Businesses, especially small ones, know how difficult it is to create the marketing and presentation materials they need to be successful. Investor slide decks, social media posts, online advertising, and logos all take time and skill to make. Visme is a one-stop shop that lets organizations and brands produce the visual assets they need, such as slideshow presentations, infographics, storyboards, and Facebook ads. Visme is part of a new category of services for designing marketing content that combine features from both presentation and collaboration apps, much like Prezi and Miro.
Visme’s library of templates, stock images, animations, and other assets is ample. That means companies can work off a ready-made sample and quickly turn it into their own branded content. Visme’s tools are easy to use, with few exceptions. You can even connect with other business apps, such as SurveyMonkey and MailChimp, to pull in data for slideshows and visual aids. Support for collaboration could be better, however, and Visme charges a lot more than its competitors, namely Editors’ Choice picks Prezi and Miro.
What Is Visme?
Visme is an online tool for creating, editing, sharing, and storing visual materials. You can use it as a presentation app to make slide decks, but you can also create templates for infographics, charts, logos, storyboards, graphics for social media posts and the web, letterheads, and other items.
Visme is built around a brand mentality and it has features for saving your brand or company’s color palettes, images, videos, and other assets so that it’s easy to make sure you’re using the most current versions. Visme comes with a wealth of templates and access to stock images, too, which makes it easy for non-designers to use the app and get good results. At present, Visme is available as a web app and macOS app. A Windows app is in development.
Visme Pricing and Plans
Visme has four tiers of service: Free, Standard ($25 per month or $180 per year), Business ($49 per person per month or $348 per person per year), and Enterprise (custom pricing).
Only the Business and Enterprise accounts seem to be worth paying for, as the Free and Standard options are highly restrictive. Even the somewhat pricey Standard account includes a mere 250MB of storage and limits you to 15 projects at a time. You’re restricted to exporting to JPG, PNG, and PDF, so no PPTX, HTML5, GIF, or video formats. Collaboration is severely limited at this tier, too. The Free account is even more limited, but at least you can use that option to get a taste for the interface without putting down a credit card.
The Business tier actually gives you something for your money. You get 10GB of storage per person and can create an unlimited number of projects, which you can store in custom folders. The Business account comes with a Brand Kit; this feature lets you upload fonts, color palettes, and other template items to maintain consistency across projects. You can export your works to JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX, HTML5, video, and GIF formats. There are no restrictions on importing PowerPoint files. When collaborating, you can manage users and their permissions, though custom permissions are limited to Enterprise accounts.
There’s a sticking point about storage. While you can export files one by one to save a copy of them to another location, Visme keeps all your materials in its own system, and there’s no option to switch to your own storage unless you’re an Enterprise customer who specifically requests using your own storage. For other business customers, not being able to choose where to store your files could be a dealbreaker.
Visme offers special, lower rates for educators who sign up with an .edu email address, as well as people working at non-profit organizations who reach out to the company.
Comparative Pricing
Visme’s prices are high, especially considering you need to subscribe to the Business tier ($49 per person per month or $348 per person per year) to reap much value.
Prezi is suitable for many of the same use cases as Visme, and it charges between $180 and $228 per person per year for some of its best plans. Miro charges $192 per person per year for its Business plan. Mural, which PCMag has not yet reviewed, charges $144 or $240 per person per year (equivalent to $12 or $20 per month), depending on what type of plan you get. All of those rates are more than $100 per year less than what Visme charges.
Even if you get access to PowerPoint through a professional-grade Microsoft 365 account, you’re still looking at $99-$240 per person per year, and that subscription includes even more apps, such as Excel and Word.
Brand Consistency
As mentioned, the Business and Enterprise account levels let you save logos, color palettes, fonts, and other aspects of branding in the Brand Kit subsection. For example, you can lock in your brand’s color palette once and then apply it to all the graphs, charts, social media posts, and slide decks that you make.
You can also take any single slide from any slide deck and save it to My Library, which lets you reuse it in other creations. Any time the master version stored in My Library gets updated, all the other instances of it will be, too…except for the first slide deck where you initially created the slide, because that slide deck doesn’t use that master copy. In testing, it took an hour to figure out how to save and reuse a master copy of a slide. The process wasn’t intuitive at all and was complicated even more by the fact that you must use a slide from a slide deck and not any other kind of asset, such as a social media post.
Visme offers a version history that retains both saved and named versions, but that’s not the same as how Google Workspace‘s apps keep an exhaustive history of every change you make. Visme supports multiple undos, though, so if you need to back up a few steps in your work and you’ve kept the file open, it is possible to return to an earlier version.
Templates and Assets
Visme capitalizes on the current trend of business software that puts a huge gallery of templates at the fore. The idea is to empower people who are not designers to produce professional visual materials. Prezi and Miro do the same thing, as do many other tools.
Any template is only as good as your ability to stick to it. Visme makes this easy with not only a huge gallery of templates, but also royalty-free images, music, and other assets you can swap for what’s on the template. In testing, I found it easy to make changes to photos, text, colors, background images, animations, and so forth.
When testing a template that included a pie chart, I had no trouble opening the data in a panel to the left and adjusting the raw numbers that were powering the image. The sidebar, however, was not linked to the data: As I updated the colors and numbers for the pie chart, I had to manually match the information in the sidebar. That said, Visme made it easy to reuse colors that were recently deployed onto the pie chart. Rearranging the elements in the sidebar wasn’t difficult either, given that Visme has automated guidelines to help align them.
Collaboration
Visme’s implementation of collaboration features is inconsistent. This is problematic for Business- and Enterprise-grade account holders who will undoubtedly add all kinds of people to their accounts. When you add a new person, you must assign them a role, and the list is long: administrator, copywriter, designer, marketing manager, marketing user, regular user, and more. Visme also doesn’t give you a summary of how these roles are different. Many apps do. When you invite a new manager to an account, the app should tell you the permissions of a manager right on the same screen. Visme doesn’t, and it slows down the process of setting up your team and mastering the app. Visit Visme’s support site for details about user roles.
You can share a file in a variety of ways, such as by publishing it to a live view-only link, inviting people to leave comments and annotations on the file, and co-editing the file with others. You can only co-edit with people on your team, however. There’s no way to invite a guest user, such as a contract designer, to work on the file without them being a part of your account. Additionally, when you share a link with people and ask for their comments, they do not have to be a part of your team, but they do have to create a Visme account. Considering Visme’s steep pricing, I expected better collaboration options.
I do, however, like that Visme has thorough commenting options. You can pin a comment anywhere on a file or annotate by drawing over the file to make it clear what you’re referring to.
App Integrations
Visme supports many app integrations, mostly so that you can pull assets and data that you already have stored somewhere. There’s also an integration with Slack that notifies you when there are changes to a file, such as when a collaborator adds comments.
The integrations enable you to use marketing info from SurveyMonkey, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Jotform, and Typeform. You can also pull in a video from YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Vidyard, or Loom. By connecting to cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, you can use assets and data stored there, too. You cannot, however, use a cloud storage service or your own storage to house your Visme files, as explained earlier.
Brimming With Potential, But Too Expensive
Visme has a lot to offer, but its pricing and plans need to be more competitive. It also needs to improve how it handles collaboration, especially if it continues charging such a high rate. Finally, businesses might be more inclined to use Visme if they could choose their own storage options at the Business account level; currently, this is only something an Enterprise account can request. Editors’ Choice winners Prezi and Miro charge $100 less per person per year for an equivalent account type and remain better, inclusive design tools for making presentations and other visual materials.