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One pitch deck. Four AI presentation tools. Here is what they got right and what they made up.

On the morning of 28 September 2026 we gave Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Prezi and Canva the same brief for a ten-slide investor deck: eleven facts about a made-up bakery chain and one rule, add no other numbers. Then we checked every deck against 15 tests we wrote down before the first one was generated, from invented numbers and chart accuracy to changing the ask in one prompt, exporting and sharing. This is one run per tool: a case study, not a ranking.

Told to use only eleven facts and add no other numbers, Canva's deck added nine, including an itemised list of expansion costs that ends at 250,000. Gamma, Beautiful.ai and Prezi added none, though Prezi made up a website for the company. Only Gamma's change prompt updated every place the amount appeared.AIBuilder Marketplace, hands-on test, 2026-09-28. Free to quote with attribution.

The brief

Sent as the first message to each tool, word for word:

Create a 10-slide investor pitch deck for Kettle & Crumb, a fictional bakery-café chain in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Use exactly these facts and do not add any other numbers:
- Founded in 2021 by Sanne de Vries (CEO) and Tomasz Nowak (head baker).
- 3 shops in Rotterdam and 38 employees.
- Revenue: €0.4 million in 2023, €0.8 million in 2024 and €1.2 million in 2025.
- Gross margin: 62% in 2025.
- Plan: open 2 new shops in Utrecht in 2027.
- Asking €400,000 for 12% of the company.
- Use of funds: 70% new shops, 20% central kitchen equipment, 10% marketing.

Slides: 1 title, 2 problem, 3 solution, 4 traction with a revenue chart for 2023-2025, 5 business model, 6 market, 7 team, 8 growth plan, 9 use of funds as a chart, 10 the ask.

Do not invent customer numbers, market sizes, quotes or testimonials. If a slide needs a number we did not give, put a clearly marked placeholder such as [MARKET SIZE] instead.

Small enough for a free plan, and built around the traps of AI decks: numbers that must be copied without additions, two charts with known values, a market slide that invites a made-up market size, and an amount that appears in more than one place when you change it later.

How we tested

• Same start. New accounts, prompts sent between 08:37 and 08:59 Amsterdam time. Gamma Free, Prezi Basic and Canva Free; Beautiful.ai offered us only a 14-day Pro trial, so we used that. Where a tool showed an outline or plan first, we accepted it unchanged and kept its default style.
• The facts. For every deck we compared each number on every slide with the brief (C02, C03) and measured the charts in pixels against their stated values (C05, C06).
• One change prompt. After the first reading each tool got the same sentence through its own AI: “Change the ask to €450,000 for 12%”. We counted how many places still said €400,000.
• By hand. We renamed slide 2 and swapped slides 8 and 9 in each editor, then exported to PowerPoint and PDF where the plan allowed, opened the files and checked whether text and charts could still be edited.
• Sharing. We opened each tool's share link in a fresh browser that was not logged in and took the screenshots below from there. All links were closed again the same morning.

Results, check by check

On C09 for Prezi and Canva: in Prezi's case the chat said “I've updated the ask on the last slide”, which is true, but slide 9 opens with “Our €400,000 investment will fuel expansion”, so the deck now contradicts itself. Beautiful.ai has AI per text block (rewrite, shorten, “Generate new”), which offered replacement sentences for one block; changing the deck means editing two text places and recalculating three chart values in euros by hand.

What it took and what it cost

The evidence

Screenshots from each tool's public share page, opened without logging in (Gamma's from its own PDF export, because its share page sits behind a bot check).

What each tool did

Choose for your situation

One run per tool on one day does not support a winner, so this is what the run does support.

• The numbers have to be exactly yours. Gamma and Beautiful.ai added none in this test. Whatever you use, read every slide against your own figures: one of four decks added nine, and its chart looked right until we measured it.
• You will change the deck after the first draft. In this test only Gamma's AI found every place an amount appeared. Elsewhere, search the deck yourself after each change, including chart data and body text.
• You need a file to send or edit in PowerPoint. Prezi's free plan exports nothing. The other three export text you can edit, but none of them exported a chart you can edit as a chart.
• You share by link. Check the defaults before you send: one link opened on “can edit”, one public page shows the owner's email, and one free plan cannot make a deck private at all.

Check the evidence

• Date and plans: 28 September 2026, prompts sent between 08:37 and 08:59 Amsterdam time; Gamma Free, Beautiful.ai 14-day Pro trial, Prezi Basic, Canva Free.
• The data: every check with what we saw, the prompt times and the credit readings are in results.json.
• The decks: the share links are closed again, so the screenshots above and the file checks in results.json are the record. The fictional company, its founders and its numbers were made up for this test.
• What this is not: one run each, so a tool could do better or worse on another day or brief. Not a design review: we did not score how good the slides look. Not a test of paid plans, apart from the Beautiful.ai trial.

Our full reviews: Gamma · Beautiful.ai · Prezi. Our earlier hands-on test: one booking app, three AI builders. How we separate researched reviews from hands-on ones: how we review.

Citation

AIBuilder Marketplace, “One Pitch Deck, Four AI Presentation Tools”, hands-on test run on 2026-09-28. Free to quote and reproduce with attribution (CC BY 4.0).