presentation for open source software

27 Open Source Slideshow Presentation Editors and PowerPoint Alternatives

Hazem Abbas

27 Open Source Slideshow Presentation Editors and PowerPoint Alternatives

Presentations and slideshows are essential tools for marketeers, strategists, teachers, and ofcourse students.

Basically, a slideshow is a presentation of series of still images on a projection screen or a projector (displaying device).

Microsoft powerpoint carries the same technique with more of magic transition effects, ability to add interactive diagrams, videos, and videos.

PowerPoint Open Source Alternative

Many think that there is a lack of alternatives for Powerpoint especially for Linux, but that is far from the truth as we are about to offer you many, so stay tuned.

Prezi, a new generation presentation

However, before we start we have to differentate between the old classicial slideshow presentation as MS PowerPoint, and the new fancy presentation by Prezi.com.

While PowerPoint and its open source counterpart in office suites keep the old approach, Prezi.com offered a large canvas presentation with stunning catching effect, that proven to be reliable for many enterprise users.

Presentation extensions and compatability

There are many presentation extensions that is supported by the popular office suites. Many of these extensions are supported in the open source apps as LibreOffice, Calligra suites. Also, in the free WPS Office suite.

On the otherhand, Prezi or canvas style presentation, has their own extension which is not compatable with the office suites.

Another note worth mentioning here is, Markdown and Terminal based presentation app, are often use Text-based Markdown files to build the presentation, which can be edited by any text editor, yet not compatable with any office suite presentation apps.

PowerPoint, and PDF Style Presentation Apps

1- libreoffice impress.

LibreOffice is an open source office suite and the ideal alternative for the commercial enterprise released office suites as MS Office. It includes a text processor, presentation manager, spreadsheet program and other apps.

The LibreOffice Impress has similar features as PowerPoint, It enables you to create a rich slideshow and presentation with dozens of customizable options. It contains a rich set of page transition animation, text styles, and dozens of shapes, diagrams, with a rich built-in 2D/ 3D library set.

LibreOffice works on Linux, Windows, macOS.

2- Calligra Stage

Calligra Stage is a presentation software and a part of Calligra office suite. It uses the OpenDocument file format standard which is compatible with other office suites.

With Stage, you can design your slides, control added shapes, charts, diagrams, and style your text. You can also add notes, change your page layout, and enjoy a long list of page transition and included animations.

Calligra Suite is an open source office and graphic suite by KDE; the popular Linux desktop environment. It also includes a text document editor (Words), a vector editor (Karbon), Spreadsheet editor (Sheet), Visual Database creator (KEXI), and an amazing project management application (Plan).

3- Impressive

Unlike the previous apps, Impressive is a standalone open source free presentation and slideshow generator that uses PDF to render your slides.

It contains many page translations, enable you to view your slides in an overview screen, highlight text boxes, and add spotlight effects.

The app is completely free, and open source for Linux systems.

4- Spice-up

Spice-up is a lightweight free presentation manager for Linux systems. It features a simple user-friendly interface, and allows you to create quick presentations without a fuzz.

Spice-up enables you to export your presentations directly to PDF.

5- Imagination

Imagination is a minimal yet feature-rich presentation software for Linux. Originally built by an open source enthusiast and Linux user who noticed a lack of presentation software for Linux systems.

It includes about 70-page transition effects, and enables you to export your presentation to video formats as OGV Theora/Vorbis, widescreen FLV video, 3GP for mobile phones, H264 and H265 for HD slideshows.

6- WPS Office (Free)

WPS Office is a free professional enterprise-grade office suite for people who look for a Microsoft Office replacement.

WPS Office enables you to edit and manage Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and PDF with others at the same time. It is fully compatible with Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS and supports 47 file formats and 46 languages.

Prezi.com style presentation

Prezi.com is a commercial web-based presentation service, that allows you to create beautiful unique presentation as it treats the whole canvas as one slide, where you move, pane, or zoom to your next area of interest.

Unlike the classical slideshow presentation, Sozi is an amazing presentation program that allows you to create a catchy zoomable presentation. It is based on open standard and released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Sozi can be installed on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It can also be installed using Docker for macOS and Linux.

With Sozi, you can add URLs, embed videos, and audios, and convert your presentation to PDF or videos.

2- DeckDeckGo

DeckDeckGo is a self-hosted collaborative web-based presentation manager, that also can be used directly from CDN or integrate with other frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular and Ember.

Although, the official commercial service is deprecated, the source code is available and supported by a good community of user and developers.

3- RevealJs

RevealJS is a popular JavaScript presentation and slideshow library that developers can install, integrate and use in their projects. It plays well with other JavaScript framework as React, Vue, and Angular.

RevealJS presentations are responsive and works smoothly with mobile browsers.

4- Impress.js

Impress.js is a presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind Prezi.com.

Impress.js demo is pretty cool as it offers an interactive canvas that zoom into the point of interest and focus area in steps.

It also comes with amazing 3D transitions that you can customize.

The primary downside of this stunning framework is that it requires coding skills to make it work. However, this can be resolved by using some Impress.js based apps which you will find in this post.

5- Hovercraft

Hovercraft is a stunning presentation software that allows you to create Prezi grade presentation using Impress.js, without having to worry about any code.

Hovercraft feature highlights

Write your presentations in a text markup language. No slow, limiting GUI, no annoying HTML!
Pan, rotate and zoom in 3D, with automatic repositioning of slides!
A presenter console with notes and slide previews!
Support for showing mathematical formulas.
Styling is easy with CSS.
The slide show generated is in HTML, so you only need a web browser to show it.
Easy sharing, as it can be put up on a website for anyone to see!

Strut - An Impress.js and Bespoke.js Presentation Editor that is based on Impress.js. The project now is getting a new update as the old code is becoming obsolete.

7- Impressionist

Impressionist is a visual 3D editor for creating stunning impress.js presentations. It uses Electron to build a visual WYSIWYG for Jmpress.js.

However, it is tricky to install, therefore there are video tutorials on how to make your edition up and running on Windows and Linux.

8- Reveal.js with R Studio

The R language is a primary language for data scientists and engineers, many of them use it for everyday purposes. This is a handy tool for them to create a catchy presentation within R Studio using Reveal.js.

9- Reveal Hugo

This one is an addition for Hugo Static Site Generator to create presentation websites using Reveal.js.

10- Reveal.js 3D

Although, the Reveal.js library does not have 3D support , some developers decided to make a 3D Reveal.js edition. It works with Google Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox, yet the lazy-loading option does not work well with some browsers.

11- ShowPreper

ShowPreper is a free open-source web-based presentation that is based on Impress.js, and Bespoke.js libraries. It is released as an open source project under the MIT license.

Gosspi is an amazing web-based slideshow and presentation editor, It uses Impress.js. It is considered the open source alternative for Prezi.com

13- Reveal.js Simple Menu

This is a simple library that adds a simple navigation menu for your Reveal.js slides. You can customize the menu position, selection and auto-generate menus easily.

Terminal based presentation

This section for old school terminal users, who prefer doing many through their terminal apps.

Slides is a terminal-based presentation with Markdown file processor that supports tables, code, simple diagrams, and more useful features.

Slides is written with the Go programming language, and it is packed by many contributors.

The present app is a colorful terminal-based presentation written with Python. It supports colors, and comes with many fancy effects.

The app works directly with Markdown files, and converts Markdown directly into rich slides that you can view directly within your terminal.

The terminal Matrix effect is one of the best catchy transition you can use there.

patat ( P resentations A top T he A NSI T erminal ) is a small tool that allows you to show presentations using only an ANSI terminal. It does not require ncurses .

patat features highlight

Leverages the great Pandoc library to support many input formats including Literate Haskell.
Supports smart slide splitting.
Slides can be split up into multiple fragments
There is a live reload mode.
Theming support including 24-bit RGB.
Auto advancing with configurable delay.
Optionally re-wrapping text to terminal width with proper indentation.
Syntax highlighting for nearly one hundred languages generated from Kate syntax files.
Experimental images support.
Supports evaluating code snippets and showing the result.
Written in Haskell.

4- lookatme

lookatme is an interactive, extensible, terminal-based markdown presentation tool.

lookatme features highlights

Markdown rendering
Built-in tutorial slides lookatme --tutorial
Live (input file modification time watching) and manual reloading
Live terminals embedded directly in slides
Syntax highlighting using the Pygments library
Loading external files into code blocks
Support for contrib extensions
Smart slide splitting
Progressive slides with  comments between block elements

5- SSH Slides

SSH Slides is an SSH server that hosts terminal-based presentations where your viewers can follow along in their own terminals. This service is currently located at slides.tseivan.com .

mdp is yet another terminal Markdown presentation tool. It is written in the C language. mdp can easily be installed on macOS using Homebrew and MacPorts. Debian and Ubuntu users can use the DEB package, while Arch Linux users can get it directly from the AUR repos.

7- Showtmux

Showtmux creates terminal-based interactive presentations. It can be used to script terminal-based demos ahead of time, and play them in tmux.

8- dss (Dead Simple Slides)

Dead Simple Slides (DSS) is a text/terminal based slide presentation tool that reads .txt files for formatted slides. These slides are then displayed to the terminal.

Presentation and slideshow apps are essential tools for making educational and informative document to present in meetings or in classroom. While they have different shapes, styles, extensions and features, we encourage you to go through and test the ones in the category you require, evaluate the features, and pick the one that fits your workflow.

If you are going with an office suite style presentation we recommend LibreOffice, as it is proven reliable and solid for countless users over the years.

Do you know any other open source free presentation app that we missed, kindly send us a hit, to add it to this list.

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The 7 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives for Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint is great, but what if you can't afford it? Here are the best free PowerPoint alternatives for presentations.

Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for a long while and so far it has served users well. However, because it's a paid program, not everyone can afford it.

Thankfully, there are many options available for users who want the functionality of Microsoft PowerPoint in a free-to-use package. In fact, some of them don't even require any downloads and are completely web-based.

1. Google Slides

By far the most popular PowerPoint alternative out there, Google Slides shines when it comes to collaboration. Multiple people can work simultaneously on a presentation and add new slides.

This is further strengthened by its availability. Google Slides works on your web browser and has apps for both iOS and Android.

Additionally, Google Slides keeps a record of all the changes users have made to a presentation, and you can easily restore your slideshow to a previous version. While anyone with a Gmail account can use Google Slides, G Suite users get added data protection.

Compared to PowerPoint, the number of templates, animation forms, and fonts is somewhat lacking. However, businesses tend to overlook these shortcomings on a day-to-day basis.

While Canva is primarily known as a photo editor and design tool, it is also a competent MS PowerPoint alternative.

One of Canva's main strengths is its ease of use. There are many beginner tutorial videos on the website if users do not understand something. Complete beginners can easily navigate through the minimalistic interface.

With the free version of Canva, you get access to over 8000+ presentation templates that exponentially speed up your workflow. Additionally, Canva still remains one of the easiest services to create infographics and charts in.

The only limiting thing with Canva is that it offers a basic set of tools and transitions at users' disposal. It's apparent that the company places more focus on photo editing and design aspect than anything else.

The Prezi presentation format is unique in the way that it lets you view slides. Instead of addressing multiple elements at once, Prezi gives viewers a single canvas that allows them to zoom in on different presentation parts. This provides a much more immersive experience.

Similar to Google Slides, Prezi supports the real-time collaboration of up to 10 users. Users can also add comments to indicate changes or report missing information. Prezi works on any modern web browser, and there are Android and iOS apps available as well.

Related: Powerful Google Chrome PDF Extensions and Apps

The Prezi software also has an analytics feature that helps users optimize their presentation by showing them which slides were the most viewed as well as which ones were skipped.

Even though the basic version of Prezi is free to use, it doesn't allow users to control the privacy of their presentation, which could be a dealbreaker for many. Additionally, due to the way Prezi works, there is a steep learning curve associated with it.

4. WPS Office Free

WPS Office is the closest alternative to PowerPoint when it comes to functionality and user interface. Plus, unlike the other web-based services on this list, you don't always need an active internet connection to use it.

With its complete support for PowerPoint files, users can edit existing PowerPoint documents with ease in WPS Office. They can also embed videos and animate individual objects, just like in Microsoft PowerPoint. It also offers many templates, so users can pick their favorite.

However, users should keep in mind that while the software is free, it is supported by ads, which may be a bit intrusive at times. In addition to this, collaboration is less straightforward than with Google Slides.

WPS Office is available across all major platforms such as Windows, macOS, Linux. iOS, and Android. There is a web-based version available as well. Alternatively, you can check out this handy guide to smoothen your transition to WPS Office from Microsoft .

Xtensio is one of the best options for business users. It has many templates available regarding various organization sections, such as marketing, UX design, etc.

With Xtensio's easy-to-use interface, even newbies can create professional-looking reports and presentations. Additionally, they offer even greater flexibility in terms of design. You can edit each object in a template to suit your specific needs.

But it does have some shortcomings. For one thing, users cannot export their presentations in PowerPoint format. Additionally, the free version supports only one user at a time with a storage space of 1MB.

6. LibreOffice

LibreOffice is open-source presentation software that does everything PowerPoint can do. Although it lacks functionality such as OneDrive Integration, its PowerPoint-like functionality more than makes up for it.

LibreOffice has its share of useful features, such as the ability to import Keynote files. In addition, LibreOffice has a vast collection of free templates that users can use to create their presentations.

If that's not enough, you can download additional templates from LibreOffice's online repository. LibreOffice is available across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

7. Zoho Show

There are several reasons to use Zoho Show for your next presentation. It's a great presentation tool that's similar to Google Slides, but even better. Users can also import and edit all their PowerPoint files in the online tool.

Users can create tables, infographics, and data charts within Zoho Show itself. In addition to this, the service also has in-built Google Image Search functionality that lets you search and insert images quickly.

Related: Tools to Give an Online Presentation From Anywhere

Additionally, Zoho Show supports collaboration in real-time and multiple users can edit presentations. Although there's not much to complain about in Zoho Show, many users would like to have more options when it comes to templates and animations.

Worthy PowerPoint Alternatives

Essentially, all these tools and services function the same way as PowerPoint without the cost. Furthermore, the web-based alternatives are more advanced such as automatic saving and cloud storage.

Despite this, PowerPoint remains the front-runner when it comes to presentation software. As such, it is important for users to know how to make the best out of its features.

Extensions & Templates
Get Involved
Focus Areas
Native Languages

Apache OpenOffice Impress

Impress your audience with your presentations!

Impress is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools.

Master Pages simplify the task of preparing your materials. Save even more time by downloading templates from our Templates repository.

Complete range of Views are supported: Slides / Outline / Notes / Handouts to meet all the needs of presenters and audiences, plus an optional multi-pane view to put all the tools at your fingertips.

Multiple monitors support so that presenters can have additional materials or notes while presenting their slides on a projector. Make the most of this with the integrated Presenter Screen , which lets you see your next slides as well as the time and the speaker notes.

Easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools - a complete range to spice up your presentation. ‘Park’ your most commonly used drawing tools around your screen ready for single-click access.

Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. Fontworks provides stunning 2D and 3D images from text. Create lifelike 3D images with astounding speed and response.

.odp Standard - Save your presentations in OpenDocument format, the new international standard for office documents. This XML based format means you’re not tied up with using Impress. You can access your presentations from any OpenDocument compliant software.

.ppt & .pptx support - Of course, you are free to import your old Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, or save your work in PowerPoint format for sending to people who are still using Microsoft products.

Flash .swf support - Alternatively, use Impress’s built-in ability to create Flash versions of your presentations.

Apache, OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org and the seagull logo are registered trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache feather logo is a trademark of The Apache Software Foundation. Other names appearing on the site may be trademarks of their respective owners.

3 open source tools to make your presentations pop

Opensource.com

Love them or hate them, presentations are a major part of life in both academia and business. Traditionally, creating a presentation meant using Microsoft's PowerPoint, but Apple's Keynote and LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org's Impress are solid alternatives. The problem with all those applications (aside from the closed source nature of the first two) is that you need those applications installed in order to view the presentations you've created. You can try your luck opening the file in Google Drive or the like, but your success will vary.

In recent years, web frameworks designed for creating presentations have proliferated. These take advantage of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create presentations that display in just about any modern web browser. And, as an added bonus, presentation designers remains in complete control of their presentations. They need not worry about file compatibility or being locked into a particular web-based service. Because these presentation frameworks are open source, they can be extended and enhanced in any way you wish—though to be fair, writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a little more complicated than just using PowerPoint, Keynote, or Impress.

One of the most interesting presentation frameworks is impress.js, which aims to move presentations beyond the standard slide deck. Below, I'll introduce you to impress.js and two tools that make it easy to create impress.js presentations.

Impress.js is a JavaScript presentation framework developed by Bartek Szopka. Inspired by Prezi , it makes use of CCS3 transformations to provide a presentation experience that goes way beyond the traditional slide deck. Using impress.js for presentations allows speakers to wow their audiences with presentations that slide, rotate, and zoom in three dimensions.

Being based on standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) means that impress.js does not lock users into using a particular application or web-based service to create presentations. Because it is released under the MIT and GPLv2+ licenses, if impress.js does not work the way you'd like, you have the freedom to change it yourself. However, unlike some other open source JavaScript presentation frameworks, impress.js requires a very modern web browser to view the presentations. It is designed to take full advantage of up-to-date web technologies. Legacy browser support is not a development priority. But recent releases of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer should work just fine with impress.js.

Creating an impress.js presentation is no easy task, even for someone with decent HTML and CSS skills. The basic markup is easy to understand, but impress.js presentations can be very complex and require a lot of thought and planning. There is no default theme, so you'll have to design the look and feel of your presentation yourself. And the flow of your presentation is entirely up to you, so you'll have to plan how each slide will transition to the next and the layout of the slides' relative positions in the canvas. Creating an impress.js presentation from scratch can be a lot of work, but the results can be impressive. A selection of demos and examples are available to provide inspiration and guidance, and there are tutorials for those who want to dig deeper and learn more.

If creating an impress.js presentation from scratch is too complicated for you, there are tools to make creating impress.js presentations easier. The two listed below have different strengths and weaknesses. Give them both a try, and see if one works for you.

Hovercraft simplifies the creation of impress.js presentations by allowing you to create presentations using reStructedText markup. Instead of having to write HTML markup while crafting a presentation, you can focus on just writing the text. You can move things around and change things without having to mess with complicated markup. For example, the following text creates a slide that is five times larger than the previous slide and rotated 90 degrees.

Creating an impress.js presentation using Hovercraft greatly simplifies the process and enhances impress.js. Hovercraft supports four different methods for positing slides in a presentation. If you specify no positing in your markup, you end up with a traditional slide-to-the-left slide show. If you want something a little fancier, you can use relative positioning and slides are positioned based on the offset you specify relative to the previous slide. This method allows you to easily insert a new slide in the middle of a presentation and have all the following slides readjust their positions. If you want total control, you can use absolute positioning, which allows you to specify the precise coordinates of a slide. And finally, you can specify a SVG path for the presentation to follow. According to Hovercraft's documentation, SVG layouts are "a bit fiddly to use," but having such precise control over the layout can result in some pretty impressive slide shows. In addition, Hovercraft supports syntax highlighting for any source code you want to include in your presentation, and it adds a presenter screen with timer and notes. When you're done writing your presentation (or want to test what you have written so far), a very simple command converts the reStructuredText file into an HTML presentation:

Despite Hovercraft's strengths, it still requires the user to be fairly CSS savvy. The default Hovercraft theme is extremely spartan, so you'll still need to stylize your presentation if you want anything fancier than plain black text on a white background. Adding CSS to a presentation is not complicated, but it is not as easy as selecting a new presentation theme in PowerPoint.

You can read Hovercraft's documentation to learn more.

Hovercraft was created by Lennart Regebro and is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license.

If you'd like a tool that works more like traditional presentation software, Strut is the tool for you. Strut is a web-based application that provides the traditional slide sorter and editing tools. The graphical tools let you add text, images, videos, websites, and pre-designed shapes to your slides. You can also easily change the color of the slides' backgrounds and the surface (the backdrop in front of which the slides appear) for the entire presentation all at once, or on a slide-by-slide basis. Strut also supports adding text to slides using Markdown . And for power users, you can apply custom CSS classes to objects and write custom CSS rules from inside Strut. Once you have your slides designed, you can switch to Overview mode and graphically layout your slides. You just drag around the slides and enter values for depth, rotation, and scale. In addition to creating impress.js presentations, Strut can also create presentations using the bespoke.js framework.

Strut is very nice, but it does still have a few rough edges. Users will encounter the occasional bug, and the project's to-do list is somewhat long (though that is not a major issue). The project has followed the "release early, release often" maxim, and anyone who wishes to can help make the project better by contributing on GitHub .

Give Strut a try using the editor on the project's site , or download the source from GitHub and run it locally (or on a server). You'll need Node.js's npm and Grunt to install the dependencies and build Strut.

Strut's creator, Matthew Crinklaw-Vogt, has released the application under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 .

natterstefan

6 Open Source Tools to create inspiring presentations

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6 Open Source Presentation Tools

As a software developer, PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Sheets quickly become boring for presentations. You want something different, you want to create the presentation with Markdown files, HTML, or JavaScript. There are some open source solutions for that, like reveal.js , mdx-deck , Spectacle , remark , webslides or impress.js . Each solution allows you to create presentations yourself in minutes, push them to GitHub, and share them with your audience.

Personally, I have tried mdx-deck and Impress.js in the past. Which one do you use?

⛓ Links of the Week

Last week I told you about ScrollMagic . This week I have another similar tool for you: lax.js . With lax.js you can also make great animations when the user scrolls too. Vaibhav Khulbe describes in his article "Create a crazy input interaction with lax.js. 🤪" how you can also use lax.js when the visitor fills in an input field.
I am a very big admirer of CSS-Art. I admire the patience, precision, and attention to detail that the artists invest. Among the CSS artists is Kass . Her Ring camera looks deceptively real , doesn't it?
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While we're on the topic of static site generators, Speedlify lets you quickly and easily create a web performance and accessibility benchmark. Here are some Eleventy benchmarks .
At work the other day we were discussing if and how it is possible to keep multiple React mini-apps in sync with Redux in one document. Here is a clear example that shows how it works. It's easier than you might think.
When I started streaming , I also looked into the topic of "virtual-cams". Not because I use it with OBS, but because I wondered if I could use OBS' output in Skype, Slack, and other apps. And lo and behold, it's actually possible on macOS as well. Thanks to the open-source solution of John Boiles and the other contributors.

📺 My latest Video

🐦 tweets of the week, 💜 special thanks to these inspiring people.

See you next week, Stefan

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7 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives To Level Up Your Presentations

Ashish Upadhyay

Apache openoffice, google slides, libreoffice, propresenter, seven free powerpoint alternatives to help design engaging presentations..

Think of presentations and you think of Microsoft PowerPoint. An industry standard, PowerPoint is a long-standing tool that offers an easy-to-navigate interface to create impactful presentations for business meetings, sales pitches, and more.

However, despite being widely used, Microsoft PowerPoint might not be the most accessible tool, especially if you’re looking for free software. PowerPoint is part of the Microsoft Office suite and can only be accessed by purchasing the suite. Small businesses, especially sales and marketing companies, need software that helps design impactful presentation slides without draining their finances. That’s where free PowerPoint alternatives come to the rescue.

We asked users about the PowerPoint alternative they considered when looking for presentation software for their business. Here are the seven best PowerPoint alternatives (listed alphabetically) they identified.

See the full list of Microsoft Powerpoint alternatives.

1st image for the blog article "7 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives To Level Up Your Presentations"

1. Apache OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is an open-source software suite that offers a presentation tool to design multimedia slides.

The presentation software lets you add 2D and 3D clip art, special effects (such as slide transitions), and animation to your presentations. It offers a built-in template library with a range of templates to use in your slides.

Using the tool’s multi-monitor support, you can showcase additional material while presenting your main slides. You also get access to a drawing and diagramming toolkit to draw custom shapes to add to your presentations.

Apache OpenOffice offers chat and email support. It has a desktop application for Linux, Mac, and Windows users.

Key Features

Collaboration tools
Data import/export
Database creation
Document generation
Office suite
Organizational charting

Trial/Free Version

Free Version

Device compatibility

Screenshots.

Creating a presentation in Apache OpenOffice

Here’s how Apache OpenOffice compares to PowerPoint

Both PowerPoint and Apache OpenOffice provide multiple slide views, such as the outline view and presenter view. However, Apache gives quick access to all its views from the main window, which PowerPoint doesn’t. Also, Apache OpenOffice has a better user interface and multiple hotkeys for quick access.

Platforms supported: Both PowerPoint and Apache OpenOffice are available as desktop applications for Mac and Windows. Apache OpenOffice is also available for Linux users.

Typical customers: Both tools are used by freelancers and small businesses. However, PowerPoint is also used by large enterprises.

Customer support: Both tools offer chat and email support.

Pricing: Apache OpenOffice is open source and free to use, whereas subscription for Microsoft 365 Personal Suite, containing PowerPoint, starts at $6.99 per user per month.

Canva is a design and presentation app that helps create infographics, logos, banners, and full-fledged presentation slides for team and client meetings.

The software offers a library of presentation templates you can access to add pre-built videos, logos, and graphics to your presentations. Additionally, Canva lets you collaborate with teammates by sharing access to the content dashboard.

You can add animation to your slides, customize the color scheme, and remove the background from images using the background remover tool. You can also use the version history to revert to a previous design instead of undoing all changes.

Canva offers chat and email support. It is web-based and also has applications for desktop and mobile (iOS and Android) devices.

Access controls/permissions
Artwork management
Asset categorization
Asset library
Asset sharing

Design catalog in Canva

Here’s how Canva compares to PowerPoint

Canva offers a variety of pre-built templates and font types compared to PowerPoint and is easier to navigate for first-time users. It also integrates with third-party social media platforms, making it easy for you to share graphics and presentations directly to an audience.

Platforms supported: You can download both tools as desktop applications. However, Canva also provides a web-based version and has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Typical customers: Both tools are used by freelancers, small to midsize businesses, and large enterprises.

Customer support: Both Canva and PowerPoint offer chat and email support.

Pricing: Pricing for PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month, while Canva’s paid plans start at $12.99 per user per month.

3. Google Slides

Google Slides is a presentation tool that is part of the Google Workspace suite. The software lets you create and sync slides, share them with your teammates, use comments, and assign action items to build presentations together.

With Google Slides, you get an easy-to-use presenter view for presenting slides during meetings, referencing speaker notes, showcasing text to viewers, and accessing live captions for audio content. You can integrate the software with third-party video calling platforms to present slides during online conferences.

Features such as smart compose and autocorrect help eliminate spelling and formatting errors automatically from your slides. An offline mode helps you work on your slides without an internet connection.

Audio file management
Customizable templates
Offline editing

Creating a presentation in Google Slides

Here’s how Google Slides compares to PowerPoint

Google Slides is an online tool and doesn’t require any software installation, whereas PowerPoint is more suited to offline work and comes as a desktop app that needs to be installed. Also, Google Slides is cloud based, and it offers better collaboration and is suitable for teams with many people.

Platforms supported: Google Slides is web-based, while PowerPoint is a desktop application.

Typical customers: Both tools are used by freelancers, small businesses, and large enterprises

Customer support: Both Google Slides and PowerPoint offer chat and email support.

Pricing: Google Slides is free to use. However, you can buy the Google Workspace Suite, which provides additional tools and more storage space, at $6 per user per month. The cost for PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month.

4. LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an open-source suite designed to create, manage, edit, and modify documents, spreadsheets, and presentation slides.

The software offers multiple editing and viewing modes for editing, outlining, and organizing text and images in slides. It lets you edit and manage notes that appear on individual slides. It also provides a slide sorter to locate and sort presentation slides.

With LibreOffice, you can manually navigate the slides during presentations or schedule their transition using a built-in timer.

Document classification
File conversion
File sharing
Full text search

Adding graphics in LibreOffice

Here’s how LibreOffice compares to PowerPoint

LibreOffice is an open-source solution, so it’s free to use. PowerPoint, on the other hand, needs a paid subscription. Also, LibreOffice works better for Linux users, as PowerPoint is unavailable for Linux. Additionally, you can customize LibreOffice by accessing its source code.

Platforms supported: PowerPoint is available for Mac and Windows, while LibreOffice is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Typical customers: Both software tools are used by freelancers and small businesses. However, large enterprises tend to use PowerPoint as well.

Customer support: Both PowerPoint and LibreOffice offer chat and email support.

Pricing: LibreOffice is free to use, while subscription for PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month.

Prezi is a presentation software tool designed for freelancers and small businesses. It helps create video presentations for business meetings and client pitches.

With Prezi, you get a canvas to build slides and add data to your presentations. Its Smart Structure feature helps arrange content within slides using a simple drag-and-drop option, without disrupting your layout. Another feature called Zoom Reveal lets you zoom in and focus on slides to look at critical details and change minute aspects of your presentation.

The software offers a built-in video tool that allows you to appear alongside your content while presenting slides during remote meetings or presentations.

Media library

Adding animations in Prezi

Here's how Prezi compares to PowerPoint

Prezi offers a better interface than PowerPoint and provides a zoom-in feature to oversee crucial details in slides. It is easier to use and integrates with third-party social media and video-calling platforms to share assets easily.

Platforms supported: PowerPoint is available for Mac and Windows, while Prezi is web-based.

Customer support: PowerPoint offers chat and email support, while Prezi provides chat, email, and phone support.

Pricing: Subscription for PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month. For Prezi, paid plans start at $12 per user per month.

6. ProPresenter

ProPresenter is a presentation tool for live events. It helps present slides to live audiences during sporting events, conferences, trade shows, and worship gatherings.

ProPresenter helps display lyrics, slides, and high-quality media. It provides transitions and onscreen rolling announcements for slides. It also lets you present your slides on multiple screens, each showcasing a different type of content. You can use the preview window to monitor all your screens.

The tool’s built-in library allows you to save all your presentation content. You can also automatically change the text color in a presentation slide at different time intervals.

Chord chart management
Drag & drop
Event management
For religious organizations
Layout & design

Slides in ProPresenter

Here’s how ProPresenter compares to PowerPoint

Both PowerPoint and ProPresenter are presentation tools, but ProPresenter lets you live stream your presentations and add announcement layers and timers with action triggers. Also, the software is more suited for live events and gatherings.

Platforms supported: PowerPoint is available on Windows and Mac, while ProPresenter is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. ProPresenter also has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Typical customers: Both tools are used by freelancers, small businesses, and large enterprises.

Customer support: Both PowerPoint and ProPresenter offer chat and email support.

Pricing: PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month, while you can rent ProPresenter for $99 per user per month.

Visme is a design and presentation tool that helps create graphics and presentation slides.

The software offers multiple pre-built templates to create slides for your presentations. It also lets you import your designs on the platform and use them for your slides.

With a drag-and-drop editor, you can arrange the layout and structure of your slides according to your preference. You can import a PowerPoint presentation and edit it in Visme. You can also record audio and video files with a built-in recorder and add them to your presentations.

Template library in Visme

Here’s how Visme compares to PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a stand-alone presentation tool. Visme, on the other hand, also lets you create graphics and infographics on its platform. The software offers analytics for graphics and presentations that you share publicly and assess engagement for your assets.

Platforms supported: PowerPoint is available on Windows and Mac as a desktop app. Visme, on the other hand, is a web-based tool.

Customer support: PowerPoint offers chat and email support. Visme offers phone, chat, and email support.

Pricing: Subscription for PowerPoint starts at $6.99 per user per month, whereas paid plans for Visme begin at $15 per user per month.

Look at all options before finalizing the best PowerPoint alternative

Despite its popularity, Microsoft PowerPoint may not always be the right choice if presentations are crucial for your business. You can, instead, choose the various software options discussed in this article.

If you want a completely free and customizable tool , select either Apache OpenOffice or OpenLibre. You can access the source code of these tools to customize their functionality per your preference.

If you create a lot of posters, designs, and infographics , Visme and Canva are good options, as both help create such assets and include them in presentations.

If real-time collaboration is crucial for your business , then Google Slides is worth a shot, as it provides collaboration for small and large teams alike.

If you want to do video presentations and feature them during remote meetings , Prezi, with its built-in video presentation functionality, is an ideal solution.

If your work involves live audiences and large gatherings , ProPresenter might be an ideal tool, as it helps stream presentations to larger groups and is more suited for outdoor events.

How did we choose these products? We didn’t—you did

At Capterra, we objectively select and rank products based on a methodology developed by our research team. Some vendors pay us when they receive web traffic, but this has no influence on our methodology.

Products featured in this article were identified in user reviews as the other products considered by buyers at the same time as PowerPoint. In this article, we highlighted the products with the highest number of other products considered mentions.

To be included in this list, alternative products had to provide the following core presentation software features: animations, transitions, media library.

Disclaimer: We conducted this analysis based on reviews and ratings data as of Jan. 24, 2022. In order to present the most up-to-date information, the product cards below show real-time ratings. Please note that this means the ratings’ value in the product card may not reflect the value of the ratings at the time of analysis.

Product research for this article was contributed by Himanshi Arora.

Was this article helpful?

About the author.

Ashish Upadhyay is a content writer at Capterra, helping small businesses identify the right software for their business needs by analyzing user reviews data for the highest rated products in relevant software categories. Prior to joining Capterra, he worked in insurtech, fintech, and real estate. Specializing in marketing, project, and IT management, Ashish’s works have been featured in MAST magazine and Medium. In his free time, he enjoys working out and playing video games.

Presentations done right

In Impress, creating and editing slides is very versatile thanks to different editing and view modes: Normal (for general editing), Outline (for organizing and outlining your text content), Notes (for viewing and editing the notes attached to a slide), Handout (for producing paper-based material), and Slide Sorter (for a thumbnail sheet view that lets you quickly locate and order your slides).

Rich content for outstanding presentations

Impress has a comprehensive range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to add style and sophistication to your presentation. What's more, you can bring your presentation to life with slide show animations and effects. The Fontworks tool lets you create attractive 2D and 3D images from text. Impress enables you to build and control 3D scenes incorporating a large variety of objects and components.

Stay in control - Master your performance

When the time comes to present your work, a powerful Slide Show mode gives you total command over how your slides are displayed and sequenced, so that you can focus on addressing your audience (which slides get shown; manual or timed slide transition; pointer visible or invisible; navigator visible/invisible; and much more).

Impress supports multiple monitors, and its bundled Presenter Console extension gives you even more control over your slide show, such as the ability to see the upcoming slide, view your slide notes, and control the presentation timer while the audience is looking at the current slide.

A touch of creativity

Take your presentations to the next level and save even more time by downloading templates from the LibreOffice template repository .

@libreoffice
@LibreOfficeBugs

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy) | Statutes (non-binding English translation) - Satzung (binding German version) | Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified, all text and images on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License . This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0 . “LibreOffice” and “The Document Foundation” are registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use thereof is explained in our trademark policy . LibreOffice was based on OpenOffice.org.

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The best presentation software

These powerpoint alternatives go beyond the basics..

The latest presentation apps have made it easier than ever to format slides and create professional-looking slideshows without giving off a "this is a template" vibe. Even standard PowerPoint alternatives have updated key features to make it easier than ever to collaborate and create presentations quickly, so you can spend more time prepping for your actual presentation.

If, like me, you've been using Google Slides unquestioningly for years, it's a whole new world out there. The newest crop of online presentation tools go way beyond the classic slideshow experience, with new features to keep your audience's attention, streamline the creation process with AI, and turn slide decks into videos and interactive conversations.

I've been testing these apps for the past few years, and this time, I spent several days tinkering with the top presentation software solutions out there to bring you the best of the best.

Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design

Prezi for non-linear, conversational presentations

Powtoon for video presentations

Genially for interactive, presenter-less presentations

Pitch for collaborating with your team on presentations

Zoho Show for a simple presentation app

Gamma for generative AI features

What makes the best presentation app?

How we evaluate and test apps.

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog .

When looking for the best presentation apps, I wanted utility players. After all, slideshows are used for just about everything, from pitch decks and product launches to class lectures and church sermons. With that in mind, here's what I was looking for:

Pre-built templates. The best presentation tools should have attractive, professional-looking templates to build presentations in a hurry.

Sharing and collaboration options. Whether you plan to share your webinar slides later, or you just want to collaborate with a coworker on a presentation, it should be easy to share files and collaborate in real-time.

Flexibility and customization options. Templates are great, but top presentation apps should enable you to customize just about everything—giving you the flexibility to build exactly what you need.

Affordability. Creating compelling presentations is important, but you shouldn't have to bust your budget to make it happen. With capable free tools on the market, affordability is a top consideration.

Standalone functionality. There's no reason to use multiple tools when one can do it all, so I didn't test any apps that require and work on top of another presentation app like PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Familiar, deck-based UI. For our purposes here, I only tested software that uses slides, with the familiar deck-based editor you expect from a "presentation" tool (versus, for example, a video creation app).

While many apps now offer AI features in one way or another, I found many of these features to be lacking still—they're often slow, struggle to pull in relevant imagery, and yield wildly inconsistent designs. For that reason, I opted not to make AI features a strict requirement (for now!), and I've still included apps that don't offer AI. (Of course, if you opt for one of those, you can still easily get AI-generated images from a separate tool and copy them into your presentation app of choice.)

Beyond that, I also looked for presentation apps that brought something unique to the table—features above and beyond what you can get for free from a legacy solution like PowerPoint or Google Slides. (And I opted not to test any brand new apps that are still in beta, since there are so many established options out there.)

Here's what my testing workflow looked like:

I went through any onboarding or guided tutorials.

I created a new deck, scanning through all available templates, noting how well-designed they were (and which were free versus paid).

I added new slides, deleted slides, edited text and images, and played around with other content types.

I changed presentation design settings, like color schemes and background images.

I reviewed and tested the sharing and collaboration options.

I tested out presenter view (when available).

After my first round of testing, I went back into the top performers to test any unique or niche features like AI, brand settings, interactive content, and more. With that, these are the best presentation apps I found—each one really brings something different or radically easy to the table.

The best presentation software: at a glance

The best free presentation software, canva (web, windows, mac, android, ios).

Canva, our pick for the best free presentation app

Canva pros:

Excellent free plan

Tons of amazing templates for all use cases

Feature-rich

Canva cons:

The Magic Design AI tool is still inconsistent and not super impressive

Canva offers one of the most robust free plans of all the presentation apps I tested. The app delays account creation until after you've created your first design, so you can get started building your presentation in seconds. Choose from an almost overwhelming number of beautiful templates (nearly all available for free), including those designed specifically for education or business use cases.

Anyone who's accidentally scrolled too far and been bumped to the next slide will appreciate Canva's editor interface, which eliminates that problem altogether with a smooth scroll that doesn't jump around. Choose from a handful of preset animations to add life to your presentations, or browse the library of audio and video files available to add. And Canva also has a number of options for sharing your presentation, including adding collaborators to your team, sharing directly to social media, and even via QR code.

Present directly from Canva, and let audience members submit their questions via Canva Live. Once you share a link to invite audience members to your presentation, they can send questions for you to answer. As the presenter, you'll see them pop up in your presenter view window, so you can keep the audience engaged and your presentation clear. Alternatively, record a presentation with a talking head bubble—you can even use an AI presenter here—to share remotely.

Canvas has added a number of AI-powered tools , but I wasn't super impressed by them yet. When I asked the Magic Design tool to generate a presentation from scratch, for example, the result was a bunch of unrelated images, inconsistent design, and surface-level copy. These features will likely improve in time, but for now, you're better off starting from one of Canva's many great templates.

Canva pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $119.99/year for 1 user and include additional features like Brand Kit, premium templates and stock assets, and additional AI-powered design tools.

The best presentation app for AI-powered design

Beautiful.ai (web, mac, windows).

Beautiful.ai pros:

True AI design

No fussing around with alignment

Still allows for customization

Beautiful.ai cons:

No free plan

Generative AI features aren't great yet

If you're like me, editing granular spacing issues is the absolute worst part of building a presentation. Beautiful.ai uses artificial intelligence to take a lot of the hassle and granular design requirements out of the presentation process, so you can focus on the content of a presentation without sacrificing professional design. If I needed to make presentations on a regular basis, this is the app I'd use.

Many apps have recently added AI design features, but Beautiful.ai has been doing it for years—and they've perfected the UX of AI design, ensuring the tool's reign as the most streamlined and user-friendly option for AI design.

The editor is a little different from most presentation apps, but it's still intuitive—and you'll start off with a quick two-minute tutorial. When creating a new slide, scroll through "inspiration slides" to find a layout you like; once you choose, the app will pull the layout and automatically adapt it to match the design of the rest of your presentation.

With 10 themes, several templated slides, over 40 fully-designed templates, and 23 different color palettes to choose from, Beautiful.ai strikes a perfect balance between automation and customization.

While Beautiful.ai doesn't offer a free plan, paid plans are reasonably priced and offer sharing and collaboration options that rival collab-focused apps like Google Slides. And speaking of Google, you can connect Beautiful.ai with Google Drive to save all your presentations there.

Note: I did test the newly released generative AI feature (called DesignerBot) and felt it wasn't much to write home about. It's great for adding individual slides to an existing presentation—automatically choosing the best layout and matching the design to the rest of the deck—but as with most other apps, it struggled to generate a quality presentation from scratch.

Beautiful.ai pricing: Plans start at $12/month for unlimited slides, AI content generation, viewer analytics, and more. Upgrade to a Team plan for $40/user/month to get extra collaboration and workspace features and custom brand controls.

If you're a founder looking for an AI presentation tool for your pitch deck, Slidebean is a great Beautiful.ai alternative for startups. The app offers a number of templates; a unique, content-first outline editor; and AI design help that you can toggle on or off for each slide. I didn't include it on the list mainly because of the price: the free plan is quite limited, and the paid all-access plan starts at $228/year.

The best presentation app for conversational presentations

Prezi (web, mac, windows, ios, android).

Prezi pros:

Doesn't restrict you to standard presentation structure

Lots of customization options

Prezi Video lets you display a presentation right over your webcam video

Prezi cons:

Steep learning curve

Struggling to squeeze information into a basic, linear presentation? Give Prezi a try. Unlike nearly all other presentation apps on the market, Prezi Present doesn't restrict the structure of your presentation to a straight line. The editor focuses on topics and subtopics and allows you to arrange them any way you want, so you can create a more conversational flow of information.

With the structural flexibility, you still get all the same customization features you expect from top presentation software, including fully-editable templates. There's a learning curve if you're unfamiliar with non-linear presentations, but templates offer a great jumping-off point, and Prezi's editor does a good job of making the process more approachable.

Plus, Prezi comes with two other apps: Prezi Design and Prezi Video. Prezi Video helps you take remote presentations to a new level. You can record a video where the presentation elements are displayed right over your webcam feed. Record and save the video to share later, or connect with your video conferencing tool of choice (including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet) to present live.

Prezi pricing: Free 14-day trial and a free plan that includes up to 5 visual projects; paid plans start at $5/month and include additional features like private presentations and Prezi Present.

The best presentation app for video presentations

Powtoon (web, ios, android).

Powtoon pros:

Timing automatically changes based on the content on the slide

Can toggle between slideshow and video

Can orient presentation as horizontal, vertical, or square

Powtoon cons:

Limited free plan

Powtoon makes it easy to create engaging videos by orienting the editor around a slide deck. Editing a Powtoon feels just like editing a presentation, but by the time you finish, you have a professional video.

You can edit your slides at any time, and when you hit play, a video plays through your deck—the feel is almost like an animated explainer video. Each slide includes the animations you choose and takes up as much time as is needed based on the content on the slide. Powtoon figures the timing automatically, and you can see in the bottom-right of the editor how much time is used on your current slide versus the total presentation. If you ever want to present as a slide deck, just toggle between Slideshow and Movie.

You'll likely need to subscribe to a paid plan to get the most out of Powtoon—like creating videos longer than three minutes, downloading them as MP4 files, and white-labeling your presentations—but doing so won't break the bank. Plus, you'll unlock tons of templates complete with animations and soundtracks.

One of my favorite Powtoon features is the ability to orient your video: you can choose horizontal orientation (like a normal presentation) or opt for vertical (for mobile) or square (for social media). When your presentation is ready, you can publish straight to YouTube, Wistia, Facebook Ads, and any number of other locations.

Powtoon pricing: Limited free plan available; paid plans start at $20/month and include white-labeling, priority support, additional storage, and more.

The best presentation app for interactive presentations

Genially (web).

Genially pros:

Don't need a presenter (it's interactive)

You can set universal branding guidelines

Unlimited creations on the free plan

Genially cons:

Free plan has some limitations worth looking into (e.g., can only make public presentations)

While many presentation apps are built for presenter-led decks, Genially 's interactive features and animated templates make it easy to build a self-led presentation. A variety of interactive buttons allow you to show viewers additional context on hover, have them skip to any page of your deck, and let them navigate to external links.

This presentation program offers a bunch of searchable templates, including some for business proposals, reports, social media presentations, and more (though most of those are available on premium plans only). Genially also includes Smart blocks —templated blocks of content for elements like data visualizations and image galleries.

My favorite feature is the brand settings. Premium users can set universal branding guidelines that include your logo, color scheme, fonts, images, and backgrounds, among other options. Think of them like a custom template, created and customized by you, that the whole team can use. Once set, your team can easily create on-brand presentations that automatically apply your brand settings, without even thinking about it.

Plus, Genially supports additional content like training materials, infographics, and interactive images—all subject to your brand presets.

Genially pricing: Free plan available with unlimited creations and views and access to templates; paid plans start at $7.49/month and include additional download options, privacy controls, offline viewing, premium templates, and more.

The best presentation app for collaborating with your team

Pitch (web, mac, windows, ios, android).

Pitch, our pick for the best presentation software for collaborating with your team

Pitch pros:

Google levels of collaboration

Assign slides to specific team members

Start live video calls straight from decks

Pitch cons:

User interface is a little different than you're used to

Need to collaborate on presentations with your team? Pitch is a Google Slides alternative that gets the job done. As far as decks go, Pitch includes all the beautifully-designed templates, customizability, and ease of use you expect from a top-notch presentation tool. But the app really shines when you add your team.

The right-hand sidebar is all about project management and collaboration: you can set and update the status of your deck, assign entire presentations or individual slides to team members, plus comment, react, or add notes. Save custom templates to make future presentations even easier and faster.

You can also invite collaborators from outside your company to work with you on individual decks. And if you opt for a paid plan, Pitch introduces workspace roles, shared private folders, and version history.

The "Go live" feature is a personal favorite—with just a click on the camera icon in the top-right, you can start a live video call. Any team members who open the presentation can hop in and collaborate in real-time.

Pitch pricing: Free plan offers unlimited presentations, custom templates, and live video collaboration; paid plans start at $8/user/month for additional workspace features, presentation analytics, and more.

The best simple presentation app

Zoho show (web, ios, android, chrome).

Zoho Show pros:

Simple and easy to use

Version history and ability to lock slides

Completely free

Zoho Show cons:

Templates are pretty basic

If you're looking for a simple, yet capable presentation app that's a step up from Google Slides, Zoho Show is a great option. It's completely free to use, offers a clean, intuitive editor, and includes a number of great templates.

While the handful of "Themes" offered are on the basic side, Zoho templates boast a more modern and professional design than much of what Google Slides or PowerPoint offer. And I love that you can set the font and color scheme for the whole template, right from the start.

The app doesn't skimp on collaboration or shareability either. You can invite collaborators via email or shareable link, and comments and version history make it easy to work together on presentations. Once you're ready to share, you can even broadcast your presentation to a remote audience right from within Zoho. Plus, you can one-click lock slides to prevent any more editing or hide individual slides to customize your presentation for different audiences.

You can even connect Zoho Show to Zapier , so you can do things like automatically create a presentation when something happens in one of the other apps you use most.

Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with 6,000+ apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more .

Zoho Show pricing: Free

The best presentation app for generative AI

Gamma (web).

Gamma pros:

Creates fully fleshed-out presentations from a prompt

Chatbot-like experience

Can still manually edit the presentation

Gamma cons:

Not as much granular customization

I tested a lot of apps claiming to use AI to up your presentation game, and Gamma 's generative features were head and shoulders above the crowd.

Simply give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document or article—approve the outline, and pick a theme. The app will take it from there and create a fully fleshed-out presentation. It's far from perfect, but Gamma produced the most useful jumping-off point of all the AI presentation apps I tested.

Here's the key: Gamma is much more geared toward the iterative, chatbot experience familiar to ChatGPT users. Click on the Edit with AI button at the top of the right-hand menu to open the chat, and you'll see suggested prompts—or you can type in your own requests for how Gamma should alter the presentation.

Once you've done all you can with prompts, simply close the chat box to manually add the finishing touches. While you do sacrifice some granular customizability in exchange for the AI features, you can still choose your visual theme, change slide layouts, format text, and add any images, videos, or even app and web content.

Gamma pricing: Free plan includes unlimited users, 1 custom theme, 400 AI deck credits, and basic view analytics; upgrade to the Pro plan ("coming soon," as of this writing) for $10/user/month to get additional AI credits, advanced view analytics, custom fonts, and more.

What about the old standbys?

You might notice a few major presentation players aren't on this list, including OGs Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides. These apps are perfectly adequate for creating basic presentations, and they're free if you have a Windows or Mac device or a Google account.

I didn't include them on the list because the presentation space has really developed in the last several years, and after testing them out, I found these behemoths haven't kept pace. If they weren't made by Microsoft/Apple/Google, I might not even be mentioning them. They're pretty basic tools, they're behind the curve when it comes to templates (both quantity and design), and they don't offer any uniquely valuable features like robust team collaboration, branding controls, video, and so on.

Some of these companies (think: Microsoft and Google) are openly working on some pretty impressive-sounding AI features, but they haven't been widely released to the public yet. Rest assured, I'm watching this space, and the next time we update this article, I'll retest tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides to see what new features are available.

In any case, if you're reading this, you're probably looking for an alternative that allows you to move away from one of the big 3, and as the presentation platforms featured above show, there's a ton to gain—in terms of features, usability, and more—when you do.

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Best presentation software of 2024

Make perfect slides for speeches and talks

Best overall

Best for branding, best for marketing, best for themes, best for media, best unique.

How we test

The best presentation software makes it simple and easy to create, manage, and share slideshow presentations.

A person setting up files to import into Powerpoint.

1. Best overall 2. Best for branding 3. Best for marketing 4. Best for themes 5. Best for media 6. Best unique 7. FAQs 8. How we test

Presentation software runs at the heart of business sales, management, and development, so it's important to ensure you have the best presentation software for your needs. This is especially when looking to share ideas, concepts, and workflows, and the ability to present these in a simple and understandable way is essential.

However, while presentation software has been traditionally limited to text and images, it has widened its ability to work with different media such as video and audio .

Therefore it's important for the best presentation software to not simply be easy and simple to use, but also be able to support additional media so that presentations can be more engaging, lively, and ultimately serve their purpose in educating and updating their intended audience.

Below we've listed the best presentation software currently on the market.

We've also listed the best free presentation software .

The best office software in the world is: Microsoft 365

<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=92X363&xcust=hawk-custom-tracking&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fproducts.office.com%2Fen-us%2Fcompare-all-microsoft-office-products%3Ftab%3D2&sref" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> The best office software in the world is: Microsoft 365 There are many different office software suites out there, but Microsoft Office remains the original and best, offering an unsurpassed range of features and functionality that rivals just can't match.

Even better, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=92X363&xcust=hawk-custom-tracking&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fproducts.office.com%2Fen-us%2Fcompare-all-microsoft-office-products%3Ftab%3D2&sref" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Microsoft 365 - previously branded as Office 365 - is a cloud-based solution which means you can use it on any computer, mobile device, or smartphone, without having to worry about compatibility. All your files are saved in the cloud and synced between devices, so you can begin work on a document at home or in the office, then continue working on it on the go.

<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=92X363&xcust=hawk-custom-tracking&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fproducts.office.com%2Fen-us%2Fcompare-all-microsoft-office-products%3Ftab%3D2&sref" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" data-link-merchant="SkimLinks - office.com"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> You can sign up to Microsoft 365 here .

The best presentation software of 2024 in full:

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

1. PowerPoint

Our expert review:

Reasons to buy

For most people, Microsoft 's PowerPoint remains the original and best of all the presentation software platforms out there. While other companies have managed to catch up and offer rival products worthy of consideration, the fact is that PowerPoint's familiar interface and ubiquitous availability means it remains a favorite for the majority of people.

On the one hand, it's long been a staple of the hugely popular Microsoft Office suite, meaning that for most users this is going to be the first - and last - presentation software they are going to need to use.

Additionally, Microsoft has made PowerPoint, along with their other office products, available as free apps (with limited functionality) on both iOS and Android for mobile use, meaning it's even harder to avoid them. And this is before we even consider the inclusion of PowerPoint in Microsoft's cloud-based Microsoft 365.

It does everything necessary that you'd expect of presentation software, allowing you to add text and media to a series of slides, to accompany a talk and other presentations. There are easy-to-use templates included to help spice things up a little, but even a general user with little experience of it is likely to find themselves able to use PowerPoint without much trouble at all.

Overall, it's hard to go wrong with PowerPoint, and although Microsoft 365 has a nominal cost, the apps are free to use even if they do have more limited functionality.

Read our full Microsoft PowerPoint review .

^ Back to the top

2. CustomShow

Reasons to avoid.

Branding says a lot about a business, and it’s something firms need to get right from day one – from a good logo to a suitable font. CustomShow is business presentation software that puts all these elements of branding first.

Using the system, you can design and present customized, branded presentations that reflect your company and the products you offer, featuring the aforementioned logo and custom fonts. As well as this, you get a slide library and analytics to ensure your presentations are a success.

What’s more, you can import presentations into the software, and use it to tweak them further. There’s also integration with SalesForce , and because the platform is cloud-based, you can access your presentations on computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Considering the focus on branding, this offering could be good for marketing and sales teams, and it's used by major companies such as HBO and CBS Interactive.

3. ClearSlide

Just like CustomShow, ClearSlide has a niche focus for companies. The platform is targeted at firms looking to generate successful marketing campaigns, pushing sales via presentations (and more), not least through a range of analytics and metrics to work for sales and marketing.

With the product, you can upload a range of files, including PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF, and Excel. ClearSlide is integrated with other platforms, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Salesforce.

This system is pretty complex and may offer too many irrelevant features for some businesses, but you can create customized content that reflects your company and the message you’re trying to get out to customers. There are also some good metrics and analysis features, and you can sign up for a free trial before making any decisions.

The real strength of ClearSlide comes from its focus on sales and marketing data, not least being able to track user engagement alongside other metrics.

4. Haiku Deck

Any presentation app will allow you to personalize your slides to at least some extent, but Haiku Deck goes one step further than the competition. It comes with a wide range of themes suited to different needs, and you also get access to 40 million free images from the Creative Commons collection.

When it comes to creating a presentation, you have the option to do so on the web, which means your presentation is accessible across a range of mobile devices as well as desktops. Regardless of the device used, you’re able to select from a variety of different fonts, layouts, and filters to make the perfect presentation.

The great thing about these various customization options is that they’re categorized into different industries and use cases. For instance, you’ll find themes for teaching, cooking, real estate, and startups. Most of the features require you to be online, but hopefully, you’ll have a sturdy net connection wherever you go.

5. SlideDog

It’s all too easy to end up creating a presentation that’s unappealing, and the last thing you want to do is make the audience fall asleep. SlideDog lets you combine almost any type of media to create a rich presentation that’s sure to keep the viewers’ peepers open, avoiding the ‘cookie cutter’ look that makes presentations seem dull.

Marketed as a web-based multimedia presentation tool, it gives you the ability to combine PowerPoint presentations, graphics, PDF files, Prezi presentations, web pages, pictures, videos, and movie clips. You can drag these into custom playlists and display them to your audience with ease.

You’re able to remotely control your presentations and playlists from your smartphone, the web, or a secondary computer, and there’s also the option to share slides in real-time. Audience members can even view your slide from their own devices by clicking a link. That’s a handy feature if you’re looking to create an immersive presentation experience.

SlideDog is probably the cheapest of the presentation software featured, with a free account that will cover the essential features. However, for live sharing and premium support, you need to upgrade.

Read our full SlideDog review .

Prezi is one of the more unique presentation tools. Instead of presenting your graphics and text in a slide-to-slide format, you can create highly visual and interactive presentation canvases with the goal of “emphasizing the relationship between the ideas”.

Presentations can also be tailored to the specific audience, as this is a flexible platform that’s capable of skipping ahead, or veering off into a side topic, without having to flip through all the slides to get to a particular bit.

For business users, there are a variety of handy tools available. By downloading Prezi , you can build and edit presentations with your colleagues in real-time, which is perfect for companies with teams based around the globe.

When you have created a presentation you’re happy with, you can present it live (in HD) and send a direct link to viewers. There are some analysis tools here, too – you can see who’s accessed your presentation, which parts of it, and for how long. The app is available for Mac and Windows devices.

Read our full Prezi review .

Presentation software FAQs

Which presentation software is best for you.

When deciding which presentation software to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes free platforms may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a paid platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, free and budget software options can sometimes prove limited when it comes to the variety of tools available, while higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require for your presentation needs.

How we tested the best presentation software

To test for the best presentation software we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar .

We've also featured the best alternatives to Microsoft Office .

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Nicholas Fearn is a freelance technology journalist and copywriter from the Welsh valleys. His work has appeared in publications such as the FT, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, The Next Web, T3, Android Central, Computer Weekly, and many others. He also happens to be a diehard Mariah Carey fan!

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The 8 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives

Professional results for tight budgets

Swansea University, Staffordshire University

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for creating professional-looking slideshows and presentations. However, the home version requires a Microsoft 365 subscription, and the free mobile app locks some features behind the sub as well. Fortunately, there are plenty of free PowerPoint software alternatives out there. Here's a look at some of the best options and how they compare to PowerPoint.

Best Direct PowerPoint Replacement: Google Slides

Very similar to PowerPoint.

Free to use.

Compatible with PowerPoint.

An internet connection is strongly recommended.

Where there's a need for an app, Google seems to have it covered. Google Slides is its PowerPoint equivalent and it's a lot like Microsoft's app. Very simple to use and offering full compatible with the alternative, you can access Google Slides via your browser and easily create custom presentations with audio and your own images, all entirely for free. It also offers great live collaboration features for teamwork purposes.

The only minor downside is you need an internet connection to at least get started but the service does also work offline with presentations syncing once you're back online.

Best for Designers: Prezi

Video editing included.

Can easily make data visualizations.

Stylish user interface.

Free option is pretty basic.

No support.

Presentations viewable by all.

Prezi is a great option for designers who have a vision but aren't technically proficient at achieving it. Its simple drag and drop interface makes it a breeze to organize your presentation just how you want it. Backed up with other Prezi apps that mean you can create videos or more stylish data visualizations than simple graphs, it's ideal for industries that are more visual than others. A series of pre-made templates makes it all the more attractive.

Prezi isn't as free as it seems though. To get the full wealth of features like advanced image editing, offline access, and narration, you'll need to pay a subscription fee.

Best for Quick Results: Zoho Show

A theme for every occasion.

Quick to create something.

Intuitive interface.

Need to be online to use it.

Simple to use yet highly effective is the sweet spot for quick results, and that's certainly the case with Zoho Show. You might need to be online to use it, but it's worth the connection with an intuitive user interface that adapts to what you need to do. You can easily embed videos, tweets, and images into your presentations with some neat transition effects making things more interesting.

Collaboration tools further sweeten the deal with annotation features meaning you can work together well as a team and fast.

Best for Animations: Powtoon

Great animation tools.

Easy to use.

Can export to social media platforms.

Branding applied on free presentations.

Best for Mass Branding: Renderforest

Plenty of options for expanding branding.

300MB cloud storage for free.

Unlimited exports.

Exports can be low in quality.

Content is watermarked.

RenderForest thinks of itself as more than just a PowerPoint alternative. It tackles everything you might need from creating logos to designing promo videos, music visualizations, landing pages, and websites. That's on top of its extensive animations and intro creation. That might sound intimidating but the service keeps things simple, so it won't take you long to mock something up and develop it.

Stick to the free version and there are some restrictions such as branding on your videos, lower quality logos, and so forth, but it's a solid start for an otherwise entirely free service. In particular, if you just need to concoct a quick 3-minute video for a presentation, RenderForest has you covered.

Best for Non-Designers: Visme

Plenty of templates to choose from.

Can set up five projects at once.

Charts and widgets support.

Limited cloud storage.

Visme branding on free plan.

Been asked to make a presentation and you don't know where to start? Visme is perfect for those that aren't well versed with graphics as it offers an extensive template library. The free plan limits your options a little but there are still some decent choices here. In addition, the service provides cool ways to make stats and data look exciting thanks to chart and widget support. It's all done through a simple drag and drop interface too that makes it super simple to add video and embed other content.

Just bear in mind that storage options are a little limited and everything on the free plan will contain Visme branding.

Best for Office Replacement: LibreOffice Impress

Full program rather than browser-based.

Extensive support.

Similar experience to Microsoft Office.

Requires installation.

Not quite as intuitive as alternatives.

LibreOffice is a popular free alternative to Microsoft Office, so it makes sense to use LibreOffice Impress if you want the closest experience to Microsoft's package. Unlike most of the others here, you need to install LibreOffice on your PC or Mac which means it's no good for Chromebooks or moving between different systems. However, in exchange, you get an intuitive experience that makes it simple to create slideshows, whether you're handing them out to a class or conference afterwards, or simply projecting them on screen.

Bear in mind you have to seek out templates yourself though which may be off-putting for the least technically minded user out there.

Download for:

Best for Apple Users: Keynote

Simple to use.

Apple Pencil support.

Cloud based as well as app based.

App is only on Apple devices.

Keynote is Apple's direct competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint and it's a great alternative, especially if you're a Mac user. With app support for iOS and Mac, it takes seconds to get started. Alternatively, PC users can use Keynote via the iCloud website and easily work across multiple devices.

One of the best features is the ability to use the Apple Pencil on an iPad to create diagrams or illustrations making it great for skilled artists. As well as that, Apple provides plenty of convenient templates for personal and professional projects.

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Elevate Your Presentations with FreeShow

A dynamic, user-friendly, and open-source presenter built for all of your presentations.

Download for Linux

Download another version:

Our Mission

Every year churches spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the software needed to operate effectively and efficiently. We believe that within the Church the talent exists to create all the software that churches need and provide it free of charge.

Changing how we handle church software can not only save a lot of money, but also bring believers together. If we use the skills within our own community, we can make the software that the Church needs without the costly expense. This way, more of our funds can go directly to the Church's mission instead of overhead. It's about working together, saving money, and focusing on what truly matters.

What is FreeShow

documentation

FreeShow Key Features

Powerful editing.

Limitless Customization: A Robust editor to alter text font, size, color, and add outlines, shadows, with almost boundless possibilities.

On-the-Fly Text Editing: Make live changes to your text during presentations with the Edit mode.

Timed & Automated Play

Autoplay: Set timers on slides for seamless transitions.

Countdowns: Easily let your congregation know when services will start with built in countdowns.

MIDI Controls: Receive MIDI commands to advance slides or send MIDI commands on slide change to trigger lighting and other changes.

Multiple Views

Simultaneous Outputs: Show the same presentation with different looks for your in-person audience, online audience, and a stage view for leaders.

Web Output: Users can connect to the presentation from their mobile devices. Perfect for pastor sermon notes or musicians.

NDI Support: We fully support output over NDI. No need for converters or SDI cables to send your lyrics to the computer running your online stream.

Remote Control: Allow your pastor or worship minister to control the show directly from their mobile device. Excellent for rehearsals of for smaller churches.

Template & Design

Sleek Templates: Modify your slide styles swiftly with a variety of templates.

Dynamic Layouts: Resize and organize your display areas as per your requirement.

Create & Show

Create Impactful Shows: Easily arrange slides and layouts for lyrics, presentations, events, and more, ensuring a smooth flow in your presentations.

Dynamic Media Integration: Effortlessly drag images and videos into your slides as backgrounds enhancing the visual appeal of your presentations.

Preview of software. Drawer with templates open.

Scripture & Lyric Integration

Scripture Integration: Easily look up passages and turn them into slides with one click.

Lyric Integration: It's no longer necessary to manually enter the lyrics to all the songs. Just enter the title and click search and be amazed as the slides are automatically created for you.

Distant background of person working on FreeShow

Plays Well With Others

Import: Import Presentations from PowerPoint, ProPresenter, EasyWorship, OpenSong, and other platforms.

Export: You're not locked in and can export your content in multiple formats at any time.

Cloud Sync: Allow multiple people within your church to work on presentations from different computers with cloud sync.

Computer sitting on desk with FreeShow open

How FreeShow Compares

Unlike other presentation software providers, we are not a business. We are a non-profit that exists solely to serve churches. Our biggest difference is in the name. FreeShow is and always will be free. This is possible due to the generous support of donors. Learn more. That isn't the only way FreeShow stands above the alternatives. It is also a very feature-rich application. Here is how we stack up.

What Others are Saying

Creating presentations is extremely easy. The quality of presentations we can create without having to spend a dime is mind-blowing.

Empower Your Church

Experience the power of open source in your church with worship presentation software designed to fit how you want to run your service. Fast, flexible and easy to use, you will have your service up and running in a few minutes. These features and a whole lot more at a price that can't be beat.

About OpenLP

Free Worship Presentation Software for your Church.

OpenLP is a feature rich open-source church presentation platform that doesn't tie you down to subscription renewals, device platforms, or even the presentation computer! With OpenLP, you're free to upgrade as soon as the next release comes out; you're free to roam the sanctuary with one of our remote apps, and you're free to install as many copies of the application as you want on Windows, Linux, Mac or FreeBSD. OpenLP continuously strives to deliver with excellence the technical elements of your church's worship service.

Cross platform between Linux, Windows, OS X and FreeBSD
Display songs, Bible verses, presentations, images and more
Control OpenLP remotely via your mobile web browser
Quickly and easily import songs from other popular presentation packages
Easy enough to use to get up and running in less than 10 minutes

Open Source

OpenLP is an open-source presentation platform created for use in churches large and small. Say good-bye to the hassle of subscription costs and device platforms; this software offers a wide variety of features that will greatly benefit your worship service.

But what does open-source mean? It means that the code that the developers write is available to you. But more than that, it means that OpenLP is, and always will be, free. Free to download, free to use, and free to give to all your friends. Being open-source also means that the developers are continuously working to improve this application, and welcome any comments or questions users may have.

Remote Control

Control your presentations from anywhere using OpenLP's first-of-its-kind remote system. With a built-in web app, you can access your service from any network-enabled device that has a browser and a touch screen. Change slides, or even change what is currently presenting from your phone. Search for songs, Bible verses, images and more without needing to touch the computer.

For those with Android or iOS devices there is an Android and an iOS app available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, to download for free. They have all the same features as the web app, packed into a native application.

Screenshots

Import songs from a variety of sources, tag verse types, set ordering of verses, add formatting, manage authors, search through songs and even add backing tracks to songs for when your band is on holiday.

Integration with VLC means that you can display almost any video file and play almost any audio file in OpenLP. Using VLC means that a wide variety of formats are supported.

Import Bibles from a number of formats, or even download a few verses you need from a Bible site, display verses in varying formats, easily search verses by scripture reference (e.g. Luke 12:10-17) or by phrase.

Custom Slides

Store your liturgy, announcements, or other custom slides in OpenLP. Just like a song, but with less structure, custom slides can also contain formatting and can be set to loop.

Presentations

Integration with PowerPoint, PowerPoint Viewer and LibreOffice Impress on Windows and LibreOffice Impress on Linux/FreeBSD means that you can import your presentations into OpenLP and control them via OpenLP.

Android/iOS Remote

Control OpenLP remotely using any tablet or phone using our remote apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Search, go live, control slides, and more. Also accessible via any phone's web browser.

Import pictures into OpenLP and organise them into folders. Create slide-shows by simply selecting multiple songs and drag-and-dropping the selection into the service, with auto-forwarding.

Built-in stage view accessible from any device with a web browser. Use any device on the local network as your stage monitor, meaning unlimited stage monitors without any extra hardware constraints.

Read the latest release announcement below

OpenLP 3.1.0 "Superb Seth" Released

Today we are proud to announce that OpenLP 3.1.0 "Superb Seth" has been released. On the surface, this might not seem like such a big release, since there seem to be very few new features, but if you dig a little deeper, the sheer number of bugs squashed tells another story. We have also made a number of changes under the hood to help carry OpenLP into the future.

Known Issues

Please read through the following issues carefully, so as to ...

Select your operating system, and then click on the link below the selector to download OpenLP for your platform.

Select a platform from the options above

OpenLP for Windows 10 and higher

OpenLP 3.1.1

64-bit Direct Download
32-bit Direct Download

OpenLP for Mac OS X 10.15 and higher

Direct Download

macOS Installation Instructions

Follow the instructions below or OpenLP will be corrupted.

Download OpenLP using the download button below

Open the downloaded file and drag the OpenLP app to your Applications folder

In your Applications folder, open the Utilities folder and run the Terminal app

In the Terminal app, type the following:

If you are on an Apple Silicon Mac, you may need to run this command too:

Now OpenLP should open correctly.

OpenLP for Linux

Select a distribution

Ubuntu Installation Instructions

OpenLP only supports Ubuntu from 23.04 and up .

To install OpenLP, either search for OpenLP in Software Center, or run the following command:

Previous versions of Ubuntu

This is for informational purposes and unsupported by OpenLP.

If you are running an older version of Ubuntu (22.04 and up), you can install the latest version of OpenLP by downloading the latest DEB file and installing it, running the following commands in a terminal:

Fedora Installation Instructions

Note: OpenLP only supports the most recent Fedora release.

To install OpenLP, either search for OpenLP in your GUI package manager, or run the following command:

Debian Installation Instructions

Note: OpenLP only supports Debian unstable.

Note: The version of OpenLP in the repositories at time lags behind the official release by a week or two.

Arch Linux Installation Instructions

OpenLP is available in the Arch User Repository . You will need to install an AUR helper if you haven't already.

Go to OpenLP in the AUR

Flatpak Installation

This Flatpak is experimental, and currently the OpenLP team does not support its use.

You will need the FlatHub repository installed in order to install dependencies.

OpenLP Source Code

Older versions can be downloaded from our downloads archive , but we do not support these versions .

Testimonials

Kudos to openlp.

At our Bible college, we decided to switch to OpenLP because it was free. We found it to be feature-rich and easy to use. It's also constantly improving. David Le Roux George Whitefield College, Cape Town

Hello, I love your software! Praise the Lord. The fact that you all are willing to provide this for free is amazing. Matt

OpenLP has made a tremendous positive impact on our services. The singing has increased tenfold as even those with poor eyesight can clearly see the onscreen lyrics. H. Mullan

Fantastic Software!

I have been using OpenLP for a couple of years and I found it very easy to navigate and despite never having used this type of software before was able to get a service up and running in a couple of minutes once I had installed the program. Peter G.

A Huge Blessing!

Just wanted to drop you a line to say thank you for a great product. I'm traveling around to small churches helping them upgrade their media environments. With little or no budgets, OpenLP has been a great help. I wish I could capture the look on a pastor's face when I tell him it's a free software. Brian

Great Product!

Sunday morning I set the up projector, gave a 10 minute lesson to the young lady who does our overheads. Everything went smoothly. She was so excited, the congregation thought it was great, our priest was ecstatic. John H. St Patrick's Church, Canada

Used by churches worldwide!

For Business

7 best presentation software in 2024

In 2024, the demand for engaging and dynamic presentations will be higher than ever, as they remain a crucial aspect of effective communication and information dissemination. Whether you’re a professional speaker, teacher, or business executive, having the right presentation software can make all the difference. Let’s take a look at the 7 best presentation software for 2024, each offering unique features to enhance your presentation.

Presentation Editors

Presentation editors remain a classic choice for creating slides-based presentations. They offer a wide range of design tools, animations, and transitions. Some editors provide predesigned templates that users can customize, saving time on design and layout.

Finished presentations can be easily exported to different file formats (PDF, PPTX, etc.), making them compatible with different software and presentation platforms.

Besides, many presentation editors, especially cloud-based ones like Google Slides, enable real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to edit and contribute simultaneously. This feature streamlines the editing and revision process, especially for remote teams.

Here are the tools you can use to create to create a presentation.

1. ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor

ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor is an open-source presentation software that can serve as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint with a simple and user-friendly interface. ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor works with PowerPoint presentations and can save them in PDF, PNG, and JPG. PPTX, PPT, ODP, and PPSX files are also supported.

You can make creative slides and add text, objects, tables, background patterns, etc. Keep your audience’s attention by adding transitions and animations to your presentation’s slides. Set the start time, duration, and delay parameters. Your presentation can also be enriched with visual content: charts, autoshapes, tables, OLE spreadsheets, equations, and SmartArt graphics.

In Presenter View, you can add notes to highlight important parts of your speech and conveniently navigate by switching to any desired slide with a single click.

Plugins extend the basic functionality of the ONLYOFFICE presentation editor. For example, you can insert YouTube videos, translate text in presentations using Google or DeepL, insert special symbols, edit images, and more.

The built-in AI assistant helps you perform tasks related to understanding or generating natural language, get accurate answers to questions, quickly find information, generate texts, create code, etc. right in the editor.

In the online version, ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor provides collaborative features. You can ensure prompt collaboration on slides, share your presentation, collaboratively edit it in real time, comment on slide elements, and communicate with colleagues online without leaving the editor.

You can create your presentations online with a free DocSpace account or use desktop apps for Windows, Linux, and macOS to work offline:

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2. Google Slides

Google Slides has gained popularity for its cloud-based collaboration features. It remains a powerful presentation tool.

Google Slides boasts an intuitive and user-friendly interface. The toolbar provides easy access to a variety of tools, allowing users to create and edit slides with efficiency. Google presentation supports a range of multimedia elements, including images, videos, charts, and graphs. Users can seamlessly integrate these elements to enhance the visual appeal of their presentations.

The library of ready-made templates offers presentations suitable for a variety of purposes, from business presentations to educational materials. This simplifies the creation process for users who can use them as the basis of their presentation.

Google Slides facilitates real-time collaboration, enabling users to work on presentations simultaneously, comment, and edit them, irrespective of their location. What’s more, it keeps a detailed version history, allowing users to track changes and revert to previous versions if needed.

Google Slides is freely accessible with a Google account, making it an excellent choice for individual users and small teams.

3. Canva Presentation

Canva Presentation is a dynamic and user-friendly tool for creating visually stunning presentations. Known for its simple design and creative flexibility, Canva provides users with a drag-and-drop intuitive interface, making it easy for users, regardless of their design expertise, to create visually appealing slides.

Canva Presentation allows users to easily integrate multimedia elements including images, icons, videos, and illustrations to create visually appealing presentations. It offers extensive customization options, allowing users to change colors, fonts, and layouts to match their brand or personal preferences. In addition, there are animation and transition features that allow you to add dynamic elements to your slides. The Brand Kit feature allows users to create a consistent brand identity across all their presentations. This includes saving brand colors, logos, and fonts for easy access.

Ready presentations can be exported to a variety of formats including PDF and PowerPoint.

Canva’s collaboration features allow team members to collaborate in real time, making it a suitable choice for group projects and remote teams.

The tool operates on a freemium model, providing free access to a wide range of features. Premium plans open up additional design elements, templates, and collaboration features to users with more specific needs.

AI presentation makers

Using AI presentation makers can significantly enhance the creation and delivery of presentations. They can automate the layout creation process. By analyzing your content, AI-powered tools can generate slides with optimized arrangements, saving you time on manual adjustments.

4. Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai is an innovative presentation creation tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize the design process, helping users create visually effective presentations effortlessly. With its intelligent design and automation offerings, Beautiful.ai is considered the best tool for creating presentations with artificial intelligence.

Beautiful.ai uses artificial intelligence to create intelligent design suggestions. Users enter their content, and an artificial intelligence algorithm analyzes it and suggests design layouts, ensuring visually appealing slides by optimizing the placement of text, images, and other elements.

Users can export presentations in various formats, including PDF and PowerPoint, ensuring compatibility with different platforms and presentation tools.

Gamma is another AI presentation maker that can create presentations for you.

It uses a chatbot principle similar to ChatGPT. You can give the app a topic or upload an outline, notes, or any other document or article. The app will take it as a basis and create a complete presentation. You may have to make additional changes to the resulting output, but Gamma will help you create the most useful starting point.

You can choose a visual theme, customize slide layouts, format text, and add any images, videos, and even app and website content.

Gamma pricing: The free plan includes unlimited users, 1 custom theme, 400 AI deck credits, and basic view analytics; upgrade to the Pro plan (“coming soon,” as of this writing) for $10 per user per month to get additional AI credits, advanced view analytics, custom fonts, and more.

Presentation websites

Presentation websites are typically cloud-based, allowing users to create, edit, and access presentations from any device with an internet connection. Many of them provide tools for collaborative work and are accessible from all devices, which gives flexibility and productivity. Besides, presentation websites often offer a wide variety of professionally designed templates from their online library.

Prezi is an online presentation creation project that features an innovative approach to visual storytelling. Unlike traditional slide-based presentations, Prezi offers a non-linear canvas that allows users to zoom, pan, and create fluid connections between ideas.

A distinctive feature of Prezi is the zoom and pan feature that allows users to create dynamic and visually appealing presentations. Users can create tracks that zoom in and out of content and create custom paths for their presentations, determining the sequence in which content is presented to the audience.

Prezi features the integration of charts, graphs, and other visual aids, allowing users to present complex data in an engaging way.

Prezi offers a free version with basic features, suitable for individual users or those exploring the platform. The paid version comes with additional features, storage, and collaboration tools for users with more specific and advanced requirements.

7. Slidebean

Slidebean is an online presentation maker that stands out for its streamlined design process and AI-driven features. This presentation website uses artificial intelligence capabilities to calculate the design of new slides. The platform offers a large number of professional templates, each with text suggestions adapted to different industries. Slidebean also allows you to integrate logos, enhancing your branding.

In addition, Slidebean offers a presenter view, allowing presenters to see speaker notes, upcoming slides, and other presentation details, enhancing the delivery experience during live presentations. The tracking feature provides valuable insights into audience engagement, giving you the ability to improve your content and make your presentations successful.

How to choose the best presentation software

When choosing the best presentation software, consider factors that match your needs.

If you plan to create a lengthy presentation with many features, go for professional presentation editors. Check if the program allows you to easily add images, videos, and audio. Make sure the program is easy to use, especially if you are not a technology expert. Look for templates and customization options to save time and personalize your presentations.

Consider your collaboration needs – if you will be working with others, choose programs with good collaboration features.

Keeping these factors in mind will help you choose software that suits your needs and helps you create effective presentations.

Useful links

ONLYOFFICE Docs v7.5

ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors v7.5

7 useful tips for preparing a presentation

Transitions in PowerPoint presentations: a big guide

Top 3 open-source alternatives to PowerPoint

What is a PPTX file?

XLS vs XLSX: differences and ways to convert between

How to contribute to ONLYOFFICE blog: a brief guide for writers

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Microsoft Pitched OpenAI’s DALL-E as Battlefield Tool for U.S. Military

Any battlefield use of the software would be a dramatic turnaround for OpenAI, which describes its mission as developing AI that can benefit all of humanity.

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Microsoft last year proposed using OpenAI’s mega-popular image generation tool, DALL-E, to help the Department of Defense build software to execute military operations, according to internal presentation materials reviewed by The Intercept. The revelation comes just months after OpenAI silently ended its prohibition against military work.

The Microsoft presentation deck, titled “ Generative AI with DoD Data ,” provides a general breakdown of how the Pentagon can make use of OpenAI’s machine learning tools, including the immensely popular ChatGPT text generator and DALL-E image creator, for tasks ranging from document analysis to machine maintenance. (Microsoft invested $10 billion in the ascendant machine learning startup last year, and the two businesses have become tightly intertwined. In February, The Intercept and other digital news outlets sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.)

The Microsoft document is drawn from a large cache of materials presented at an October 2023 Department of Defense “AI literacy” training seminar hosted by the U.S. Space Force in Los Angeles. The event included a variety of presentation from machine learning firms, including Microsoft and OpenAI, about what they have to offer the Pentagon.

The publicly accessible files were found on the website of Alethia Labs, a nonprofit consultancy that helps the federal government with technology acquisition, and discovered by journalist Jack Poulson . On Wednesday, Poulson published a broader investigation into the presentation materials. Alethia Labs has worked closely with the Pentagon to help it quickly integrate artificial intelligence tools into its arsenal, and since last year has contracted with the Pentagon’s main AI office. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

One page of the Microsoft presentation highlights a variety of “common” federal uses for OpenAI, including for defense. One bullet point under “Advanced Computer Vision Training” reads: “Battle Management Systems: Using the DALL-E models to create images to train battle management systems.” Just as it sounds, a battle management system is a command-and-control software suite that provides military leaders with a situational overview of a combat scenario, allowing them to coordinate things like artillery fire, airstrike target identification, and troop movements. The reference to computer vision training suggests artificial images conjured by DALL-E could help Pentagon computers better “see” conditions on the battlefield, a particular boon for finding — and annihilating — targets.

In an emailed statement, Microsoft told The Intercept that while it had pitched the Pentagon on using DALL-E to train its battlefield software, it had not begun doing so. “This is an example of potential use cases that was informed by conversations with customers on the art of the possible with generative AI.” Microsoft, which declined to attribute the remark to anyone at the company, did not explain why a “potential” use case was labeled as a “common” use in its presentation.

OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeous said OpenAI was not involved in the Microsoft pitch and that it had not sold any tools to the Department of Defense. “OpenAI’s policies prohibit the use of our tools to develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property,” she wrote. “We were not involved in this presentation and have not had conversations with U.S. defense agencies regarding the hypothetical use cases it describes.”

Bourgeous added, “We have no evidence that OpenAI models have been used in this capacity. OpenAI has no partnerships with defense agencies to make use of our API or ChatGPT for such purposes.”

At the time of the presentation, OpenAI’s policies seemingly would have prohibited a military use of DALL-E. Microsoft told The Intercept that if the Pentagon used DALL-E or any other OpenAI tool through a contract with Microsoft, it would be subject to the usage policies of the latter company. Still, any use of OpenAI technology to help the Pentagon more effectively kill and destroy would be a dramatic turnaround for the company, which describes its mission as developing safety-focused artificial intelligence that can benefit all of humanity.

“It’s not possible to build a battle management system in a way that doesn’t, at least indirectly, contribute to civilian harm.”

“It’s not possible to build a battle management system in a way that doesn’t, at least indirectly, contribute to civilian harm,” Brianna Rosen, a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government who focuses on technology ethics.

Rosen, who worked on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, explained that OpenAI’s technologies could just as easily be used to help people as to harm them, and their use for the latter by any government is a political choice. “Unless firms such as OpenAI have written guarantees from governments they will not use the technology to harm civilians — which still probably would not be legally-binding — I fail to see any way in which companies can state with confidence that the technology will not be used (or misused) in ways that have kinetic effects.”

The presentation document provides no further detail about how exactly battlefield management systems could use DALL-E. The reference to training these systems, however, suggests that DALL-E could be to used to furnish the Pentagon with so-called synthetic training data: artificially created scenes that closely resemble germane, real-world imagery. Military software designed to detect enemy targets on the ground, for instance, could be shown a massive quantity of fake aerial images of landing strips or tank columns generated by DALL-E in order to better recognize such targets in the real world.

Even putting aside ethical objections, the efficacy of such an approach is debatable. “It’s known that a model’s accuracy and ability to process data accurately deteriorates every time it is further trained on AI-generated content,” said Heidy Khlaaf, a machine learning safety engineer who previously contracted with OpenAI. “Dall-E images are far from accurate and do not generate images reflective even close to our physical reality, even if they were to be fine-tuned on inputs of Battlefield management system. These generative image models cannot even accurately generate a correct number of limbs or fingers, how can we rely on them to be accurate with respect to a realistic field presence?”

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In an interview last month with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Capt. M. Xavier Lugo of the U.S. Navy envisioned a military application of synthetic data exactly like the kind DALL-E can crank out, suggesting that faked images could be used to train drones to better see and recognize the world beneath them.

Lugo, mission commander of the Pentagon’s generative AI task force and member of the Department of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, is listed as a contact at the end of the Microsoft presentation document. The presentation was made by Microsoft employee Nehemiah Kuhns, a “technology specialist” working on the Space Force and Air Force.

The Air Force is currently building the Advanced Battle Management System, its portion of a broader multibillion-dollar Pentagon project called the Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which aims to network together the entire U.S. military for expanded communication across branches, AI-powered data analysis, and, ultimately, an improved capacity to kill. Through JADC2, as the project is known, the Pentagon envisions a near-future in which Air Force drone cameras, Navy warship radar, Army tanks, and Marines on the ground all seamlessly exchange data about the enemy in order to better destroy them.

On April 3, U.S. Central Command revealed it had already begun using elements of JADC2 in the Middle East.

The Department of Defense didn’t answer specific questions about the Microsoft presentation, but spokesperson Tim Gorman told The Intercept that “the [Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s] mission is to accelerate the adoption of data, analytics, and AI across DoD. As part of that mission, we lead activities to educate the workforce on data and AI literacy, and how to apply existing and emerging commercial technologies to DoD mission areas.”

While Microsoft has long reaped billions from defense contracts, OpenAI only recently acknowledged it would begin working with the Department of Defense. In response to The Intercept’s January report on OpenAI’s military-industrial about face, the company’s spokesperson Niko Felix said that even under the loosened language, “Our policy does not allow our tools to be used to harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property.”

“The point is you’re contributing to preparation for warfighting.”

Whether the Pentagon’s use of OpenAI software would entail harm or not might depend on a literal view of how these technologies work, akin to arguments that the company that helps build the gun or trains the shooter is not responsible for where it’s aimed or pulling the trigger. “They may be threading a needle between the use of [generative AI] to create synthetic training data and its use in actual warfighting,” said Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University. “But that would be a spurious distinction in my view, because the point is you’re contributing to preparation for warfighting.”

Unlike OpenAI, Microsoft has little pretense about forgoing harm in its “responsible AI” document and openly promotes the military use of its machine learning tools .

OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

Following its policy reversal, OpenAI was also quick to emphasize to the public and business press that its collaboration with the military was of a defensive, peaceful nature. In a January interview at Davos responding to The Intercept’s reporting, OpenAI vice president of global affairs Anna Makanju assured panel attendees that the company’s military work was focused on applications like cybersecurity initiatives and veteran suicide prevention, and that the company’s groundbreaking machine learning tools were still forbidden from causing harm or destruction.

Contributing to the development of a battle management system, however, would place OpenAI’s military work far closer to warfare itself. While OpenAI’s claim of avoiding direct harm could be technically true if its software does not directly operate weapons systems, Khlaaf, the machine learning safety engineer, said, its “use in other systems, such as military operation planning or battlefield assessments” would ultimately impact “where weapons are deployed or missions are carried out.”

Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a battle whose primary purpose isn’t causing bodily harm and property damage. An Air Force press release from March, for example, describes a recent battle management system exercise as delivering “lethality at the speed of data.”

Other materials from the AI literacy seminar series make clear that “harm” is, ultimately, the point. A slide from a welcome presentation given the day before Microsoft’s asks the question, “Why should we care?” The answer: “We have to kill bad guys.” In a nod to the “literacy” aspect of the seminar, the slide adds, “We need to know what we’re talking about… and we don’t yet.”

Update: April 11, 2024 This article was updated to clarify Microsoft’s promotion of its work with the Department of Defense.

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The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind

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The scourge of software supply chain attacks —an increasingly common hacking technique that hides malicious code in a widely used legitimate program—can take many forms. Hackers can penetrate an update server to seed out their malware, or even break into the network where the software was developed to corrupt it at the source. Or, in the case of one particularly insidious software supply chain attacker known as Jia Tan, they can spend two years politely and enthusiastically volunteering to help.

Padlock with computer motherboard architecture inside

By Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

Over the weekend, the cybersecurity and open source software community was shocked by the news that a relatively new, experimental version of XZ Utils —a compression utility integrated into many popular distributions of Linux—contained a backdoor that would have allowed hackers in possession of a specific private key to connect to the backdoored system and run their own commands as an administrator. Only some chance detective work carried out by a lone Microsoft engineer, Andres Freund—who’d detected a strange delay in how the remote connection protocol SSH was running in a version of the Linux variant Debian—caught the spy trick before it ended up in many millions of systems worldwide.

That XZ Utils backdoor, it’s now clear, was inserted by none other than the lead open source steward of XZ Utils, a developer who went by the name Jia Tan. In the wake of the backdoor's discovery, a mystery percolating through the tech world remains: Who is Jia Tan, and who did he, or she—or very likely they —truly work for?

Jia Tan exploited open source software’s crowdsourced approach to coding whereby anyone can suggest changes to a program on code repositories like GitHub, where the changes are reviewed by other coders before they’re integrated into the software. Peeling back Jia Tan’s documented history in the open source programming world reveals that they first appeared in November 2021 with the GitHub username JiaT75, then made contributions to other open source projects using the name Jia Tan, or sometimes Jia Cheong Tan, for more than a year before beginning to submit changes to XZ Utils.

By January 2023, Jia Tan’s code was being integrated into XZ Utils. Over the next year, they would largely take control of the project from its original maintainer, Lasse Collin, a change driven in part by nagging emails sent to Collin by a handful users complaining about slow updates. (Whether those users were unwitting accomplices, or actually working with Jia Tan to persuade Collin to relinquish control, remains unclear. None of the users replied to requests for comment from WIRED.) Finally, Jia Tan added their stealthy backdoor to a version of XZ Utils in February of this year.

That inhumanly patient approach, along with the technical features and sophistication of the backdoor itself, has led many in the cybersecurity world to believe that Jia Tan must, in fact, be a handle operated by state-sponsored hackers—and very good ones. “This multiyear operation was very cunning, and the implanted backdoor is incredibly deceptive,” says Costin Raiu, who until last year served as the most senior researcher and head of the global research and analysis team at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. “I’d say this is a nation-state-backed group, one with long-term goals in mind that affords to invest into multiyear infiltration of open source projects.”

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As for which nation, Raiu names the usual suspects: China, Russia, and North Korea. He says it’s still too early to know the true culprit. “One thing is for sure clear,” he adds. “This was more cunning than all previous software supply chain attacks I’ve seen.”

A Very Private, Very Busy Programmer

As scrutiny around Jia Tan has mounted since the revelation of the XZ Utils backdoor last Friday, researchers have noted that the persona has remarkably good operational security. Independent security reporter Brian Krebs writes that he could find “zero trace” of Jia Tan’s email address outside of the messages they sent to fellow open source contributors, even after scouring breached databases. Jia Tan also appears to have routed all their communications through a VPN with a Singaporean IP address .

The lack of any other online presence linked to Jia Tan points toward the account being a “single-purpose invented persona” and indicates how much sophistication, patience, and thought was put into developing the backdoor, says Will Thomas, an instructor at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training firm. The Jia Tan persona has vanished since the backdoor was discovered, and emails sent by WIRED to a Gmail address linked to it have gone unanswered. Jia Tan’s GitHub account has been suspended, a company spokesperson tells WIRED.

In fact, the only real footprints Jia Tan appears to have left behind were their contributions to the open source development community, where they were a prolific contributor: Disturbingly, Jia Tan’s first code change was to the “libarchive” compression library, another very widely used open source component. That first change swapped one function with a less secure alternative, potentially attempting another malicious code change, notes developer Evan Boehs in his detailed Jia Tan timeline —though the problem has since been fixed.

In total, Jia Tan made 6,000 code changes to at least seven projects between 2021 and February 2024, according to Michael Scott, the cofounder of the cybersecurity firm NetRise who previously worked in the Marine Corps cyberwarfare group under US Cyber Command. Determining all the branching effects of those changes is nearly impossible, Scott says. Because those changes, known as “commits,” are often batched into collections in a process known as “squashing commits,” it’s not always apparent which exact changes were made by Jia Tan. And the difficulty of tracing which of the many versions of a library like libarchive ended up in which software adds yet another layer of obfuscation. “It’s going to be a bit of a mess pulling on this thread and trying to figure out where all these things ended up,” Scott says.

Scott notes that, throughout this time, Jia Tan was also emailing with other contributors, writing in a “very concise, very dry,” but not unfriendly tone that Scott compares to the output of ChatGPT. “Nice job to both of you for getting this feature as far as it is already,” Jia Tan wrote at one point. Or, at another: “Let me know your thoughts on these patches when you have a chance :)” Jordi Mas, a developer who contributed to XZ Utils and had emailed “feedback” from Jia Tan, says in retrospect that the account went to extra levels to build trust in the persona.

Ultimately, Scott argues that those three years of code changes and polite emails were likely not spent sabotaging multiple software projects, but rather building up a history of credibility in preparation for the sabotage of XZ Utils specifically—and potentially other projects in the future. “He just never got to that step because we got lucky and found his stuff,” says Scott. “So that’s burned now, and he’s gonna have to go back to square one.”

Technical Ticks and Time Zones

Despite Jia Tan’s persona as a single individual, their yearslong preparation is a hallmark of a well-organized state-sponsored hacker group, argues Raiu, the former Kaspersky lead researcher. So too are the technical hallmarks of the XZ Utils malicious code that Jia Tan added. Raiu notes that, at a glance, the code truly looks like a compression tool. “It’s written in a very subversive manner,” he says. It’s also a “passive” backdoor, Raiu says, so it wouldn’t reach out to a command-and-control server that might help identify the backdoor’s operator. Instead, it waits for the operator to connect to the target machine via SSH and authenticate with a private key—one generated with a particularly strong cryptographic function known as ED448.

The backdoor’s careful design could be the work of US hackers, Raiu notes, but he suggests that’s unlikely, since the US wouldn’t typically sabotage open source projects—and if it did, the National Security Agency would probably use a quantum-resistant cryptographic function, which ED448 is not. That leaves non-US groups with a history of supply chain attacks, Raiu suggests, like China’s APT41 , North Korea’s Lazarus Group , and Russia’s APT29 .

At a glance, Jia Tan certainly looks East Asian—or is meant to. The time zone of Jia Tan’s commits are UTC+8: That’s China’s time zone, and only an hour off from North Korea’s. However, an analysis by two researchers , Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger, suggests that Jia Tan may have simply changed the time zone of their computer to UTC+8 before every commit. In fact, several commits were made with a computer set to an Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zone instead, perhaps when Jia Tan forgot to make the change.

“Another indication that they are not from China is the fact that they worked on notable Chinese holidays,” say Karty and Henniger, students at Dartmouth College and the Technical University of Munich, respectively. They note that Jia Tan also didn't submit new code on Christmas or New Year's. Boehs, the developer, adds that much of the work starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm for Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zones. “The time range of commits suggests this was not some project that they did outside of work,” Boehs says.

Though that leaves countries like Iran and Israel as possibilities, the majority of clues lead back to Russia, and specifically Russia’s APT29 hacking group, argues Dave Aitel, a former NSA hacker and founder of the cybersecurity firm Immunity. Aitel points out that APT29—widely believed to work for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the SVR—has a reputation for technical care of a kind that few other hacker groups show. APT29 also carried out the Solar Winds compromise , perhaps the most deftly coordinated and effective software supply chain attack in history. That operation matches the style of the XZ Utils backdoor far more than the cruder supply chain attacks of APT41 or Lazarus, by comparison.

“It could very well be someone else,” says Aitel. “But I mean, if you’re looking for the most sophisticated supply chain attacks on the planet, that’s going to be our dear friends at the SVR.”

Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one person working alone. Instead, it seems clear that the persona was the online embodiment of a new tactic from a new, well-organized organization—a tactic that nearly worked. That means we should expect to see Jia Tan return by other names: seemingly polite and enthusiastic contributors to open source projects, hiding a government’s secret intentions in their code commits.

Updated 4/3/2024 at 12:30 pm ET to note the possibility of Israeli or Iranian involvement.

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Google Workspace

Image Credits: Google

Among the new features are voice prompts to kick off the AI-based “Help me write” feature in Gmail while on the go . Another one for Gmail includes a way to instantly turn rough email drafts into a more polished email. Over on Sheets, you can send out a customizable alert when a certain field changes. Meanwhile, a new set of templates make starting a new spreadsheet easier. For the Doc lovers, there is support for tabs now. This is good because, according to the company, you can “organize information in a single document instead of linking to multiple documents or searching through Drive.” Of course, subscribers get the goodies first. Read more

Google also seems to have plans to monetize two of its new AI features for the Google Workspace productivity suite. This will look like $10/month/user add-on packages. One will be for the new AI meetings and messaging add-on that takes notes for you, provides meeting summaries and translates content into 69 languages. The other is for the introduced AI security package, which helps admins keep Google Workspace content more secure. Read more

In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. The company pulled it shortly after it was found to be randomly injecting gender and racial diversity into prompts about people. This resulted in some offensive inaccuracies. While we waited for an eventual re-release, Google came out with the enhanced image-generating tool, Imagen 2 . This is inside its Vertex AI developer platform and has more of a focus on enterprise. Imagen 2 is now generally available and comes with some fun new capabilities, including inpainting and outpainting. There’s also what Google’s calling “text-to-live images” where you can now create short, four-second videos from text prompts, along the lines of AI-powered clip generation tools like Runway , Pika and Irreverent Labs . Read more

Vertex AI Agent Builder

We can all use a little bit of help, right? Meet Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder, a new tool to help companies build AI agents.

“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. “You can build and deploy production-ready, generative AI-powered conversational agents and instruct and guide them the same way that you do humans to improve the quality and correctness of answers from models.”

To do this, the company uses a process called “grounding,” where the answers are tied to something considered to be a reliable source. In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate). Read more

Gemini comes to databases

Google calls Gemini in Databases a collection of features that “simplify all aspects of the database journey.” In less jargony language, it’s a bundle of AI-powered, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who are creating, monitoring and migrating app databases. Read more

Google renews its focus on data sovereignty

closed padlocks on a green background with the exception of one lock, in red, that's open, symbolizing badly handled data breaches

Image Credits: MirageC / Getty Images

Google has offered cloud sovereignties before, but now it is focused more on partnerships rather than building them out on their own. Read more

Security tools get some AI love

Data flowing through a cloud on a blue background.

Image Credits: Getty Images

Google jumps on board the productizing generative AI-powered security tool train with a number of new products and features aimed at large companies. Those include Threat Intelligence, which can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code. It also lets users perform natural language searches for ongoing threats or indicators of compromise. Another is Chronicle, Google’s cybersecurity telemetry offering for cloud customers to assist with cybersecurity investigations. The third is the enterprise cybersecurity and risk management suite Security Command Center. Read more

Nvidia’s Blackwell platform

One of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. Yes, that seems so far away. However, here is what to look forward to: support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and GB200 NBL72 for large language model (LLM) training. Oh, and we can reveal that the GB200 servers will be liquid-cooled. Read more

Chrome Enterprise Premium

Meanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium . What’s new here is that it mainly pertains mostly to security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done. Read more

Gemini 1.5 Pro

Everyone can use a “half” every now and again, and Google obliges with Gemini 1.5 Pro. This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform. Here’s what you get for that half: T he amount of context that it can process, which is from 128,000 tokens up to 1 million tokens, where “tokens” refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”). Read more

Open source tools

Open source code on a computer screen highlighted by a magnifying glass.

At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company debuted a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. One is Max Diffusion, which is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models that run on XLA, or Accelerated Linear Algebra, devices. Then there is JetStream, a new engine to run generative AI models. The third is MaxTest, a collection of text-generating AI models targeting TPUs and Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. Read more

We don’t know a lot about this one, however, here is what we do know : Google Cloud joins AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. Frederic Lardinois writes that “based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.” Read more

The entire Google Cloud Next keynote

If all of that isn’t enough of an AI and cloud update deluge, you can watch the entire event keynote via the embed below.

Google Cloud Next’s developer keynote

On Wednesday, Google held a separate keynote for developers . They offered a deeper dive into the ins and outs of a number of tools outlined during the Tuesday keynote, including Gemini Cloud Assist, using AI for product recommendations and chat agents, ending with a showcase from Hugging Face. You can check out the full keynote below.

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Submit your proposal for all things open – doing business with open source.

The supply-side value of widely-used Open Source software is estimated to be worth $4.15 billion, and the demand-side value is much larger, at $8.8 trillion. And yet, maintaining a healthy business while producing Open Source software feels more like an art than a science.

The Open Source Initiative wants to facilitate discussions about doing business with and for Open Source.

If you run a business producing Open Source products or your company’s revenue depends on Open Source in any way, we want to hear from you! Share your insights on:

How you balance the needs of paying customers with those of partners and non-paying users
How you organize your sales, marketing, product and engineering teams to deal with your communities
What makes you decide where to draw the lines between pushing fixes upstream and maintaining a private fork
Where do you see the value of copyleft in software-as-a-service
Why you chose a specific license for your product offering and how do you deal with external contributions
What trends do you see in the ecosystem and what effects are these having

We want to hear about these and other topics, from personal experiences and research. Our hope is to provide the ecosystem with accessible resources to better understand the problem space and find solutions.

How it works

We’re tired of panel discussions that start and end at a conference. We want to share knowledge to the widest possible base. We’re going to have a panel at All Things Open, with preparation work before the event.

You’ll send your proposals as pitches to OpenSource.net , a title and abstract (300 words max) and a short bio.
Our staff will review the pitches and get back to you, selecting as many articles as deemed interesting for publication.
We’ll also pick the authors of five of the most interesting articles to be speakers at a panel discussion at ATO, on October 29 in Raleigh, NC. Full conference passes will be offered.
Authors of accepted pitches to write a full article (1,200-1,500 words) to be published leading up to ATO.
We’ll also select other pitches worth developing into full-length articles but, for any reason, didn’t fit into the panel discussion.

Note: Please read and follow the guidelines carefully before submitting your proposal.

Submission Requirements

Applications should be submitted via web form
Add a title and a pitch, 300 words maximum
Include a brief bio, highlighting why you’re the right person to write about this topic
Submissions should be well-structured, clear and concise

Evaluation Criteria

Relevance to the topic
Originality and uniqueness of the submission
Clarity and coherence of argumentation
Quality of examples and case studies
Presenter’s expertise and track record in the field
Although the use of generative AI is permitted, pitches evidently written by AI won’t be considered
Submission deadline: May 17, 2024
Notification of acceptance: May 30, 2024
Accepted authors must submit their full article by June 30, 2024
Articles will be published between July 8 and October 10, 2024
The authors of the selected articles will be invited to join a panel by July 20, 2024
Event dates: Oct 28, 29, 2024

What to Expect

Your submission will be reviewed by a panel of experts in the field
If accepted, you will be asked to produce a full article that will be published at opensource.net

We look forward to receiving your submission!

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COMMENTS

27 Open Source Slideshow Presentation Editors and PowerPoint Alternatives
1- LibreOffice Impress. LibreOffice is an open source office suite and the ideal alternative for the commercial enterprise released office suites as MS Office. It includes a text processor, presentation manager, spreadsheet program and other apps. The LibreOffice Impress has similar features as PowerPoint, It enables you to create a rich ...
3 open source alternatives to PowerPoint
Vimdeck is an MIT-licensed tool that turns Markdown into a set of files, one per slide, which are then opened in Vim, and then sets up some keybindings for easy movement through your deck. You can give your slides a surprising amount of customization, including syntax-highlighted, a headline text font, and more.
Open Source Microsoft PowerPoint Alternatives: 25+ Presentation Makers
Other interesting open source alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint are reveal.js, OpenBoard Whiteboard, Sozi and impress.js. Microsoft PowerPoint alternatives are mainly Presentation Makers but may also be Slideshow Makers or Code Editors. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of ...
The 7 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives for Presentations
Additionally, the free version supports only one user at a time with a storage space of 1MB. 6. LibreOffice. LibreOffice is open-source presentation software that does everything PowerPoint can do. Although it lacks functionality such as OneDrive Integration, its PowerPoint-like functionality more than makes up for it.
The Top 10 Free Presentation Tools For Corporate Presenters
In this article, I'll cover 10 of the best open source, desktop-based, and web-based presentation software you'll find online. Best Open Source Presentation Tools. Open source software has come a long way. In the old days, open software couldn't compete with proprietary or closed software (Microsoft Office is one such example of closed ...
Apache OpenOffice Impress
Apache OpenOffice Impress. Impress your audience with your presentations! Impress is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools. Master Pages simplify the task of preparing your materials.
Open Source Prezi Alternatives: 25+ Presentation Makers
Linux. Inkscape. 68 Sozi alternatives. Sozi is an open-source browser-based presentation software using SVG and JavaScript to play animated presentations. - Sozi is the most popular Windows, Mac & Linux alternative to Prezi. - Sozi is the most popular Open Source & free alternative to Prezi.
3 open source tools to make your presentations pop
Because these presentation frameworks are open source, they can be extended and enhanced in any way you wish—though to be fair, writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a little more complicated than just using PowerPoint, Keynote, or Impress. ... no offence to more appealing presentation software, but maybe impress!ve can be an option to use and ...
Top 3 open-source PowerPoint alternatives
The presentation software PowerPoint is proprietary, and hence not so transparent and less cost-effective than some competitors. Discover the best open-source PowerPoint alternatives in this article. ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors. ONLYOFFICE presentation editor for desktop is a free PowerPoint alternative for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The app is ...
6 Open Source Tools to create inspiring presentations
There are some open source solutions for that, like reveal.js, mdx-deck, Spectacle, remark, webslides or impress.js. Each solution allows you to create presentations yourself in minutes, push them to GitHub, and share them with your audience. Personally, I have tried mdx-deck and Impress.js in the past.
Best free presentation software of 2024
Best free presentation software of 2024. The best free presentation software makes it simple and easy to create presentations as an alternative to subscribing to Microsoft PowerPoint. 1. Best ...
The 6 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives in 2023
Google Slides. Google Slides is the one-size-fits-all inheritor of the PowerPoint mantle. If you have used PowerPoint, you'll already be pretty familiar with Google Slides. There's nothing fancy, nothing unexpected. It's just a reliable web-based presentation platform that's greatest strength lies in the familiarity of its capabilities ...
7 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives For Your Business
1. Apache OpenOffice. Apache OpenOffice is an open-source software suite that offers a presentation tool to design multimedia slides. The presentation software lets you add 2D and 3D clip art, special effects (such as slide transitions), and animation to your presentations.
Impress
LibreOffice, Impress, presentation, ODF, open standards. In Impress, creating and editing slides is very versatile thanks to different editing and view modes: Normal (for general editing), Outline (for organizing and outlining your text content), Notes (for viewing and editing the notes attached to a slide), Handout (for producing paper-based material), and Slide Sorter (for a thumbnail sheet ...
presentation-tools · GitHub Topics · GitHub
GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects. ... Free and open source consulting-style Powerpoint toolbar. ... Small presentation tool that displays a countdown watch and changes the background color to enhance perception of time. Available for ...
The best presentation software
The best presentation software. Canva for a free presentation app. Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design. Prezi for non-linear, conversational presentations. Powtoon for video presentations. Genially for interactive, presenter-less presentations. Pitch for collaborating with your team on presentations.
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The best presentation software makes it simple and easy to create, manage, and share slideshow presentations. ... LibreOffice Impress is part of the open-source suite offered as a free alternative ...
The 8 Best Free PowerPoint Alternatives
Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for creating professional-looking slideshows and presentations. However, the home version requires a Microsoft 365 subscription, and the free mobile app locks some features behind the sub as well. Fortunately, there are plenty of free PowerPoint software alternatives out there.
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FreeShow
Creating presentations is extremely easy. The quality of presentations we can create without having to spend a dime is mind-blowing. Kingsley N. FreeShow is a free and open-source presenter software for anyone to use with ease.
Best Open Source Presentation Software 2024
Examples of open source presentation software include LibreOffice Impress, Apache OpenOffice Impress, and HTML 5 Slides. LibreOffice Impress is a free and powerful open source presentation tool that includes features such as support for multimedia, animation effects, and graphs.
Open Source Technologies Presentation
This presentation is about Open Source Software, this may be helpful to understand what is open source, why we need open source software and examples of Open Source software. This Presentation is created by Harishankar Ranagaraj and was presentated at various sessions. Harishankar Rangaraj is the founder and Director of Open Source Academy ...
Free Open Source Church Worship Presentation Software
Free Worship Presentation Software for your Church. OpenLP is a feature rich open-source church presentation platform that doesn't tie you down to subscription renewals, device platforms, or even the presentation computer! With OpenLP, you're free to upgrade as soon as the next release comes out; you're free to roam the sanctuary with one of ...
7 best presentation software in 2024
ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor is an open-source presentation software that can serve as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint with a simple and user-friendly interface. ONLYOFFICE Presentation Editor works with PowerPoint presentations and can save them in PDF, PNG, and JPG. PPTX, PPT, ODP, and PPSX files are also supported.
Microsoft Pitched OpenAI's DALL-E as Battlefield Tool for U.S. Military
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Over the weekend, the cybersecurity and open source software community was shocked by the news that a relatively new, experimental version of XZ Utils—a compression utility integrated into many ...
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In the realm of statistical analysis, Bayesian methods offer a powerful alternative to traditional frequentist approaches, providing researchers with robust tools for inference and hypothesis testing. This poster presents a practical application of Bayesian analysis using JASP (Jeffreys's Amazing Statistics Program), an open-source software package designed for intuitive Bayesian analysis.
Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far
Open source tools. Image Credits: Getty Images. At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company debuted a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure ...
Best Record Yet for Open Source Use in Business Worldwide
Among the 95% of organizations that increased or maintained their use of open-source software in the past year, 33% said their usage increased significantly. The 5% who reduced their OSS were predominantly early-stage startups, whereas 39% of those representing large enterprises (500 to 5,000 employees) reported a significant increase.
Submit your proposal for All Things Open
Submit your proposal for All Things Open - Doing Business with Open Source. The supply-side value of widely-used Open Source software is estimated to be worth $4.15 billion, and the demand-side value is much larger, at $8.8 trillion. And yet, maintaining a healthy business while producing Open Source software feels more like an art than a ...