Introduction
With over 75,000 startups launching in just the United States alone in 2023, the competition for funding is intense 1. Y Combinator, a leading startup accelerator, has even expanded beyond its traditional summer cohorts to accommodate more startups year-round 2. In this landscape, a strong pitch deck is crucial for standing out and securing investor interest.
This article explores some of the best pitch deck software available for startups in 2024. While PowerPoint and Google Slides remain popular, we focus on more innovative tools that help you create visually impactful, effective presentations that are a cut above the rest.
Key Companies
When evaluating the best tools for creating a compelling pitch deck, we considered several important criteria to help you make an informed decision. We looked at ease of use, ensuring the tools are accessible for users with varying levels of design experience. We also evaluated templates and customization, considering whether each tool offers a variety of professional templates and how easily they can be customized. Other key factors include collaboration features, pricing, and AI capabilities that enhance the presentation design or content creation. Finally, we assessed design quality to ensure the pitch decks produced are visually engaging and memorable.
1. Sonic Slides
Sonic Slides is an innovative pitch deck tool that leverages AI to create dynamic presentations with ease. Unlike other tools, Sonic Slides emphasizes speed and user-friendliness, allowing even those with minimal design experience to create polished, engaging pitch decks in minutes.
Best Features
Text-to-Action AI: The standout feature of Sonic Slides is its "text-to-action" capability. Users can describe the desired content, and Sonic Slides uses AI to generate, format, and refine slides, ensuring everything—from charts to visuals—meets presentation standards without cutting corners on quality. This makes it perfect for startups who want to achieve a refined, professional look without needing design expertise.
Sonic Slides text to translate
Rapid Slide Editing: Sonic Slides also allows users to make edits on the fly, leveraging its AI to adjust slides quickly. Whether you need to swap visuals, update text, or change the structure, the platform makes the entire process efficient, enabling rapid iterations to keep your presentation current.
Sonic Slides Text Prompt Edits
Clean, Easy-to-Use UI: Sonic Slides' interface is designed with simplicity in mind. The clean, intuitive ChatGPT-like UI makes it accessible to users with minimal design experience, providing a smooth and straightforward experience for creating high-quality pitch decks.
2. Slidebean
Slidebean is a pitch deck software that blends AI assistance with a user-friendly interface to help startups create effective investor presentations. Built by a pitch deck design agency, Slidebean is especially tailored for entrepreneurs, offering a tool that focuses on the needs of early-stage startups.
Best Features
AI-Powered Deck Creation: Slidebean offers an AI writing and design wizard, which guides users through creating essential startup collateral. This feature is particularly helpful for first-time founders who need support with both content and design.
Created a whole new deck based on the VC firm Sequoia Capital
Analytics: One standout aspect of Slidebean is its analytics feature, which allows users to track investor engagement. By monitoring which slides have been viewed the most, founders can gather insights into what resonates most with investors.
Slidebean analytics page
Pitch-Specific Templates: Slidebean provides templates specifically designed for startup pitch decks, including iconic decks like Airbnb's. This makes it easy for users to start with a proven structure, ensuring their presentations include all the necessary elements investors expect.
Slidebean template catalogue
3. Visme
Visme is a versatile design tool that offers an easy-to-use platform for creating visually appealing presentations, infographics, and pitch decks. With a focus on accessibility, Visme aims to provide non-designers with the ability to produce polished, professional content.
Best Features
Drag-and-Drop Editor: Visme's simple drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for users with no design experience to create presentations. The platform is intuitive, allowing you to add elements like text, images, charts, and animations seamlessly.
Visme available components to drag and drop on left side
Interactive Data Visualizations: Visme offers over 40 different types of charts and graphs that can be customized or linked to live data through Google Sheets. This makes it a great choice for startups looking to effectively present their key metrics to investors.
Creating a graph in Visme with options to import data
Sleek, Modern Design: Visme's pre-built templates and themes have a modern aesthetic that ensures your pitch deck will look up-to-date and professional. The designs are geared towards creating a visually engaging experience that captures attention.
Visme main slide editing interface
Visme template catalogue
4. Canva
Canva is a versatile design platform that stands out for its simplicity and adaptability. It’s a popular choice for users who need a visually attractive pitch deck without extensive design skills. The platform's ease of use, combined with a wealth of creative tools, makes it ideal for creating polished pitch decks quickly. Canva is often compared to PowerPoint because of its similar focus on presentation design but with a more intuitive, modern interface that appeals to users with limited design experience.
Best Features
AI Features: Some of Canva's suite of AI features includes Magic Write, Magic Resize, and AI Image Generation.
Magic Write: An AI-powered writing assistant that helps generate content quickly and effectively, making it easy to craft compelling slide text without starting from scratch.
Canva magic write for AI generated content
Magic Resize: This feature allows users to instantly resize a design to fit different formats, saving time and ensuring your pitch deck looks great across various devices and screen sizes.
Canva resize tool that uses AI technology
AI Image Generation: Canva also includes AI-powered image generation, which lets users create unique visuals directly within the platform. This helps make pitch decks visually engaging without needing external tools or illustration skills.
Canva magic media to generate AI images
Extensive Media Library: Canva has an extensive built-in library of high-quality images, icons, and other design elements, which helps to create visually appealing slides without the need to source materials elsewhere. This can make a pitch more memorable, using visuals that are directly available on the platform.
Canva pitch deck templates
Brand Kit Integration: Canva’s Brand Kit feature allows users to maintain consistent branding across all presentations. By storing logos, fonts, and brand colors, Canva ensures that each pitch deck remains on-brand without repetitive manual adjustments, making it an efficient choice for startups needing a cohesive and professional appearance.
Canva brand template manager
5. Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is an AI-driven presentation tool that simplifies the design process, helping users create sleek, professional-looking slides with minimal effort. It is especially well-suited for startups and teams that need consistent, branded presentations without dedicating a lot of time to the design aspect.
Best Features
AI-Driven Design Assistance: Beautiful.ai’s AI handles most of the layout and design decisions, ensuring your presentation looks polished and professional without needing extensive manual adjustments. The AI intuitively arranges elements to maintain a clean and visually appealing structure.
Beautiful.ai dynamic slides to add more people to team slide
Beautiful.ai dynamic slides to add more sections to the roadmap
AI-Generated Slide Decks: The platform leverages AI to generate entire slide decks based on your input, ensuring that each deck is structured effectively with all the necessary elements. Users can start with an AI-created framework that automatically arranges slides and content for a compelling pitch.
Beautiful.ai AI slide deck generation
Collaboration Features: Beautiful.ai allows users to easily share presentations with their team, enabling real-time feedback and updates. This collaborative functionality is particularly helpful for refining pitch decks before presenting to investors.
Beautiful.ai collaboration
6. Pitch.com
Pitch.com is a modern presentation tool that combines visually attractive design with collaboration features tailored for teams. It offers a streamlined interface that simplifies the process of building and sharing presentations, making it an ideal solution for fast-moving startups in need of well-designed pitch decks.
Best Features
Collaboration Tools: Pitch.com excels in its collaboration features, allowing multiple team members to work on a presentation simultaneously. Users can leave comments, suggest edits, and view real-time updates from colleagues. This makes the process of creating a pitch deck highly efficient for distributed teams.
Pitch.com team collaboration page
AI-Driven Design Assistance: The platform incorporates AI to help users structure their presentations effectively. This includes AI-generated slide templates that adapt based on content and user inputs, ensuring a consistent and professional look. The AI also assists in suggesting content elements like charts or images based on the context of each slide.
Pitch.com AI generate slide deck
Sleek and Simplified Design: Pitch.com stands out with its clean, modern design, providing an experience that's less cluttered and more intuitive compared to traditional presentation tools like PowerPoint. The minimal interface helps users focus on content creation, ensuring that the resulting pitch deck is both elegant and impactful.
Pitch.com slide editing interface
Conclusion
Choosing the right pitch deck software can significantly impact how your presentation is received by investors, clients, or collaborators. Each of the tools we've reviewed has unique strengths, catering to different needs and design preferences. Whether it's Slidebean's analytics for tracking engagement, Visme's modern and accessible design features, Canva's extensive AI tools for enhanced creativity, or Pitch.com's sleek and collaborative interface, there's a tool that fits every pitch style.
Ultimately, the best pitch deck software is one that aligns with your specific goals—whether that's creating a visually impressive narrative, focusing on seamless collaboration, or simply speeding up the design process. With options like Sonic Slides offering cutting-edge AI functionality for easy, rapid slide creation, your pitch can be ready in no time, letting you focus on what really matters: telling your story effectively.
