Gamma, Google Slides, Canva, and the rest: which tool for which job
Teams rarely pick one presentation tool. They pick one per moment: the quarterly business review, the conference talk, the sales demo, the internal training. Here is how the usual suspects differ—and where a deck stops being “slides” and becomes software.
The slide editors
Google Slides / PowerPoint
Still the default for corporate compatibility. Great for templates, comments, and export to PDF. Weak for live data, simulators, or anything that must feel like a product. Gemini and Copilot help inside the suite; they will not turn your deck into a hosted app.
Canva / Beautiful.ai
Fast visual polish, brand kits, social formats. Ideal when design consistency matters more than interaction. You will still export or present inside their player—not ship a URL your eng team can fork.
Gamma / Tome
AI-first outline → deck in minutes. Strong for first drafts and narrative flow. Most output is still a linear presentation. Treat them as accelerators for story, then rebuild the high-stakes slides as HTML if you need calculators, maps, or embedded product UI.
Keynote / Pitch
Polished motion and presenter notes for live talks. Less common in enterprise handoff chains. Beautiful on stage; awkward as a living product demo link.
When to leave the slide editor
Move to HTML (with or without AI) when any of these are true:
- The “slide” is really a small app: filters, tabs, draggable charts.
- You update numbers weekly and do not want to re-export PDFs.
- Design and engineering should share one source file in Git.
- You need a single URL for investors, customers, and internal teams.
That is not an argument against Gamma or Slides for early thinking—it is an argument for graduating the final artifact.
Where Superprez fits
Most tools stop at export. Superprez is for after the deck exists as code: host it, share a live link, let collaborators pull zip source, edit in Cursor or Claude, and push updates. You can start in Gamma for story, rebuild interactives in HTML, package with the packaging skill, and never return to attachment hell.