Pros & Cons

If you feel that linear slideshows are remnants of a bygone era, Prezi’s free-flowing, video-first presentations should appeal as a modern alternative. The platform enables anyone, regardless of skill level, to easily craft compelling materials, thanks to its large variety of accessible templates and customization options. Nothing else quite offers the same combination of features as Prezi, though high-end plans can get pricey, and there's no in-app chat functionality. Prezi now falls short of our Editors' Choice winners for office suites, Google Workplace and Microsoft 365, which include the AI-centric and more collaboration-friendly Slides and PowerPoint, along with plenty of other productivity apps.

Pricing: A Good Value, But Plans Can Still Get Expensive

You can use Prezi for free, but premium plans unlock more features. A 14-day trial of any premium plan requires a payment method.

Prezi’s free Basic plan lets you make graphics, presentations, and video presentations, as well as gives you limited access to AI features by way of 500 monthly AI credits. This tier might be sufficient if you only need to make a quick graphic or presentation once in a while, but its significant limitations make it hard to recommend for any serious use. For example, the free plan lacks analytics, image background removal, presentation recording, presentation voice-over, video presentation downloads, watermark-free video presentations, and much more. You can also create only five projects with the free plan.

Prezi’s Standard plan ($7 per month, billed annually) introduces image background removal, an image editor, a larger library of images for creating graphics and presentations, and more. You can also make an unlimited number of projects. However, the Standard plan also has many limitations. Presentations still have watermarks, for example, and you can't make HD-quality video presentations. AI features continue to cost credits, of which you get just 500.

Prezi’s Plus plan ($19 per month, billed annually) adds a wide range of features, including graphic downloads, HD-quality video presentations, offline recording, a presenter view, unlimited use of AI features, watermark removal, and more. Although the Plus tier is much more expensive than the Standard tier, it also offers significantly more features.

Prezi’s Premium plan ($29 per month, billed annually) is aimed at professionals. A subscription unlocks specialty features like analytics, phone support, and SQL connectors. Unless you’re in serious need of one of the relatively few features exclusive to the Premium plan, Plus is a much better value. For this review, I tested the Premium version.

If you’re an educator or student, Prezi offers a variety of affordable, targeted plans. For example, the introductory EDU Plus plan ($4 per month, billed annually) matches the regular Plus plan. However, you need a valid school email address to sign up. Organizations should consider the Teams plan ($39 per user per month, billed annually), which unlocks brand kit creation, commenting, Slack integration, and more. Notably, the Teams plan is the only one that allows for more than two collaborators and folders.

Prezi’s closest competitor is Microsoft PowerPoint, which you can use online for free with a Microsoft account. Just keep in mind that you need a Microsoft 365 subscription ($99 per year, billed annually) to access Copilot features or use the desktop version of the app. Prezi has many features that PowerPoint doesn’t, but Microsoft 365 includes an entire suite of office apps beyond PowerPoint, so it’s difficult to directly compare the two. Microsoft 365 doesn't impose any collaboration restrictions, however.

Apple Keynote and Google Slides can't match Prezi’s exhaustive feature list, but they’re free and likely more than sufficient for most people. Apple Keynote stands out for its elegant effects, while Google Slides makes collaboration and sharing extremely simple. Prezi still occupies a unique space in the market, but it's only worth it if you often need to create non-traditional presentations.

What’s New in Prezi?

By far the biggest change to Prezi is the introduction of Prezi AI, a suite of AI features. The headline feature is the ability to create entire presentations from prompts. For example, I asked for a Prezi review presentation. It quickly came up with an adjustable outline. Once I gave it the go-ahead to make the full presentation, it did so without issue. Inevitably, results are fairly generic, so you need to expand and tweak them before professional use.

You can also generate images with AI to add to your presentations. After you write out a prompt, choose a style, and select an aspect ratio, Prezi generates your image in about 10 seconds. Alternatively, you can turn text into an animated story, flow chart, visual list, or zoom-to-frame slide with the click of a button. Similarly, you can use AI to make text longer or shorter, simplify it, or turn it into bullet points. All of these features work as expected, but whether they’re useful depends on your needs.

If you plan to make regular use of Prezi AI, you need to at least pay for the Plus plan. As mentioned, Prezi’s free and Standard plans include just 500 AI credits per month, and they disappear quickly. Making a presentation with AI takes 150 credits, for example, so neither of those plans is sufficient if you intend to generate more than three presentations in a given month. Meanwhile, Prezi’s Plus plan doesn't limit your use of AI features.

Presentations, Videos, and Graphics: Deep Customization and Robust Functionality

Prezi is an online service, so it works directly in your browser. All your work saves automatically to the company's cloud. The main Prezi app is also available as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, and there is a separate app for creating video presentations. The former requires a paid account, but the latter is free. You can also download the Prezi Viewer app on mobile (Android and iOS).

The three core parts of Prezi—presentations, video presentations, and graphics—work together seamlessly. In testing, I used Prezi to create an infographic to represent each of its core elements, which I added to a presentation I created with Prezi AI. Then, I used Prezi to record a video of me presenting my slideshow.

Prezi Presentations

The most fundamental component of Prezi is its presentations, which feature Prezi’s trademark zooming effect. In Prezi, you don’t create simple slideshows like in PowerPoint. Instead, you create a canvas on which you can zoom in and out of different sections with subsections. As you present, zooming in and out to different sections is much less linear and static than transitioning between slides in a traditional PowerPoint presentation.

You can start with a blank canvas to create something complex, but if you're a beginner, I suggest starting with a template or using AI to create the bones of your presentation. Then, you can add and edit slides to your heart’s content. New slides automatically use the same design elements and colors.

As with PowerPoint, you can add elements such as graphs, tables, and lists, among others, to Prezi presentations, which it calls Story blocks. Think of Story blocks as visual elements that allow you to add context and display information in your presentation. Story blocks go further than you might expect. You can add animated timelines, animated world maps, process flows, and more. Story blocks aren’t static, either. You can edit their animations, style, and transition effects to make them unique. Aside from Story blocks, you can add audio, charts, GIFs, icons, images, PDFs, stickers, videos, or even PowerPoint slideshows to a Prezi presentation. It's possible to adjust slide colors and change their backgrounds, too.

Once your presentation is ready, you can present it right from the browser. Presenting Prezi presentations works like a regular slide deck; use your keyboard’s arrow keys or your mouse to flip between elements. You can use the Presenter View to keep track of time and your notes during your presentation.

Altogether, it took me only a few minutes to whip together a basic presentation, complete with a variety of elements beyond mere text. The process went especially quickly when I started with Prezi AI or from a template. Of course, longer presentations that cover complex information will take more time to create.

Conveniently, Prezi allows you to export presentations as PDF or PPTX files. You can also record a video of your presentation within Prezi. So, even though Prezi itself requires an internet connection, it’s easy to take your presentations offline.

Prezi Video Presentations

You can create video presentations from scratch with Prezi, or turn your Prezi presentations into videos, in which Prezi removes the background and inserts your video feed in its place. Prezi calls this Transparent mode. As you go through a video presentation, you can swap to Full mode to display a slide with its original background whenever something important comes up that viewers need to focus on.

This is a clever way to create video presentations, but you still need to design them with video in mind. For example, the presentations I created in testing are packed with graphics and text, which completely overpower a video feed background. If you want your face to remain visible, you need to leave enough space on your slides to do so. If you don’t need your face in a video presentation, Prezi lets you create presentations where you record your screen as you present and just provide narration.

Alongside Prezi presentations, you can turn PowerPoint presentations into video presentations. However, this functionality is nowhere near as seamless as starting with a Prezi presentation. For example, Prezi can’t remove the background of a PowerPoint presentation, so entire slides become transparent in Transparent mode. This can work in a pinch or if you use Prezi’s Floating mode to shrink slides so they appear next to your face, but it’s far from the ideal way to present.

Via Prezi’s desktop app, you can present on video conferencing apps, such as GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Webex, among others. Prezi provides instructions within the app on how to get everything working. If you want a video presentation longer than 15 minutes and without a watermark, you need at least Prezi’s Plus plan.

Prezi Infographics

Outside of making presentations and turning them into videos, you can make graphics for your presentations. You can start from scratch or use a template, of which Prezi has a huge number, ranging from charts to social media posts, email headers, and YouTube thumbnails. Chances are, Prezi has a template that meets your needs.

Prezi’s editor has a ton of features. You can add and edit maps, graphics (flags, GIFs, icons, images, and stickers), shapes, text, and videos, alongside a host of visual elements (callouts, diagrams, flowcharts, galleries, icon blocks, image blocks, lists, notes, plans, and timelines) and more. You can further customize your graphics with animations, colors, fonts, and more. Once you make a graphic, you can download it in a variety of formats.

Prezi doesn’t have the depth of dedicated graphic design software, such as Adobe Illustrator or even Canva, but its tools are more than powerful enough to make compelling graphics for a presentation. Making graphics with Prezi is also incredibly straightforward; it takes only a few minutes to create most things.

Collaboration: No In-App Chat

Prezi offers a couple of sharing features. Live Prezi lets you create a link for a live presentation that you can send to anyone on the web. Still, you might prefer to present through Prezi’s video conferencing integrations. Keep in mind that Live Prezi requires at least a Prezi Plus subscription.

You can also create links to presentations for others to view or work on with you. Anyone with a link can view a presentation, and anyone with a free Prezi account can collaborate on it with you. This works seamlessly, and you can see (as designated by initials) which element of a presentation a collaborator is currently interacting with.

On the other hand, Prezi doesn’t have a chat function or an easy way to track changes or version history, even though it does have redo and undo functions. Furthermore, you can make comments or collaborate with more than two people only if you sign up for Prezi Teams. These limitations disappoint when other apps, such as Google Slides and PowerPoint, don’t limit collaborators and support chatting.

Privacy and Security: Is Your Data Safe With Prezi?

Prezi’s privacy policy is straightforward. The company collects account information, information you share with it, payment information, support information, and survey information, and reserves the right to access or collect any content you make public. If you create anything on Prezi that isn’t publicly accessible, you own that content.

I couldn't find evidence of any major hacks or leaks related to Prezi in recent memory, which is always good to see. If you’re looking for more security, Prezi offers single sign-on support for its Teams plan, but it doesn't support multi-factor authentication (MFA). While Prezi doesn’t give you much reason to worry about sharing information with it, its lack of MFA support is disappointing.

Final Thoughts

(Credit: Prezi)

Prezi

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Prezi

Pros & Cons

Pricing: A Good Value, But Plans Can Still Get Expensive

What’s New in Prezi?