Understanding Prezi vs PowerPoint – What’s The Best For Your Business Presentation

Designing a business presentation is a tough task. The formidable choice of software doesn’t make it any easier.

The most popular tools for modern business presentations are Prezi and PowerPoint. A dozen similar programs exist, but the majority of companies prefer the above two.

These programs come with a big set of similarities and differences. How can you tell which one is the best for your purposes?

In this article, we’ll give you a short comparison between Prezi and PowerPoint to make your struggle easier.

Remember, even an ideal presentation can be ruined by the wrong choice of tools.

What is Prezi?

What is Prezi anyway? It’s a rather young (compared to PowerPoint) piece of software, which takes an innovative approach to presentation making.

Instead of using slides, which everyone is used to, Prezi created a large canvas filled with points, each of which can be zoomed in on. The Prezi platform supports text, images, and videos.

For presentation makers, who haven’t had experience with Prezi, the platform offers a formidable choice of templates. Even though they aren’t highly customizable, they are suitable for a wide variety of purposes.

Prezi has a drag-and-drop interface, which isn’t as easy to work with as PowerPoint but could be preferable as soon as you get used to the idea. It is the king of diagrams, graphs, and other visual ways to present information.

Prezi allows storing presentations on the cloud so different users can access the presentation simultaneously for editing or for watching.

One of the highly-valued features offered by Prezi is analytics. The platform offers real-time analysis of the presentation that helps presenters understand which points were appreciated by the audience and which need improvement.

What is PowerPoint?

Not too many people in the world have ever heard of PowerPoint. Next year, the program is celebrating its 30th birthday. More than 500 million people use it worldwide. PowerPoint is a market leader in the presentation industry. Its popularity is often attributed to its ease of use.

Schoolchildren use it to make presentations in classrooms. Meanwhile, executives without any coding experience can take advantage of PowerPoint to create a good presentation.

PowerPoint has had sufficient time to deal with all its bugs and come up with numerous useful features. It uses a slide-by-slide presentation approach, allowing the user to go back and forth between pieces of information during the presentation.

The program has many different PowerPoint business templates, which can be customized. It comes with excellent support from the developers (Microsoft) and numerous communities.

If you have a question about PowerPoint, just Google it. There is a 99% chance that the answer has been discussed online several times before you graduated from high school.

Let’s go further to compare and contrast the two popular presentation-making tools.

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 1. Platforms To be Used On

These days, mobility is king. If your presentation can’t be accessed on a mobile gadget, you can send it to the trash can. Sounds too harsh? It’s true. More than half of the world’s population is using mobile gadgets. How likely is your audience to be among it?

PowerPoint comes with iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps. However, Prezi currently offers only iPhone and Android app options.

This may not be a deciding factor for some businesses. However, it’s nice to know that apps are available for the majority of platforms.

2. To Pay or Not to Pay

For the majority of business owners, pricing matters. In fact, more often than not, price becomes the deciding factor.

Both tools are similarly priced. However, for PowerPoint, you’ll pay about $2 more per month. Meanwhile, PowerPoint doesn’t have a free trial available. So you can’t test it before making the final choice.

Free Prezi software is good enough to get an idea about its suitability to the needs of your company.

3. Business Suitability

When it comes to making business presentations, size matters. If you are a small or medium-sized business, both PowerPoint and Prezi can work fine. However, if you are an enterprise, you should stick with the good old PowerPoint.

According to presentation designers at PresentationGeeks, the majority of enterprise owners choose PowerPoint for their business presentation purposes. The reason is the set of proper tools needed for sizeable presentations.

4. How Easy Is It?

Another thing to consider when choosing between the two tools is the learning curve. Microsoft PowerPoint is much easier to use than Prezi. Of course, you still have to spend some time learning how to wield different features with PowerPoint.

However, with Prezi, learning is bound to take longer. Unless you have experience with Prezi, you need to allow some time to get the hang of it.

5. Innovation vs. Reliability

While PowerPoint has been on the market for decades, Prezi is the “new kid on the block”. It takes a different approach to presentation making, giving presenters an opportunity to add more visuals to the process.

In a world where visuals are gaining popularity faster than light, such an approach could be highly valuable. The eye can process an image in just 13 milliseconds, which is much faster than it processes text.

However, the good old PowerPoint is suitable for more purposes than Prezi. When it comes to business presentations, visual innovations offered by Prezi aren’t always acceptable.

Prezi Advantages

Here is a list of Prezi advantages you should consider:

• The Zoom function offers a new way to present your information. The presentation looks like a big canvas packed with info. When you want to focus on the topic, you zoom in on it.
• It comes with a free web-based version so you don’t need to download any software to your computer.
• You can insert images at any angle (unlike horizontal and vertical image insertion in PowerPoint.
• Media insertion is simplified.
• It’s easy to embed Prezi presentations in blogs and websites.
• It’s easy to go back and forth between the slides. You don’t need to search for the right slide if you have to go back to certain information.

PowerPoint Advantages

PowerPoint has some interesting advantages over Prezi:

• Unlike Prezi, PowerPoint is easy to use. Many people have already used PowerPoint in school or college.
• You can change premade layouts without too much effort.
• PowerPoint offers high-quality slide transition effects.
• You can print the presentation out.
• You can insert hyperlinks.
• The clarity of slides is often preferred over the overwhelming number of images and dizzying zooming of Prezi.
• Since the software has been around for many years, all the features are tweaked to excellence.

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Which One Should You Choose?

Marvel or DC? Coffee or tea? Gandalf or Dumbledore? Prezi or PowerPoint? When it comes to business presentations, the choice may be hard to make.

If you want to impress your audience with visuals, Prezi is the right way to go. However, you have to be ready for the lack of important features and a bit of unprofessional appearance. Prezi can be an excellent choice for e-business presentations. Using it is a great way to show your strive for innovations and new angles.

If you want to experience, reliability, and power, PowerPoint is the answer. Business owners have been using it for decades.