Gamma vs Beautiful.ai (2026): Which AI Slide Tool to Pick?

Pick Gamma if you work mostly alone, want a fast AI first draft of a deck, document or web page, and want to start free. Pick Beautiful.ai if a team has to keep every deck on brand and hand clients editable PowerPoint or Google Slides files. At the time of writing, Gamma Plus costs $9 a month billed annually, and there is a free plan. Beautiful.ai Pro costs $14.50 a month billed annually and has no free plan. For teams the price is the same: $40 per person per month, billed annually, for Gamma Business or Beautiful.ai Team. The real difference is how each works: Gamma is a flexible, credit-metered AI canvas; Beautiful.ai is a rule-based slide system with unlimited AI on paid plans and stronger brand controls.

Prices and plan details were re-checked on 25-26 October 2026 against Beautiful.ai’s pricing and security pages and Gamma’s help centre and developer docs. Both tools have full guides in our directory: Gamma and Beautiful.ai.

Gamma vs Beautiful.ai at a glance

	Gamma	Beautiful.ai
What it makes	Presentations, documents, web pages (Sites), social posts	Presentations only
Free plan	Yes: 400 credits at sign-up, no refresh, 10 slides per prompt	No; 14-day Pro or Team trial, credit card required
Entry paid plan	Plus, $9/seat/month billed annually	Pro, $14.50/month billed annually (1 member)
Team plan	Business, $40/member/month billed annually	Team, $40/user/month billed annually, $50 monthly
How AI is metered	Monthly credits (1,000 on Plus, 4,000 on Pro)	Unlimited AI content generation on paid plans
Layout system	Gamma 5 grids and freeform boxes on a 16:9 canvas	300+ auto-aligning Smart Slide layouts, or Classic Slides
Export	PDF, PNG, PowerPoint (PPTX)	Editable PowerPoint, PowerPoint (images), Google Slides, PDF, offline player
Google Slides	Upload the PPTX	Direct export (paid plans)
SSO	Business and Enterprise	Enterprise
AI training on your content	On by default on individual plans; opt-out available; locked off on Business	Not used to train public LLMs

Pricing: what you actually pay

Gamma plans

Plan	Price (billed annually)	Monthly credits	Key limits
Free	$0	400 at sign-up, no refresh	10 slides per prompt, basic image models, “Made with Gamma” badge on exports
Plus	$9/seat/month	1,000	Badge removed, advanced image models, 100 slides per prompt
Pro	$18/seat/month	4,000	Premium image models, password protection, up to 10 custom-domain sites, detailed viewer analytics
Ultra	$90/seat/month	20,000	Ultra image models, custom fonts, up to 100 custom-domain sites
Business	$40/member/month	10,000 per member	Everything in Pro plus SSO, all image models, 100 custom domains, SOC 2 documentation on request

Gamma says annual billing saves 28% against monthly billing. We could not confirm the monthly prices on a live Gamma page, so check them at checkout. Billing is per member: three people on Pro means three Pro subscriptions. Unused plan credits roll over up to twice your monthly allowance. Paid plans can buy extra credits at $6 per 1,500.

Beautiful.ai plans

Plan	Price	Who it is for
Pro	$14.50/month billed annually	One person; unlimited AI, 300+ Smart Slide layouts, custom branding, viewer analytics, PowerPoint import and export
Team	$40/user/month billed annually, $50 billed monthly	Teams of 2 to 20; adds real-time collaboration, a shared slide and template library, locked slides and custom brand themes
Single presentation	$45, billed monthly	One-off projects; everything in Pro, cancel any time
Enterprise	Custom	SSO, SCIM, audit logs, brand guardrails

One oddity: Beautiful.ai’s Team card says “includes 3 users” and “fixed pricing for up to three users”, while the same page’s FAQ says teams of 2 to 20 pay per user. Ask sales which applies before you budget for a small team. Students with a valid .edu email get a year free.

How far Gamma credits go

Gamma’s developer docs publish its credit costs. A card costs 1-3 credits. Each image costs 2-15 credits on a Standard model, 20-33 on Advanced, 34-75 on Premium and 30-125 on Ultra. Gamma’s own example puts a 10-card deck with 5 basic images at about 20-60 credits. On those numbers, the 1,000 credits on Plus cover roughly 16 to 50 such decks a month. Premium images change the maths. Gamma estimates a 20-card document with 15 premium images at 320-1,070 credits, so Pro’s 4,000 credits buy about 4 to 12 of those. Agent generations and edits are priced by the work the agent does, so treat these as estimates. Beautiful.ai has no credit meter: AI content generation is unlimited on paid plans.

Trials, refunds and traps

Gamma has no traditional trial; the Free plan is the trial. It refunds only if you ask within 3 days of subscribing and have used less than a set share of your credits (under 200 on Plus, 600 on Pro, 1,000 on Business). Beautiful.ai’s 14-day trial needs a card and is charged in full unless you cancel from Billing in your profile. Annual plans can get a partial refund within 24 hours of purchase or renewal. Monthly plans are non-refundable, and refunds carry a processing fee.

Creating a deck with AI

Gamma 5, released on 6 October 2026, starts with a conversation. You type what you need in the dashboard prompt bar and can attach files. In the default Plan mode, Gamma’s agent asks about your goal and audience (or you click “Decide for me”). It then proposes a plan covering story, style and look, and builds nothing until you approve it. Express mode skips the questions; Research mode pulls in web sources. Once the deck exists, you edit by chat, and “restyle” changes the look without touching the content. Gamma’s help centre says this flow is slower than the old generator, which is still available as the classic generator. An effort picker sets how hard the AI works: Lite, Standard, or Max (Pro and above), and higher effort uses more credits.

Beautiful.ai’s Create with AI button sits in the upper right of My Presentations. You type, dictate or paste a prompt, and can attach documents, PDFs or links with ”+”. Instead of building slides at once, it shows a text-only outline. You edit titles and copy, reorder or remove slides, and ask its AI chat panel for changes in plain language. Then you choose a theme, an image source (AI-generated, stock, web or none) and a language, and click Generate Presentation. Afterwards, Slide AI works on one slide at a time. It suggests alternative Smart Slide layouts, generates ideas, and can preserve your exact text or regenerate an image.

In practice, Gamma suits a vague idea you want the AI to shape; Beautiful.ai suits a storyline you already know and want filled into a structure you control. Either way, a clear brief with audience, goal and key points gives a better first draft; our guide to writing better prompts applies here too.

Design control and branding

Gamma 5 lays slides out on a fixed 16:9 canvas using grids, with freeform boxes for free placement. You can choose Fixed slides, where content scales to fit, or Fluid slides, which grow like a document. Themes set colours, fonts and logo. Custom font uploads need Ultra, and shared custom themes are a team feature. That freedom suits tweakers, but nothing stops a teammate from breaking the brand.

Beautiful.ai takes the opposite approach. Its 300+ Smart Slide layouts reflow and realign as you add content, so slides stay tidy without manual nudging. If a layout fights you, convert it to a Classic Slide and position elements by hand. On the Team plan, admins get locked themes, locked slides and a central slide and template library. That makes it hard for anyone to go off-brand. Designers who want pixel control may find that restrictive; brand managers like it for the same reason.

Exporting to PowerPoint and Google Slides

This is where the two differ most for anyone whose decks end up in Microsoft or Google tools.

Gamma exports PDF, PNG and PowerPoint (PPTX) from Share > Export. Choose “All cards”, or you may export only the current card. Tables arrive as editable tables, speaker notes carry over, and theme fonts are embedded in the PPTX. There is no direct Google Slides export: you upload the PPTX, and Google Slides then ignores the embedded fonts and substitutes its own. The PowerPoint slide master comes through blank, which matters if your company requires its own master. Word (.docx) export is not supported. On the Free plan, PDF and PPTX exports carry the “Made with Gamma” badge.

Beautiful.ai exports from the Presentation menu to Editable PowerPoint, PowerPoint (images), Google Slides, PDF, Print and a Present Offline player. Editable PowerPoint and Google Slides export are paid-plan features (Pro, Team, Enterprise). Transitions and animations are lost in every export format, and so is audio. Google Slides export also drops embedded video. Beautiful.ai also offers a PowerPoint Add-In and PowerPoint import.

If the client wants a Google Slides file, Beautiful.ai saves a step. If you present from a link, export problems never arise.

Beyond slides: documents, websites and sharing

Gamma is the broader tool. One gamma can be a presentation, a document, a web page or a social post. You can publish it as a site on a gamma.site address or a custom domain: up to 10 sites on Pro, 100 on Ultra and Business. Social formats are sized for LinkedIn and Instagram, and you can post straight to a personal LinkedIn profile. Gamma also has an API and connectors for ChatGPT, Claude and Slack.

Beautiful.ai stays focused on decks but goes deeper there. Charts, graphs and timelines can link to spreadsheets and update when the data changes. The Team plan adds viewer and slide analytics plus engagement alerts. Gamma has viewer analytics too, with per-viewer detail on Pro and above.

Teams, security and privacy

Gamma. Business adds SSO, a shared workspace with central billing, 10,000 credits per member and SOC 2 documentation on request. Enterprise adds SCIM, audit logs and admin controls. The key privacy point: on the individual plans (Free, Plus, Pro and Ultra), Gamma’s help centre says your content may be used to train its AI models by default. You can opt out at your avatar > Settings > Data Controls. On Business and Enterprise, training is off and locked for the whole workspace. A small team on Pro seats should have every member switch it off, or pay for Business.

Beautiful.ai. SSO, SCIM, audit logs and brand guardrails sit on the Enterprise plan. Beautiful.ai lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA and PCI. Its security page says data processed by its AI models “will not be used to train public LLM models”, and that data sent to AI providers is kept for up to 30 days for abuse prevention. Its AI sub-processors are barred from training on customer data. Note the word “public”: that is the vendor’s exact scope.

Which should you choose?

• Solo founder pitching investors: Gamma. Start free, upgrade to Plus when the badge matters, and use Sites for a one-page memo.
• Teacher or student: Gamma’s free plan for occasional use. Students with a .edu email should also check Beautiful.ai’s free education year.
• Marketing team with strict brand guidelines: Beautiful.ai Team. Locked themes and a shared slide library beat Gamma’s free-form canvas here.
• Sales team that sends PowerPoint or Google Slides files: Beautiful.ai, for direct editable exports and live data-linked charts.
• Agency making decks, landing pages and social posts: Gamma, for one tool across formats, with custom domains on Pro.
• Heavy users of AI images: compare costs first; Gamma’s premium images burn credits, while Beautiful.ai’s AI generation is unlimited on paid plans.

Pick neither if your company already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot or Google Workspace with Gemini. Their built-in slide drafting keeps files in the native format; see our Gemini review for the Workspace side. If you are leaving Gamma for other reasons, our Gamma alternatives guide covers Copilot, Plus AI, Canva and Pitch. For more AI writing and design tools, browse the AI content tools directory or other head-to-head comparisons.