This isn’t just another tech review, it is a real-time test from someone who speaks 50+ times per year and needs to create presentations that WOW my audience without spending days to create each presentation. In the past, I have used PowerPoint for my presentations, but recently I have been using an AI-powered PowerPoint alternative to create my presentations. Here is my Gamma App review from my professional speaker’s perspective and that of my Captain Time persona, who is obsessed with saving time.
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The PowerPoint Problem
We’ve all heard of “Death by PowerPoint” and had to sit through agonizing presentations of slide after slide of walls of text with hard-to-understand charts. This isn’t PowerPoint’s fault. When a slideshow presentation is created by a talented graphic designer and the content is written by a professional copywriter, the slides will look amazing, and the content will have a powerful punch. PowerPoint is very capable of delivering amazing keynote presentations.
But most of us aren’t graphic designers or professional copywriters, and we may not have the budget or time to bring in these talents on every slide show. Even companies with large budgets only use graphic designers and copywriters for important events like AGMs or product launches, so most internal presentations have to be done by poor saps like us without these skills. But we still need to create great presentations to impress our management team, colleagues, investors, stakeholders, and the public even without these skills. So, we plod along, trying to find useful templates and doing the best we could, until Gamma App came along.
PowerPoint Alternative: Gamma App
For many of us, AI has been a game-changer. AI has been my research assistant, my copywriter, my marketing assistant, my social media manager, my financial analyst, and much more, saving me many hours every week. And now, with Gamma, it has become my assistant for creating presentations.
What is Gamma App?
Gamma App is an AI-powered presentation tool. It works entirely in your browser, so there are no downloads required. You can generate a new presentation from a one-line AI prompt, paste in text, notes, an outline, or existing content, import a file or a URL, or generate a presentation from a template. No matter how you start the presentation generation, it will be created in just a few minutes. When I demonstrate this live, people in the audience are blown away. See the video above for an example of this.
Gamma not only does presentations, but also documents and webpages. Gamma saves me 2-5 hours of work for EACH presentation I do.
Gamma Features
When adding your prompt, you choose whether you want a:
- presentation
- webpage
- document
- or social message
You can also choose how many cards (slides) you want. You can choose to have Gamma AI create classic-style slides, which creates slides with editable text, images, and layout blocks. Once your presentation is created, you can also ask AI to create additional slides based on a prompt. You can edit the graphics to create new AI graphics, or upload stock photos or images from your hard drive. You can edit each slide manually, just like with PowerPoint or by asking Gamma AI for changes. You can also choose a Studio option where every card is a single image with embedded text that you can only edit with AI. The designs are responsive so they will look good on any device.
By default, the slides are fluid, meaning they change size based on the content, but you can choose to lock the cards to a 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio.
Gamma also quickly researches and creates:
- Charts
- Infographics
- Timelines
- Diagrams
You can also share your presentations online with a sharing link, or export as pdf, PowerPoint, Google Slides, or PNG images, or embed the presentation into your website using an embed code created by Gamma. Or you can collaborate with others and control whether they can just view, comment or edit.
Presenting with Gamma
Like PowerPoint, Gamma lets you present in a browser tab, in full screen, or with a presenter view. My remote presentation tool works with Gamma, allowing me to move slides forward with a click. One caution – you will need to have an Internet connection to present directly from Gamma. As a backup, I usually export a copy of Gamma as a PowerPoint, but you need to check the PowerPoint version as some fonts and alignment on slides may be lost when exporting.
How I use Gamma Today
Originally, I was using Gamma as a PowerPoint alternative, but its ease of use and capabilities soon had me expanding my use cases. Here are some of the expanded ways I use Gamma:
- Presentations
- Proposals
- Training
- Pitch decks
- Portfolios
- Client testimonials
- Case studies
- Client onboarding
- Online courses and more
Gamma’s ability to be shared with a live link or by exporting to PDF is brilliant for sharing proposals and other marketing assets.
Gamma App Pricing
As of the time of writing this article, here is how Gamma pricing works for individuals:
- Free: Limited to 10 cards per prompt – Gamma branding
- Plus: $10 per seat per month – up to 20 cards per prompt – 400 credits for premium features
- Pro: $25 per seat per month – up to 60 cards per prompt – 1,000 monthly credits
- Ultra: $100 per seat per month – Up to 75 cards per prompt – 4,000 monthly credits
The premium credits are used for Agent, Premium AI models and API access. A nice thing about the premium credits is that they roll over up to 2x for the months you don’t use all your credits. Like most subscriptions, you save when paying annually. I am using the individual Pro plan which works very well for my needs as a professional speaker – $25 per month or $216 per year ($18/month equivalent). Given how many hours Gamma saves me in a month, the $25 per month monthly subscription rate pays for itself with just 1 presentation per month.
Captain Time’s Gamma App Review Rating as a PowerPoint Alternative
Gamma App Pros and Cons
While Gamma is amazing and well worth purchasing in my mind, no tool is perfect. Here are some pros and cons of Gamma.
Pros
- Create presentations in a fraction of the time
- Multiple AI image modes to work with
- Easy to share and export
- Stunning AI custom slide creation
- Mobile-responsive
- Easy to collaborate
Cons
- No offline mode
- No ability to set the presentation to loop and run in a kiosk mode in PowerPoint
- Can’t set the overall context for AI, so you have to include it in every prompt
To compensate for the lack of an offline mode in Gamma, I export to PowerPoint, but sometimes have to do extra work to correct some slide fonts and alignment. In my mind, this is a key missing feature that would make Gamma near perfect. Also, for some of my workshops, I like to have a slideshow running in the background. With Gamma, you can’t set automatic transitions or loop a presentation to run until you hit [Esc]. Once again, I have to export as PowerPoint to use my presentation that way.
If Gamma had offline and the ability to loop presentations, I would rate it 5/5. But, I highly recommend Gamma as a PowerPoint alternative because of all the time it saves me as a professional speaker. You can try Gamma out here.