Google slides is part of the G-suite family of applications. It comes with much of the same functionality as the other presentation applications, with the added benefit that it is completely free to use. It features some useful collaboration tools, which enables you and your team work on a presentation simultaneously without duplicating or over-writing your work.
| Feature | Powerpoint | Keynote | Google Slides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type , images, charts and tables | Good. Powerpoint has a good range of options for styling type, images, charts and tables, however these options can be difficult to find and difficult to control. | Excellent. Keynote renders type, images, charts and tables wonderfully on screen. Modifying the styling of type, images, tables and charts is also quick and easy. | Excellent. Google Slides renders type, images, charts and tables wonderfully on screen, with contemporary choices of fonts. |
| Animations and transitions | Good. Powerpoint offers a wide range of transitions and animations, however they can be tricky to modify and the end results often lack visual elegance. | Excellent. Transitions and animations are easy to add and modify with visually smooth and fluid on-screen results. | Google Slides offers attractive animations and transitions, which are easy to set up and manage. |
| Ease of use | Whilst Powerpoint is a powerful piece of presentation software, in my experience, it is cumbersome and slow to work with. | Keynote has been designed with the user in mind. Learning how to use Keynote is relatively quick and easy. | For anybody who is already familiar wirth presentation apps, Google slides is relatively easy to use. |
| Sharing and collaborating | Quite simply Powerpoint is ubiquitous. Almost everyone with a PC or Mac will have access to Powerpoint. So there's very few issues with sharing Powerpoint files. You can also share and present Powerpoint files online through the Office Presentation Service. | Keynote allows you to export your presentation as a Powerpoint or PDF; however be warned - the conversion to Powerpoint is far from accurate and you will most likely need to do some tweaking to bring your Powerpoint version up to scratch. You can also share and present Keynote files online through the iCloud platform. | You can download your Google Slides presentation in multiple formats such as Powerpoint or PDF - which is great for sharing. It is also a game changer in terms of collaboration. Multiple people can work on slides at the same time, and you can see people’s changes as they make them. |
| Cost to license | €€ | € | Free |