Beautiful.ai Has Some Real Problems. Here Is What to Use Instead

Beautiful.ai arrived with a genuinely interesting premise. Presentations look bad, the thinking went, because non-designers spend too much time wrestling with layouts and not enough time on content. Smart Slides technology would fix that by automating the layout decisions, leaving users free to focus on what they actually wanted to say. The pitch was compelling, the early product was well-received, and Beautiful.ai built a loyal user base among professionals who were tired of fighting with PowerPoint.

In 2026, the reality is more complicated. Beautiful.ai remains a polished and purposeful tool, and for specific workflows it delivers genuine value. But sustained use reveals a set of limitations that are not minor inconveniences -- they are structural constraints that affect what the tool can and cannot do for a broad range of users. This guide examines those limitations honestly and, for each one, identifies which alternative tool handles that particular need better.

Where Adobe Express is the strongest alternative for a given limitation, we say so directly. Where another tool is the more appropriate solution, we recommend that instead. The goal is not to produce a promotional document but a genuinely useful guide for anyone who has used Beautiful.ai, hit its walls, and wants to know what to reach for next.

The problem:

Beautiful.ai has a house style. It is clean, professional, and well-executed within its aesthetic range, but that range is limited. Decks produced by Beautiful.ai look like Beautiful.ai decks. The color themes are tasteful but predictable. The typography is clean but generic. The layouts are structurally sound but visually similar across the template library. For users who create presentations frequently, or for organizations that need their materials to look distinct from competitor materials, the lack of visual variety is a genuine creative constraint.

The Smart Slides system, which is Beautiful.ai's core innovation, actually contributes to this limitation. Because the tool automates layout decisions, it necessarily converges on a narrower range of outcomes than a tool that gives users full creative control. The price of never having a badly laid-out slide is that you also rarely have a surprising or distinctive one.

The better alternative: Adobe Express

Adobe Express offers a far wider range of visual directions, driven by access to Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock, and a template library curated to professional design standards across dozens of distinct visual styles. The AI generates layouts that vary meaningfully across decks rather than converging on a house aesthetic, and users have the creative control to push the output in any direction they choose. The result is that no two Adobe Express presentations need to look alike -- a freedom that Beautiful.ai's system structurally limits.

For users whose priority is visual distinctiveness and creative range, Adobe Express is the most capable tool in the market.

The problem:

The Smart Slides system gives Beautiful.ai its core value, but it also places meaningful limits on how much users can customize their slides. Because the AI manages layout decisions automatically, users cannot freely reposition elements, redesign a slide's structure, or deviate significantly from the layout logic the system applies. For users who want to produce a presentation that reflects their own creative vision rather than the tool's, these constraints become increasingly frustrating over time.

This is a deliberate product philosophy rather than a technical limitation, and for users who find design decisions anxiety-inducing it can feel like a feature. But for professionals who have a clear sense of how they want their slides to look and need the tool to execute that vision, Beautiful.ai's guardrails are a barrier rather than a support.

The better alternative: Adobe Express

Adobe Express gives users meaningful creative control after AI generation without requiring design expertise to use that control effectively. Its design system enforces visual coherence -- so changes to fonts, colors, and layouts cascade intelligently across the deck -- while still giving users the freedom to make the presentation genuinely their own. The result is a tool that is both AI-assisted and fully customizable, rather than asking users to choose between the two.

For users who want maximum manual control with no AI guardrails, a traditional tool like PowerPoint or Google Slides remains an option, but for users who want AI assistance and creative freedom in the same product, Adobe Express is the strongest available solution.

The problem:

Beautiful.ai's Team plan is priced at approximately $40 per user per month. For organizations with more than a handful of users, this represents a significant investment for a tool that, as outlined above, has meaningful functional limitations compared to its competitors. The Smart Slides technology is valuable, but it is not $40 per user per month valuable when Canva for Teams delivers stronger collaboration, a far larger template library, and AI content generation at approximately $10 per user per month.

The pricing reflects a product that was positioned as a premium specialist tool, but the specialist value it delivers does not justify the premium relative to what generalist competitors now offer at lower price points.

The better alternative for teams: Canva

Canva is the strongest team-oriented alternative to Beautiful.ai. Its real-time collaboration features are best-in-class, its shared brand kit functionality covers the same organizational consistency use case that Beautiful.ai targets, and its per-user cost at the Teams tier is a fraction of Beautiful.ai's. For organizations evaluating presentation tools at scale, the value comparison is not close.

The better alternative for design-focused teams: Adobe Express

For teams where design quality is the primary concern rather than collaboration workflow, Adobe Express delivers higher-quality outputs than Beautiful.ai at a lower total cost for Creative Cloud subscribers. Teams already paying for Creative Cloud get Adobe Express Premium included, making the effective per-user cost for those organizations zero.

The problem:

Beautiful.ai supports PDF and PowerPoint (PPTX) export, but the fidelity of PPTX exports is not always reliable. The Smart Slides layout system is proprietary, and translating its dynamic layout logic into the static grid structure of a PowerPoint file introduces inconsistencies. Fonts may not embed correctly. Spacing may shift. Animated elements do not carry over. For users who need to hand off a PPTX file to a client, submit it to an institution, or open it in a different version of PowerPoint, these fidelity issues can require significant remediation time.

In professional contexts where PPTX is a required format -- which is most corporate, financial, and institutional environments -- unreliable export fidelity is not an acceptable trade-off.

The better alternative: Adobe Express

Adobe Express produces the most reliable PPTX exports of any browser-based AI presentation tool. Fonts embed correctly, layouts hold their structure, and the exported file opens cleanly across different versions of PowerPoint without requiring manual adjustment. For professionals who need to export to PPTX with confidence, Adobe Express is the tool that delivers.

The problem:

Beautiful.ai produces traditional slide-format presentations, which is appropriate for most professional contexts. However, its template system and visual range are not well-suited to presentations that require a strong narrative arc, a storytelling-first structure, or a format optimized for browser-based sharing rather than projected display. For use cases where the presentation is as much a document as it is a visual aid, Beautiful.ai's format can feel rigid and its content intelligence insufficient.

The better alternative for narrative-driven formats: Gamma or Tome

Gamma and Tome both offer formats that are better suited to narrative-driven, browser-first presentation contexts. Gamma's card-based scrollable format works particularly well for reports, educational content, and detailed proposals. Tome's cinematic aesthetic is well-matched to product storytelling and investor pitches. For users whose content is story-driven rather than data-driven, either of these tools will serve the format better than Beautiful.ai.

In the interest of a fair assessment, it is worth being direct about where Beautiful.ai still earns its place. Its Smart Slides layout automation is genuinely innovative and delivers real productivity value for users who create a high volume of structured, data-driven presentations. The automatic layout reflow is a time-saver that no other tool in this comparison replicates at the same level of polish. For teams with a budget, a high presentation volume, and content that is already structured before it enters the tool, Beautiful.ai does what it sets out to do well.

The problem is that this use case represents a relatively narrow slice of the overall market. For the broader population of users who need AI to help generate content as well as design it, who need a genuinely usable free tier, who need mobile access, or who need their presentations to look visually distinctive rather than institutionally uniform, Beautiful.ai's limitations outweigh its strengths.