates to fit your needs. There isn’t a huge variety of content elements to add to your presentation, but Canva makes up for this with a searchable library of more than 1 million images you can use.

Your Canva presentations live online, which makes it extremely easy to collaborate. You can invite colleagues to edit your slideshow (although simultaneous editing is not supported) or seamlessly share your finished presentation. However, beware that Canva can’t import presentations from Microsoft Powerpoint or export finished work to a Powerpoint-editable format.

Read our full Canva review .

3. LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office, and it includes a Powerpoint equivalent called Impress with nearly all of the same functionality. The only big difference you’ll find between the two slideshow creation tools is the LibreOffice lacks some modern features like built-in collaboration and integration with Microsoft OneDrive.

However, Impress does have a few advantages of its own. The software can import files from Keynote, the default presentation software on Mac computers. Plus, there are hundreds of free templates that you can download for free. Even better, there’s no limit on what fonts you can use with Impress, so it’s easy to change the look of your presentation from what Powerpoint typically allows.

On the whole, LibreOffice Impress is about as close as it gets to simply replicating Microsoft Powerpoint for free.

Read our full LibreOffice review .

4. Google Slides

Google Slides is part of Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), and it does a nice job of matching a number of PowerPoint’s capabilities. This free presentation software supports embedding videos, creating diagrams, and adding animations to your slides. While the selection of templates is somewhat limited, you can easily import hundreds of additional templates for free or create your own.

Even better, Google Slides supports the collaboration tools users have come to expect from Google. Multiple people can work on a slideshow simultaneously, and there’s a built-in group chat so you can keep track of what everyone is doing. It’s also nice that you can play your presentation in presenter mode, which allows you to preview how it will look to your audience and rehearse timing.

The only downside to Google Slides is that bloated slideshows can experience some loading delays. Also beware that while you can move between Slides and Powerpoint, the conversion often messes with the layout of your slides.

Read our full Google Slides review .

5. WPS Office Free

WPS Office Free is a Microsoft Office look-alike that fully support PowerPoint files without any layout issues during import. The WPS Presentation tool has all of the same capabilities of PowerPoint, including tons of animations, slide transitions, content effects, and video embedding. The selection of included presentation templates is also very impressive for a free software.

One of the best things about this presentation software is that the user interface will feel incredibly familiar if you’re coming from Microsoft. All of the tools are displayed in a top ribbon, with your slides shown on the left side of the screen for easy navigation. It’s simple to display your presentation right from WPS Presentation, which means there’s no unexpected troubleshooting when it’s time to show off your work.

There’s not much to dislike about WPS Presentation. However, keep in mind that the software is supported by ads. Some users find the ads annoying, but they’re not overly in the way.

Read our full WPS Office Free review .

We've also featured the best free office software .

Which alternative to PowerPoint is best for you?

When deciding which alternative to PowerPoint to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes free platforms may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a paid platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, free and budget software options can sometimes prove limited when it comes to the variety of tools available, while higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require.

How we tested the best free presentation software

To test for the best free presentation software we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar .  

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Michael Graw is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Bellingham, Washington. His interests span a wide range from business technology to finance to creative media, with a focus on new technology and emerging trends. Michael's work has been published in TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, and Harvard Business Review. 

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