In today's world of expanding communication needs, high-quality presentations are more important than ever. Luckily, these two AI tools are giving users the ability to generate captivating presentations like never before.

Platforms like Gamma and Canva are reshaping the presentation landscape by automating steps in the creation process with advanced AI features, allowing users to bring dynamic slide decks to life in a few clicks.

However, as more tools emerge on the market, AI presentation comparisons are vital to best understand which one suits your needs.

In this article, we’ll compare Gamma vs Canva across three key areas:

1. Usability
2. Presentation design
3. Features

All of these areas are important aspects of any AI presentation tool, and as a creator, you should consider each area when deciding which AI presentation tool you want to use.

Check out Gamma and Canva yourself.

ROUND #1: THE USER EXPERIENCE

Ease of use	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Skills required	No design experience required	No design experience required
Requires a lot of editing	✅ No	❌ Yes
Step-by-step guide	✅ Yes	❌ No
In-app editor	✅ Yes	✅ Yes

Question: Which presentation software is easiest to use?

Both AI presentation tools are very easy to use, but they differ in look and feel.

Gamma is geared more towards straight forward presentation generation with AI prompting, while Canva serves as more of an all around design tool. With that being said, Canva still has fantastic AI features that make it a good one-stop-shop for presentations.

For producing your presentation, Gamma begins with an AI prompt. With Canva, you won't see a clear AI prompt box at the beginning, but you'll quickly find that all its options guide you to AI features.

Both Gamma and Canva produce high-quality AI presentations in just a few steps, and also give users plenty of editing and customization options.

Below, we will dive a little deeper into each tool by focusing on two key areas of the user experience.

• Creating a presentation
• Ease of use

Creating a presentation with Gamma

To begin, Gamma gives users the ability to paste in text, generate from a prompt, or import a file or URL.

Most of the customization is done at the start of the presentation. Gamma allows users to dictate the length, tone and style of the slide deck.

Conveniently, both platforms allow users to edit the presentation once it is produced.

Here’s how Gamma looks from a user point of view.

Gamma offers a highly reliable creation experience, which is essential for presenters. During our month-long testing, we rarely experienced any technical issues.

Creating a presentation with Canva

At first, the presentation section in Canva may look more familiar to PowerPoint or an image design tool, but when you open the search bar in design editor, it acts as an AI prompt generator.

This is where you can describe the topic and details of the slide deck you want to automate.

In fact, Canva has a whole suite of "Magic" AI tools like Magic Design, Magic Write and more, which allow users to generate AI presentations in multiple ways - including uploading docs and files.

Being able to create a presentation from a file is essential for users, and both tools offer this functionality.

We'll touch more on Canva's features later, but you can also check its ease of use in this helpful video.

How easy is it to create a presentation with Gamma?

Gamma has proven to maintain a very efficient interface for creating a presentation.

Ultimately, you will prefer the AI to handle most of the heavy lifting, allowing you to add the finishing touches at the end.

So for users who are approaching this and wanting a high-quality presentation with minimal customization at the end - we recommend Gamma.

Gamma and Canva both emphasize keeping the presentation creation process simple and straightforward, but Canva gives users more points to stop and edit.

First, let's look at the slide interface of Gamma.

Seeing as Gamma and Canva both have simple editing suites, it's hard to choose which one is better. Those looking for ultimate simplicity will prefer Gamma, but if you like to design more on your own, go with Canva.

We all know simplicity is key to a great user experience, so if your goal is to create a quick yet high-quality presentation, you'll want to see how Gamma compares to Canva.

How easy is it to create a presentation with Canva?

Canva has a great user experience, keeping it simple while providing a ton of editing options along the way.

Below you can see the interface for editing your presentation with Canva. You have familiar editing tools on the left hand side.

The editing tools are pretty expansive, including everything from AI generated images to thousands of templates and elements that you can add to your presentation.

It's quite easy to edit and customize by clicking directly on elements in the slides or by exploring features in the editor. You can also change the template theme or re-write slides with AI anytime.

The interface is visually appealing and functional, but some users may find the amount of options overwhelming compared to the simplicity of Gamma.

Therefore, the rating of Canva's usability will lean heavily toward users looking for a streamlined experience vs. expansive customization options.

Which platform has the best user experience?

Our AI presentation comparison shows Canva is ideal for anyone who likes to play with designs and explore editing options. It can generate high-quality presentations, but there isn't as much AI guidance and prompting at the start.

This gives Gamma a slight edge in user experience, mainly due to its straight forward AI prompting approach.

Therefore, round 1 goes to Gamma.

ROUND #2: PRESENTATION DESIGN

Variety of designs	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Color schemes offered	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Professional design	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Number of templates	15+	1,000+

Question: Which presentation software has the best designs?

Gamma and Canva both offer great pre-designed templates for users to choose from. The designs are sleek, professional and easy to apply.

Gamma's designs come out looking modern and visually appealing, while Canva's designs are also high-quality and seemingly limitless.

If you're in search of Gamma alternatives with clean and expansive design options, Canva's ample templates are ideal for creating polished presentations quickly.

In this section, we will show you the templates offered with each platform.

Gamma template examples

Gamma has over 15 templates - which is hard to compete with Canva's selection of over a thousand.

Yet, Gamma's templates look good and offer different styles to users, e.g. dark, light or professional.

Additionally, Gamma offers many variations on their templates, and also produces high-quality graphics and images on slides.

Gamma does offer users the ability to create their own theme based off some brand guidelines, but the feature can hit or miss.

Canva template examples

Canva offers thousands of templates that are constantly updating, allowing users to take advantage of any design they can imagine.

Each template contains different layouts, colors and slide types. This is a considerably wide range for an AI presentation tool across various themes and use cases.

Canva's variety means users are sure to find a template that suits their needs - from pitch decks to brand guides.

Which platform has the best presentation designs?

For users who want more options and creative control, Canva takes the lead. However, for those looking for a streamlined selection of templates that offer simplicity without sacrificing professionalism, Gamma delivers solid design options with less effort.

Overall, it's close, but round 2 goes to Canva due its immense amount of templates and AI design editing tools.

ROUND #3: FEATURES

Speak with files	❌ No	✅ Yes
Summarize files with AI	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Create presentations with AI	✅ Yes	✅ Yes

Question: Which platform is best for creating presentations with AI?

At this point, it is clear that both tools can create high quality PowerPoint presentations with AI.

Each AI presentation tool requires a fair amount of user edits, but Gamma produces high level content in less steps.

Crucially, this round looks at the AI features behind Gamma and Canva's ability to create presentations from prompts and file uploads.

Let’s begin with Gamma and explore their features.

Creating a presentation with Gamma

As we have mentioned, Gamma allows users to create website pages and documents as well as presentations.

The process still remains the same- you input an AI prompt and then select your theme. Gamma will then create cards that display the relevant information.

Designing web pages is an excellent feature and the design interface is still the same, so you can create custom elements and cards.

But for this comparison, we are focusing on the ability to create a PowerPoint presentation.

Gamma allows users to import files, however you can't really enhance them. You cannot get answers from the file or refine the content you really want out of it.

Here we can see that I uploaded a 2023 Uber financial earnings document.

The AI produced a text summary as well as a card by card summary of the information, although the layout presented was quite messy and didn’t feel too user-friendly.

The overall result was quite a bit better than the preview. So even if you think the preview isn't looking good, Gamma will usually deliver a good end result.

Creating a presentation with Canva

As we have shown, Canva allows users to create presentations using the AI prompt box in the search bar. But you can also upload a file using Canva's Docs to Decks feature.

Starting at the home page, when you click the upload icon and choose a file, Canva will direct you to Docs to Decks or Magic Switch - these are part of Canva's Magic suite.

I started by uploading a Word file to convert to a presentation. Canva immediately generated different presentation designs to choose from.

Here are the resulting presentations generated from a Word document uploaded about climate graphs.

Since some of Canva's AI features are new, you may notice some awkward formatting or text errors, but it's easy to make any change you want afterward.

It's worth noting that Canva includes the ability to add AI avatars. You will likely need to link an account with HeyGen or another AI avatar generator, but being able to sync with Canva is a really cool feature.

Additionally, Canva does allow users to upload PDFs and transform them in many ways, but the AI doesn't necessarily generate a new design.

When it comes to converting PDFs to presentations, Canva is oriented a bit more towards a manual experience vs. a brand new AI presentation.

Which platform has the best features?

Our AI presentation comparison has shown that both tools generate quality slide decks, but they approach it differently.

Canva is great for those who like to design, edit and explore. It offers more features and more templates than Gamma, but its sheer amount of options might be a bit much for those looking to generate a presentation quickly.

If your main objective is to generate AI presentations quickly and efficiently, Gamma has the edge. Gamma has a simple and straightforward process that generates presentations from scratch, AI prompts, and documents.

While Canva deserves recognition for its suite of advanced features, Gamma is the winner when it comes to the most efficient AI presentation generator.

So, if you’re looking for a solid alternative to Canva, Gamma is the way to go.

Try Gamma now!