Prezi initially debuted as the PowerPoint antithesis.
This presentation software was meant to right every wrong of a typical corporate slideshow.
Instead of sequential slides, it gives you a canvas to lay out ideas and information, mind map-style.
Instead of hokey transitions, Prezi zooms in and out on your canvas with a virtual camera.
In the years since, Prezi has mostly kept up with the pace of the digital world, adding new modes and tools for presenting, including video.
You can record yourself delivering a speech and add graphics and text.
Prezi is now all but a lightweight video editing app, and it's positioned as a companion to PowerPoint more than a replacement.
Prezi is an Editors' Choice and a great alternative if you've never felt a kinship with traditional slide decks.
That's not to snub my nose at PowerPoint—or Apple Keynote, for that matter.
They have both also won well-deserved Editors' Choice awards.
PowerPoint and Keynote make it easy for even the least artistic person to make a professional presentation, as it gives you templates and features that assist with design.
Conversely, for all the praise Prezi deserves, its novelty can wear thin.
Just as with any other presentation app, how you show your material is second to what you show.
Prezi Pricing and Plans
Prezi has a free version you can use for as long as you like, and a variety of paid plans that come with additional features and benefits.
Reviewing the paid plans feels like paging through the wine menu of an upscale restaurant when you're 22 and hoping you'll stumble upon a few words you can pronounce.
It's long and confusing.
I'll list the prices here and explain what you get for free, but I refer you to Prezi's pricing page to compare what's included with the others.
First, there's the Basic level.
It has two options: Basic Basic, which is the free plan, and Basic Plus, which starts at $19 per month.
With the free plan, you can make as many presentations as you want, but you don't get anything special.
You can't collaborate with others, for instance.
You miss out on presenter view, voice-overs, offline access, privacy controls, images, backgrounds, and a whole bunch of other tools and features.
Second is the Individual tier.
It contains three choices: Standard for personal use (from $7 per month); Plus for so-called expert presenters, because it has premium images and offline presenting mode (from $19 per month); and Premium, which adds analytics and advanced training (from $59 per month).
Next, there's an Education version for students and educators called EDU Plus (from $7 per month), as well as a version for educators and administrators called EDU Teams (from $600 per person per year).
Finally, there's a Business tier with three options.
Business Plus is for individuals using the tool for business (from $19 per month).
Business Premium (from $59 per month) adds analytics and advanced training.
Business Teams is a group plan for organizations ($50 per person per month for up to 10 people).
How Do Prezi's Prices Compare?
It's hard to gauge the competitiveness of Prezi's pricing, for a couple of reasons.
First, the costs of other presentation apps are all over the map, as I'll show in a moment.
Second, no other presentation app is quite like Prezi, so none of the comparisons are all that direct.
Google Slides is free with a Google account, and Apple Keynote is free if you have purchased an Apple Mac or mobile device.
Keynote is a very capable tool.
Google Slides doesn't have as many features as many of the other apps in the presentation category, but depending on your needs, it could be a practical app to use.
To get Microsoft PowerPoint, you can buy it for $139.99, but it's more economical to get the whole Microsoft Office package, as long as the other apps that are included (Word, Excel, Outlook, OneDrive) have value to you.
Prices start at $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
That's for one person.
If you buy a package for a family to give up to six people access, it costs $99.99 per year.
Powtoon, an app for creating animated video presentations, has a free version of its app that's quite limited, and paid plans starting at a whopping $89 per month or $228 year.
The next tier up is $197 per month (for real!) or $708 if you pay annually.
Another presentation app, Visme, has a menu of prices and plans almost as long as Prezi's.
It similarly has a free Basic plan, with paid plans starting at $14 per month and going up to about $25 per person per month for Team plans.
What's New in Prezi?
In 2017, Prezi overhauled its app.
The update was significant enough to warrant a new name: Prezi Next.
The original version of the software then became known as Prezi Classic.
If you created an account before April 2017, you have access to both Prezi Classic and Prezi Next.
If you created an account after that time, you only have Prezi Next.
It's a little confusing because the app and website are still called simply Prezi, but it's a way to differentiate between the original and new versions.
Prezi Classic offers some advantages over Prezi Next.
The original version gives you a lot more control over the creation of your presentations compared with Next.
That said, it requires a little more skill and learning to make it work well.
Prezi Next is easier to learn to use, but gives you less control over the fine details of how your presentation plays out.
Plus, it's better for presentations don't necessarily flow in a certain order.
If you're pitching potential clients and you want to be able to tailor your presentation on the spot to whatever they're interested in, Prezi Next gives you the freedom to do that.
You can make a presentation that has no prescribed order.
One more recent change is that Prezi now has two components.
One is Presentation, the part of the software that has been at its core since the beginning.
The other, which is new as of 2019, is Video.
With Prezi Video, you use the camera on your device to record a video of yourself talking.
That's the proposed format, anyway, and the included tools and templates you use to further craft the final video all rely on that format.
The tools help you overlay graphics, type, and images to add more visual interest.
You only record yourself talking after you've set up the graphics.
After you record, Prezi gives you very minimal editing tools for trimming the beginning or end.
You can't make cuts, add cutaways, or do anything more advanced than that.
If you haven't picked up Prezi in a while, you probably know that it started as a web app, which works impressively well considering everything it does.
There are also now apps for macOS and Windows, as well as mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, and Android).
You can create any kind of content using the web app, though you need the desktop app for a feature called Go Live.
Go Live lets you take a video you've made using Prezi and share it in a meeting that's taking place on either Cisco Webex or Zoom.
Prezi has some features that you might normally associate with video conferencing software.
For example, you create a presentation, whether video or not, record voice over to go with it, and share a link to the final piece where people can view it.
You can also present while on a conference call.
With some tiers of service, Prezi gives you analytics tools so you can track how many people view your presentation.
Making Presentations With Prezi
Whether you find Prezi challenging or easy to use may depend on how much experience you have with multimedia editing software.
If it's new to you, Prezi has video tutorials that teach you not only how to use the app but also how to make high quality content.
I'm not especially adept with multimedia software, but I find Prezi reasonably easy to use.
To make a presentation, you start with a blank canvas, a template, or an imported PowerPoint slide.
Templates have themes, covering General, Sales & Business Development, Marketing, Education & Nonprofit, and HR & Training.
Each template also has an experience rating on it so you know whether it's suitable for a novice, someone who's skilled at Prezi, or best left to masters.
If you use a template, you simply replace the template text and images with new text and images as you see fit.
You can move elements around the page, too, and change their order.
That's all similar to how you'd work with any other presentation app.
Starting from a so-called blank canvas in Prezi Next is not all that different from using a template, except that you get generic placeholders instead of sample text and images.
If you use Prezi Class, a blank canvas is in fact a blank canvas.
The magic sauce in Prezi presentations is the animated path you take across and through the canvas.
In Prezi Classic, it helps to get all the parts of your presentation onto the canvas first and then save making the path until last.
When you're ready, you enter a path-making mode and then one by one click on the areas where you want to zoom in or out.
Each location is saved as you go, and you can be sure of it because a preview thumbnail of each frame appears in the left column in the order you set.
Prezi Next doesn't require you to stick to a sequentially ordered presentation.
So, instead of creating a path, you pay attention to how information is nested.
In the editor, you see how it nests via little stacks of preview slides off to the side of the editor.
You also always know where you are as you work because you can click to zoom in or out at any time.
Prezi has simplified many of its tools to make it easy for anyone to create presentations, but it doesn't always work.
Depending on what kind of content you're making, something as mundane as resizing text can be a pain.
You can make the text field larger or smaller by dragging one of its corners to resize it.
In Prezi Next, you can tap a plus sign on a font button.
What you don't see is a point size for the font.
This means you can't select all your text boxes and set the size to be the same across them.
Likewise, when you move and resize objects, guidelines appear that help you align and center the elements, but you don't get a full suite of tools for aligning and centering, like you do in some other presentation apps.
Prezi makes it tough to be a stickler for precision.
Collaboration
With Prezi, you can share your presentation with others in a few different ways.
You can send a link to your presentation or video to let them view or review your materials.
You can also give individuals the right to present your final work, or give people permission to edit it with you.
When co-authoring or co-editing a presentation, the initials of every active participant who's currently in the document appears on screen.
Their initials also appear on the slide that they're viewing or editing.
It's not unlike Google Slides in that regard.
In Share mode, PowerPoint has a similar list and shows a small flag with the user's name on their edits.
The main difference between collaborating in Prezi versus Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint is that there's no chat box in Prezi.
If you and your collaborators are working on a presentation at the same time, you can't actually have a real-time, in-app conversation about it.
You would need to pick up another app or the phone to discuss what you're doing.
Prezi does have a commenting tool, but it's limited to Business grade accounts.
There's certainly room for improvement when it comes to collaborating in Prezi.
There's Nothing Like Prezi
You can't directly compare Prezi to PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice's Impress, or other presentation software, because Prezi offers something different from a typical slide deck.
It's successful in freeing people from the sequential slideshow format.
It can create a much more intimate and personalized experience for people to whom you are presenting, letting them jump around to the areas of the presentation that they're most interested in.
Some of the newer features, such as those for making videos and sharing presentations in video conferencing calls, are bonuses for organizations that might use them.
For all those reasons, it's an Editors' Choice.
Wading through Prezi's long list of plans is a drag, however.
As much as I tried to wrap my head around them, I never felt like I knew which tier of service did what.
Simplifying the options would be a service to Prezi's potential customers.
A free trial that didn't require a credit card wouldn't hurt, either.
Prezi is a wonderful tool for making non-sequential slideshows, interactive presentations, and even simple videos.
It's best understood as adjacent to, rather than a replacement for, PowerPoint or Keynote, which also remain Editors' Choices for their more conventional implementations.
Cons
The Bottom Line
Prezi frees your presentations from the sequential slide deck format.
You can use it to make interactive presentations, talking head videos, and more.
