Ranking the Best Digital Presentation Software Tools

Looking for the best digital presentation software tools on the market today? There’s plenty to choose from, but which one is the best, or which one is right for your needs?

Below, we’ll rank the top 6 digital presentation tools based on their core abilities as digital presentation software—including recommendations for the top use cases for each software or app on our list.

Quick note: Our rankings here are for general-market digital presentation software tools. Some tools are industry-specific, such as serving the courtroom niche or the worship presentation software niche, and nothing else.

If you’re looking for a particular niche, like Houses of Worship, check our article Top Church Presentation Software Comparison Guide for 2023, which includes free version apps like OpenLP or a worship-centric desktop app like EasyWorship.

Check out these comparison articles for an in-depth look at some of the digital presentation software tools.

• ProPresenter vs. PowerPoint
• ProPresenter vs. Prezi
• ProPresenter vs. Keynote
• ProPresenter vs. Worship Extreme
• ProPresenter vs. Proclaim
• ProPresenter vs. MediaShout
• ProPresenter vs. Easy Worship
• ProPresenter vs. Open LP
• ProPresenter vs. vMix

With that out of the way, let’s get to the rankings!

1. ProPresenter – Best All-Around Professional Digital Presentation Software

ProPresenter is the leading high-end, professional presentation software. It offers various other capabilities that more straightforward office tools can’t match.

ProPresenter’s advanced slide editor gives you everything you need to adjust and edit slide content, down to the finest details — while staying simple enough that beginners can learn it quickly. It also comes with a large selection of media libraries (free and paid) and default Themes, removing the need to create your own presentations or backgrounds from scratch.

One of the biggest differentiators with ProPresenter is its support for multiple screens, including Audience Screens at the same time as Stage Screens. These allow presenters to show their slides to the Audience, while seeing everything from Slide Notes and the Next Slide, to Clocks, Timers, Countdowns, and even Messages to the presenter. These can be shown across multiple Stage Screens, and a separate interface allows an operator to click through slides instead of the speaker. This takes the pressure off the person on stage, and lets another person on the team follow along, or even fix typos on the fly.

You can also send different versions of the show to different locations, thanks to ProPresenter’s unique seven-layer slide architecture, combined with applying different Themes to different outputs. This is particularly useful when presenting simultaneously to in-house and online audiences.

Truth be told, we’ve only scratched the surface of what makes ProPresenter the best choice. For more details, visit the ProPresenter page and download a free trial.

2. PowerPoint – Best for Microsoft 365 Users with Simple Needs

Microsoft PowerPoint has a deep feature set and global ubiquity. It lacks some professional features compared to ProPresenter (like stage screens for presenters), but there’s a reason that presentation software are often called “PowerPoint alternatives”: PowerPoint is the market leader in business contexts.

PowerPoint gives you plenty of options for editing slides. Its latest version is full of templates that rival what other more visual-heavy startups are doing. One recent addition is the AI Designer tool, which gives you AI-powered slide formatting suggestions. You supply the content (such as a photo and two blocks of text) and PowerPoint gives you suggestions.

One thing to note: PowerPoint is clearly built for the office, where you’ll typically send a single stream of content to one screen. Besides a second-screen Presenter mode, PowerPoint doesn’t accommodate multiple outputs or content streams. What you see on your main slide is all you’ll see.

3. Google Slides – Best Free Office Tool

Google Slides isn’t the best digital presentation software. It isn’t the most interesting, the most innovative, or the most feature-laden. So why is it on this list? Because, for a whole lot of people, it’s good enough — especially considering the price. Google Slides is free, and completely web-based. Any device with a suitable desktop browser (and many iOS and Android mobile devices) can run it at no charge.

One area where Google Slides excels is integration and collaboration. Multiple colleagues can work on a presentation together, and slides can be fed directly with data from Google Sheets or other Google Workspace products. This is convenient for situations where most of your data is in Google Cloud, and you need to present it to a board room.

It’s not as in-depth as PowerPoint and doesn’t come anywhere near the functionality of ProPresenter. But if your presentation needs are basic, it’s often good enough.

4. Prezi – Best for Non-Linear Presentations

Prezi is a bit of an odd duck, but it’s fantastic in the right settings. Prezi’s big differentiator is that it supports non-linear visual presentations, perfect if you need to create an interactive presentation that might not follow a scripted sequence.

What does that mean exactly?

Most other apps use sequential slides; you click through them in order. Prezi doesn’t have to work that way, users can design non-linear landscapes that are much larger than a traditional slide. Then, they can navigate those shows by clicking on various triggers to zoom into and out of various parts of the presentation.

If you’re doing something more conversational or extemporaneous, Prezi can be a great tool. Maybe your audience wants to discuss your second topic first. With Prezi, you can adjust.

Prezi is great when you need that kind of non-linear animation environment. But when you don’t, that approach can sometimes come off as cheesy. You’ll also encounter the same display limitations as most others in the non-pro category.

5. Zoho Show – Best if You’re Already Using the Zoho Ecosystem

Zoho is a massive cloud software suite with dozens of SaaS applications for businesses, typically used by medium and larger businesses. As a tool to get customers in the door, Zoho offers a number of free apps. Zoho Show is among them.

At first glance, Zoho Show looks like a lightweight, web-based version of PowerPoint. There’s a lot to like, including master slide controls, animations, and quick tools for adding shapes, tables, charts, images, and text. The collaboration features are a nice touch as well.

Of course, those collaboration features work best only if you’re invested in the broader Zoho ecosystem. And as a cloud-based presentation app, you’re going to face the same display limitations as the others.

6. Keynote – Best if You’re on Mac

Keynote is the Mac-only PowerPoint competitor, and is known for making gorgeous slides. It’s not natively compatible with anything else (you need to export a Keynote as images to load into a Windows machine), and it doesn’t have the extensive integration options of Google Slides. To compensate for being Mac-only, Keynote recently added web browser support, allowing collaboration and being available across more platforms. It has no options for professional speakers like ProPresenter, isn’t as widely known as PowerPoint, and only builds basic slides.

But Apple makes it, and its templates can look gorgeous. If you’re on a Mac without Internet access, Keynote comes installed by default and is a solid choice when no other options are available.

ProPresenter Stands in a Class All Its Own

As we said at the start, the best digital presentation software for you is the one that achieves everything you need it to accomplish — and that empowers you to create dynamic, engaging, beautiful presentations.

Of the digital presentation software tools we’ve ranked here, ProPresenter stands in a class all its own. It can do so much more than the rest, and it gives you abilities that none of the other software has even come close to.

Ready to take your digital presentations to the next level? Download a free trial of ProPresenter now.