Powtoon is a free online presentation maker that offers images and templates to help make a great presentation in a short time. Some of the primary templates include ones to make a "modern edge" animation, a whiteboard look, a cartoon, and an infographic, among many others.
This "PowerPoint" tool is more of an animation maker because, if you want, you can have it play as a movie instead of a click-through presentation. Switching between the two is very easy and doesn't affect the presentation permanently.
Right off the bat, Powtoon comes off as a great service because you can use it online and because there are lots of tools available, but considering that there's a paid version, too, it's severely limited in some ways. However, it's very helpful and unique in other ways, so it's still a great choice.
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What We Like
Lots of features.
Tons of ready-made templates.
Not hard to use.
Can share with the public.
Supports rich text editing.
Save an offline version of the animated video.
Saves work automatically.
Presentations have a small watermark.
Interface can seem cluttered.
Viewing someone else's presentation takes a while to load.
Can't export to your computer if there are premium objects in it.
Several options and features are only available in a paid subscription.
Description
- Powtoon presentations can be built in a slideshow form or a movie form
- Text effects, image holders, characters, animations, props, markers, shapes, transitions, backgrounds, and many other styles are available to make slides unique
- A dedicated styles menu is available for creating greeting cards for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Halloween, winter in general, and Valentine's Day
- There's a huge selection of pre-made templates that you can choose from in categories such as stats, events, about us, explainer video, special offers, tutorials, school/education, and animated greeting card. You can also start a presentation with a blank template
- Share a video animation with anyone via a public link
- Can download the animated presentation as PDF or a PowerPoint PPT file
- Supports sending presentations directly to YouTube, though a watermark is on the bottom of the video and the quality is rather low
- The template can be set up to work best with websites like YouTube and Facebook (horizontal), or with Instagram (square) or phones (vertical)
- Regular text editing is allowed, such as changing the font type and size
- You can import an MP3 or choose from several free ones available on the website
- Images can be added directly from a search on Flickr or from your computer
- Very intuitive; drag and drop objects from the side panel directly onto a slide, use the right-click context menu for extra options, and group and move multiple objects at once
Thoughts on Powtoon
Aside from the negatives listed above, Powtoon still seems to be a very popular way to make free online animated presentations, and I can't disagree that it's fun and easy to use.
If you're looking for a quick way to find some nice presentation templates and a whole gallery of images that are instantly accessible for use on slides, Powtoon is a really nice choice—probably better than any other online presentation maker.
However, compared to Google Slides, Powtoon lacks significantly. Google's presentation maker lets you download in popular file formats, doesn't stick a watermark on your slides, supports live collaboration and chat, and can open existing files made with other similar programs.
In fact, you can't even save your presentation to your computer unless you remove all the premium features you have in the slides. However, even then, you can't save the animated video to the MP4 video format—just document formats like PDF or PPT.
Overall, I think Powtoon is a nice choice for creating presentations for school or a similar event, whereas Google Slides is fit not only for that but also for professional things that require a more clean look.