Battle of the AI-Powered PowerPoint Replacers: Voxdeck vs. Gamma
AI-first presentation tools like Voxdeck and Gamma promise to move beyond PowerPoint’s limitations by combining speed, interactivity, and professional design. For SMEs, they open the door to creating big-budget looking decks without big-budget teams.
- AI presentation tools turn words into finished decks in a matter of minutes.
- Pairing these tools with LLMs like ChatGPT maximizes impact, turning raw research into sharp narratives
- For SMEs, AI presentation builders level the playing field, letting small teams look as polished as large corporations
You have 30 minutes. Make the presentation as good as possible!
Most of us are having heart palpitations right now, reliving work situation with similar unrealistic requests.
For decades, the only real option has been turning to PowerPoint, which, for all its ubiquity, is hardly loved.
Even Microsoft’s Copilot features, impressive on paper, don’t fundamentally change the fact that PowerPoint is a formatting tool first, and a storytelling tool second.
Now, Voxdeck and Gamma, a couple of AI-powered presentation builders, look like they may want to take on the incumbent.
But are they worthy contenders? How do they differ? And which may be better for me?
Those were some of the questions I approached them with for a test of their abilities and performance.
Why PowerPoint + Copilot = meh
The truth is, even with Copilot baked in, PowerPoint is still an unwieldy tool for most.
Yes, it can churn out suggested outlines and offer up generic bullets, but still struggles with anything beyond the most basic design or storytelling input. It was built to put words and shapes on slides, not to think about story arcs. That’s part of the reason why even the best Copilot suggestions end up feeling shallow.
Then there is the need to spend hours shaping the flow, rewrite and design the slides. So, there seems to be good room for contenders to take on the incumbent.
Introducing the Contenders
Introducing the Contenders
Welcome to two challengers.
Voxdeck is the independent showman, with promises of interactive visuals and 3D charts. It’s designed for moments when you need to grab attention and hold it.
Gamma is the speedster, excelling at clean formats and strong, card-based visuals.
Both tools are part of a broader trend: moving away from “PowerPoint with AI bolted on” and starting with AI first, then presentation.
While they target the same pain point—how to get from idea to deck faster—the experiences they create are very different.
I tested both solutions on two specific tasks. One was creating an overview of about demographic shifts and their economic consequences. The second was an analysis of Denmark’s economic performance and financial projections.
A closer look at Voxdeck
Watching Voxdeck work is mesmerising. It codes your individual slides as you watch, and the results are impressive. For both tasks presented, Voxdeck presented a full deck of slides in under ten minutes.
What stood out immediately was the visual interactivity. Voxdeck’s charts give weight and clarity to numbers, making otherwise dry statistics feel more compelling. As you hover over each part, you can see connections to other data points and more.
The downsides are real, though. Voxdeck does not currently allow export into other than PDF, making collaboration and further edits a bit tricky.
Source traceability is another issue: both Gamma and Voxdeck generate visuals tied to data, but it isn’t always clear where that data originated. For anyone working in research or consulting, that can be a stumbling block.
Up close and personal with Gamma
The first thing that popped into my head with Gamma was the Roadrunner cartoon. It is that fast at generating slides.
Design-wise, Gamma leans toward minimalism and then lets you add more features after the presentation has been generated.
On the flip side, Gamma tends to lean heavily on clearly AI-generated imagery, which can look overly artificial in professional contexts. While export options are broader than Voxdeck—PDF, PowerPoint, Google Slides, and even image exports—the formatting isn’t always seamless.
Use Cases for SMEs and startups
For small and medium-sized businesses, both solutions have immediate application opportunities.
For one thing, most SMEs operate without dedicated design teams, which means presentation tools have to pull double duty: they need to be fast, but they also need to look professional enough for external audiences.
Another upside is the ability to generate presentation mock-ups in mere minutes and ad hoc presentations is the need arises in internal or client-facing moments.
Some of the places I would go with Voxdeck would be pitching a new service, unveiling a product roadmap, or trying to close an investor meeting, the ability to stand out with interactive visuals can make a difference. Even a modest team can look like they’ve invested in high-end design.
Gamma, on the other hand, can be a lifesaver for the grind of day-to-day communication. Weekly progress updates, project reports, and quick internal training sessions all benefit from its speed. You can draft, polish, and present in less than an hour, keeping your team moving without bogging down in formatting. For startups juggling time and resources, that efficiency is gold.
There is plenty of overlap between them, so your decision can be down to a question of temperament. What should be less up for debate is using them in connection with LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude.
Supercharging with ChatGPT
Neither Voxdeck nor Gamma excel at two essential parts of presentations: research and deciding how to tell your story.
That’s where LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude become a secret weapon.
Instead of starting with a blank page, I have found that the best results often come from using LLMs to carry out the research, generate an outline, and even script slide-by-slide narratives before going on to either platform.
Here’s how that workflow could look:
- Ask ChatGPT to research and summarize key facts on your topic, report, pitch, and more with sources included.
- Prompt it to shape a narrative arc: One way it to use the classic Hook → Problem → Evidence → Solution → Case study → Next steps framework.
- Refine the content into short, punchy bullets and add suggestions for visuals.
- Feed that into Voxdeck or Gamma, letting the AI platforms handle the layout.
In my experience, Voxdeck and Gamma are at their best when given high-quality, structured input, which this type of process enables.
Time for a change?
So, to get to morale of this story: I think that PowerPoint, even with Copilot, is still PowerPoint: a tool for filling slides, not for telling stories.
Voxdeck and Gamma can give you other abilities. Sure, if you are major corporation, you likely have a bunch of standardised decks where you can plug in pretty much any information you want to. You also have interns and junior staff.
Smaller companies and startups have neither, and that is one of the reasons why I think that Voxdeck and Gamm provides even small teams the ability to look like big-budget operators.
The smartest play is not about choosing one over the other, but how you combined them with other tools like LLMs to power them both with sharper stories and stronger research.
Because at the end of the day, slides don’t persuade—stories do. And the right combination of tools can help you tell them better.