Powtoon Review

Powtoon is a free online presentation maker that offers images and templates to help make a great presentation in a short time. Some of the primary templates include ones to make a "modern edge" animation, a whiteboard look, a cartoon, and an infographic, among many others.

This "PowerPoint" tool is more of an animation maker because, if you want, you can have it play as a movie instead of a click-through presentation. Switching between the two is very easy and doesn't affect the presentation permanently.

Right off the bat, Powtoon comes off as a great service because you can use it online and because there are lots of tools available, but it's severely limited because there's also a paid version. However, it's very helpful and unique in other ways, so it's still a great choice.

Powtoon Features

Here are some noteworthy features:

• Powtoon presentations can be built in a slideshow form or a movie form
• Text effects, image holders, characters, animations, props, markers, shapes, transitions, backgrounds, and many other styles are available to make slides unique
• A dedicated styles menu is available for creating greeting cards for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Halloween, winter in general, and Valentine's Day
• You can import a PPTX file to create a Powtoon
• Supports sending presentations directly to YouTube or Vimeo, though a watermark is on the bottom of the video and the quality is rather low. Other free export options are JPG, GIF, a dedicated video page, PPT, MS Teams, PDF, Facebook Page or Group, and several others.
• Share a video animation with anyone via a public link
• The template can be set up to work best with websites like YouTube and Facebook (horizontal), or with Instagram (square) or phones (vertical)
• Regular text editing is allowed, such as changing the font type and size
• Images can be added from your computer or imported from Facebook, Instagram, or Google Photos. There are also premium image collections on the website, plus other assets like scenes, backgrounds, characters, props, and shapes
• Very intuitive; drag and drop objects from the side panel directly onto a slide, use the right-click context menu for extra options, and group and move multiple objects at once

Thoughts on Powtoon

Aside from the negatives listed above, Powtoon still seems to be a very popular way to make free online animated presentations, and we can't disagree that it's fun and easy to use.

If you're looking for a quick way to find some nice presentation templates and a whole gallery of images that are instantly accessible for use on slides, this is a really nice choice—probably better than lots of other online presentation maker.

However, compared to Google Slides, Powtoon lacks significantly. Google's presentation maker lets you download in popular file formats, doesn't stick a watermark on your slides, and supports live collaboration and chat.

In fact, you can't save your Powtoons to your computer unless you remove all the premium items you're using. Even then, though, you can't save the animated video to the MP4 video format—just document formats like PDF or PPT.

Overall, this is a nice choice for creating presentations for school or a similar event, whereas Google Slides is fit not only for that but also for professional things that require a more clean look.

There are paid plans that have additional features beyond MP4 exporting, including additional storage for media files and longer presentations (free maxes out at three minutes).