Microsoft PowerPoint vs Slidebean: Which is a better fit?

Jose: My name is Jose. I'm an inside sales/outside salesman for an industrial distributor company selling all types of conveyor parts for the ag industry, and I would rate PowerPoint five out of five. Regarding the other companies, I don't believe we use them, just because of the compatibility with Microsoft. So whenever you try to basically blend it with the other Microsoft companies, it's just kind of weird. So then the other ones don't really have extensive templates, backgrounds, different types of basically inserting images, everything seems more complicated than the way Microsoft has laid out everything. The reason why I like Microsoft PowerPoint, it makes it super easy to do sales presentations for our customer. We use it basically on a daily basis. We're always trying to set up sales presentations where a customer [inaudible 00:01:04], see what we could offer, the transitions, we really like the transition of each slide, the way it transitions back, you can choose whether it's quick, whether it's slowly, with or without special effects. We like that it has an extensive amount of background templates, and then you can insert pictures straight off the web, or whether you have it saved by your computer. And then saving it onto your computer is just a breeze, because it just automatically goes. And then, yeah, that's it. I think it's extremely easy to onboard and start using PowerPoint. I've been using it since I was a kid, but at work, quite literally, anybody could just get on the app, and you don't even really need to know what you're doing. It's there for you, whether... Every single tool is available to you through the toolbar. So whether you want to format the page, want to insert photos, want to insert videos, or you want to transition slides, it's right there on the toolbar. You don't have to go looking for it. Just hit format, hit tools or whatever it is, and then it literally tells you what you need to do. Or the first thing, whenever you first onboard to PowerPoint, it's whether you want to start a blank template or you want to start basically one that's already been made. So that kind of makes it easier sometimes for the newer folks at our company, where we can throw them the app, and then they can pick a template that's already been made by Microsoft themselves. So it makes it really good. I would recommend PowerPoint. I would say best thing about it is, like I said, the compatibility with all of the Microsoft stuff that's already out there, whether it be Word or Excel, it just does really well. I would recommend it just because it's easier for the newer folks. You don't have to teach somebody how to use it. You just throw them the app, like I said, quite basically really simple to use. And I like it mainly because of the templates that are already made for you. So I think Microsoft, there's one that has a sales presentation, so you literally just open up the app, you hit sales presentation, and it's already got the layout for what a sales presentation should look like. Now all you have to do is basically edit it to your style to whatever you're trying to sell, but it's literally already there. It's showing you how to do a sales presentation.

James M.: Hi, my name's James. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a startup. I give Slidebean a two out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. Yeah, so before we used Slidebean, we'd also used Beautiful.ai, Google Slides, PowerPoint, and since Slidebean we're currently using Canva. Yeah, so we chose Slidebean, because they had the option to develop startup-specific pitch decks. So previously we'd used just the software, and that was okay, but we really wanted to utilize their experience as a startup and [inaudible 00:00:42] with investors to develop an investor-specific pitch deck. However, that experience itself wasn't great. Yeah, the process to get started with Slidebean was quite easy to start off with. We had an interview with one of the UX researchers who got a bit of our background about our startup and then put together our story. Also shared a lot of our information and assets with Slidebean, however, the next step was really difficult. So when that information got passed onto the designers, that's when we started to see some serious issues regarding the quality of the work. For anyone that's looking to use Slidebean, I definitely recommend it if you're just looking at a quick software to get started and utilize yourself. I wouldn't utilize any of their more advanced features, so paying for the pitch deck reviews and the financial tables. That stuff was really basic, and the quality of their designers and consultants are quite low. They generally use people in developing countries that don't really understand the startup space. So I'd recommend potentially using Canva or even Slidebean, and then taking your MVP deck to someone on freelance or someone on Upwork who has had experience with startup pitch decks in your industry.