Decktopus AI Review: The Best AI Presentation Maker?

Artturi Jalli
9 min readMay 28, 2024

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Did you know you can use AI to generate epic presentations in seconds?

That’s possible thanks to a tool called Decktopus.

Just tell it what kind of presentation you want and it will use AI to make one.

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But is it really that good? Is it just another overhyped AI tool?

I’ve extensively tested Decktopus so you don’t have to. This is the most comprehensive review of the product on the internet.

Let’s dive right into it!

Disclaimer: This post has affiliate links at no cost to you.

Key Features

Before I show you my experience and results with Decktopus, let’s take a closer look at the main features of this product.

  • One-click design: Decktopus allows you to generate presentation layouts and designs with AI automatically with just a click of a button.
  • Slide Notes Maker: Uses AI to create notes for your target audience.
  • Image & Icon Finder: Use this feature to find relevant icons and images for your presentations and save time.
  • Presentation editor. This tool is also a good standalone pitch deck editor. Even without all the AI features, you can use it as a standalone presentation software.

You can use these features to create presentations, forms, microsites, portfolios, and more.

All of this happens without any design skills or creativity. Just let the AI do the work!

It’s a perfect tool for all use cases from sales professionals to customer support.

Activate your free trial here.

My Experience

I’ve extensively tested Decktopus and I paid for the Pro plan so that you don’t need to.

From this point on, I will be sharing my experience and results with this product. Feel free to read along or sign up and follow along.

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Let’s start with a simple AI-generated presentation.

AI Presentation Example

The main feature of Decktopus is its ability to generate a presentation from a simple instruction, such as “The Art of Building Confidence.”

You can do so here.

I created a presentation with the title of “History of computers.”

After this, the tool asks you to sign up. I used my Google account to save clicks.

Then the AI asks you some questions related to your presentation. You should answer these as carefully as you can to let the AI best know what you’re trying to accomplish.

Tip: you can also write the answer to the above box in free form.

In total, there are 3 questions you should answer. Once again, pay attention that these are accurate because this lets the AI know what you want to do and improves the presentation.

After you’ve answered the questions, you will see an AI-generated outline.

If you need to make changes to this, feel free to. You can delete, rearrange, or re-type these outline talking points the way you like.

Then, the tool asks for the theme. Choose one that you think best fits the context.

Then just hit Generate Presentation. It will take a while for the AI to render your presentation. This can take 1–2 minutes.

After about 100 seconds of waiting, here’s the presentation:

Remember, this is all AI. It generated all the text, all the images, and all the slides. It’s 20+ slides in length. Without the AI, it would’ve taken at least a couple of hours for me to create.

What a timesaver!

One thing I love about Decktopus is that it lets you do all the edits on your decks. Just click on the elements you want to tweak.

For example, here I’m editing the title of the presentation:

If you need further ideas or assistance, use the AI Assistant feature. Just click on “Create Tips” and it will give you tips:

This will generate some valuable tips on how to make the presentation stand out more.

Here are some of the tips that it gave me:

Then, let’s talk about the images.

The images in the presentations are all AI-generated. You probably couldn’t even tell this before taking a closer look, right?

For example, this image of an old-school computer room has been put together by AI:

If you don’t like one of the images, though, you can always swap it or re-generate one.

For example, here I’m telling the AI to generate an image to resemble the Babbage Analytical machine for my computer presentation:

After about 15 seconds, here’s the output image:

The AI automatically changed the existing image to this as per my request.

Now that I’ve shown the AI features, don’t forget the good old presentation formatting features! Just click the “Elements” tab on the left to open these.

For example, you can add titles, images, videos, ratings, tables, and much more into your presentations.

As you can tell from this, Decktopus is not only a powerful AI platform but it comes with all the necessary presentation formatting elements and options too.

Anyways, this is how you create a presentation with AI and customize it to your liking.

Before you go, let me show you couple of other epic ways to use Decktopus.

Presentation from Existing PDF

Did you notice that you can also create a presentation from an existing file, such as an essay?

This can be a huge time saver if you’ve done all the legwork and writing already.

For example, here’s a PDF file of an essay on what is programming:

Turning this into a presentation would take some time. Especially for me who doesn’t usually create one of these.

But that’s not a problem anymore thanks to the Decktopus AI. It allows you to drag and drop a file into the presentation maker.

To do this, just hit Create with AI:

Then choose the import your PDF option:

Then drag and drop the file into the view:

It can take a while for the import to happen. In fact, for me it froze to this screen for at least 2 minutes.

To resolve this, I refreshed the page and re-uploaded. This way it only took about 20 seconds to process the PDF.

After this the AI asks you to answer three questions about your presentation again:

Then it takes a while for the AI to render the presentation again.

After a while, here’s the AI-generated presentation:

That’s incredible. This is exactly the stuff that I was talking about in the input PDF… Wow!

Starting from Scratch (without AI)

Last but not least, you can also create a traditional presentation with Decktopus from scratch without using AI.

(You can still use the AI features later in the presentation if you want to.)

To do this, click “Start from scratch.”

Then choose a design category.

Then pick a sub category:

Then click on “Add Slide:”

And choose a layout:

This creates a completely new presentation that you can start filling in:

Options

Once you’ve completed your presentation, you can share it, view the analytics, and play it for your audience with the options on the dashboard:

My Take

As you can tell from the above, it’s quite a versatile AI platform. You can generate presentation from scratch with AI, from a file with AI, and in the traditional way.

Also, it’s super intuitive. Especially if you’ve used presentation tools like powerpoint or such.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that you need to pay to create slides. Also, the pricing is a bit high considering that you need to do all the edits too.

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Pros

  • Easy to use. You will instantly get the gist of it. Just let the AI know what to do and it will get the job done. Then edit as you like.
  • Fast and accurate results. The tool generates presentations not in hours, not in minutes, but in seconds. This can be a huge time saver.
  • Presentation from file. The AI can also take an existing file (PDF) and turn that into a presentation in no time. This is a big time saver.
  • Powerful standalone editor. Without all the AI features, the presentation editor and templates would still be worth giving a shot.

Cons

  • Occasional slowness. The tool is mostly fast, but sometimes it’s freezing. Clicking a button might not trigger an action. Also, the file import sometimes freezes.
  • Expensive. Considering that you still need to edit and fact-check your slides, it won’t save you as much time as your first impression suggests. I’m not a huge fan of the pricing.
  • Generic content. The AI images and text are unsurprisingly generic. You need to give them your own touch (or to be a good presenter) to not let this matter.

Pricing

  • Pro: $9.99/mo
  • Business: $34.99/mo

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Decktopus Alternatives

I think Decktopus is the best AI presentation tool out there. But there are some alternatives you still might want to check.

Find a complete list of alternatives to Decktopus here.

To Take Home

Decktopus is awesome. It creates epic presentations in just seconds with AI—just as it promised.

Overall, I’m really happy with the product. Perhaps the only issue I have is that the pricing is a bit high. But other than that, the performance and results were awesome!

It’s free so why not give it a try?

Get Decktopus for Free

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Artturi Jalli

Check @jalliartturi on YouTube to become a successful blogger. (For collabs, reach me out at: artturi@bloggersgoto.com)