Simplified Review: Solid Content, Thin Visuals, Roughly a Draw With ImagineArt

Table of Contents

• First Impressions & User Experience
• Core Features
• Performance, Reliability & Everyday Usability
• Pricing Breakdown & Limitations
• Privacy & Data Handling
• Comparison With ImagineArt
• Final Verdict

Simplified was next on my list, and honestly, this platform is a lot. It does everything from UGC videos and social media content to ads, research, workflows, AI images and video, brand stuff, analytics, blog writing, and a whole bunch of other things. There was no way I was going to test all of that properly in one sitting, so, like with the other bigger platforms in this series, I stuck specifically to the AI PPT maker and the agent behind it.

I can definitely see the appeal if someone is already using Simplified for all those other things and wants presentations to be part of the same setup. But if I’m looking at it purely as a presentation maker, I wasn’t nearly as impressed. The first draft was informative and had decent content, but visually it felt pretty plain, and even after I asked for more visuals, it never really got to the level I wanted. So for someone specifically looking for a presentation tool where the final deck looks polished and engaging, I don’t think this would be my first choice.

First Impressions & User Experience

The sidebar alone gives you a pretty good idea of how much Simplified is trying to do. There are sections for UGC videos, ads, research, workflows, and then this whole AI hub with what feels like dozens of different content types sitting inside it. There’s honestly so much there that I could’ve spent the entire testing session just clicking around instead of actually testing the presentation maker. I basically ignored all of that and went straight to the presentation option through the AI agent, which in the interface is called Riley.

That was really the only part I wanted to judge here. I wasn’t trying to see how good Simplified is at making social posts or videos or doing research, because that’s a completely different test. I wanted to see what happened when I gave Riley a presentation prompt and let it handle the process from there.

Core Features

Generation process and speed. After I gave Riley my prompt, it first put together an outline and then came back with a few follow-up questions before actually making the full presentation. I liked that part because it didn’t just take the first prompt and immediately throw a deck at me. It asked for more detail about what I wanted, including the theme and overall visual direction, which did gave me a bit more say in what the finished presentation was supposed to look like.

The whole process was a little on the slow side, though. It took around five minutes before I had the actual presentation, which is definitely longer than most of the tools I’ve tested. That said, I didn’t feel like the wait was completely wasted because the first draft was actually pretty decent. The content was informative, covered the main points of the topic reasonably well, and felt like a proper first draft rather than something I immediately wanted to throw away. The main problem became much more obvious once I started looking at the presentation as a presentation rather than just reading the information, like the content was there, but the visual side wasn’t nearly as strong.

The visual problem. This was probably the biggest issue I had with the whole thing. The first draft was actually fine when I looked at the information itself, but once I looked at the deck as a presentation, it felt pretty plain. There wasn’t much happening visually to break things up or make the slides feel interesting. It had the information I needed, but it often felt like the text was doing most of the work.

And this ended up being the main problem throughout my entire test. I kept trying to push it in a more visual direction, but the presentation never really caught up with the quality of the content. The writing was good enough, the structure was usable, but the slides themselves just didn’t have that extra bit of visual variety that makes a presentation feel finished. Even after I specifically asked for more visual elements later on, I still found myself looking at a fairly basic deck.

Manual editor. This was probably the weakest part of the editing experience for me. It was genuinely pretty limited. I could make the basic changes you’d expect, like editing text, changing fonts, adjusting colours and similar stuff, but that was more or less where it stopped. I didn’t have much freedom to actually work on the individual parts of a slide.

There wasn’t much I could do manually with charts, shapes, media, or other visual elements, and I couldn’t really go in and properly rearrange or redesign a slide myself. That was especially frustrating given that the main thing I wanted to improve was the visual side of the presentation. If the deck already looked a little plain, I couldn’t just jump in and fix that properly on my own. For any bigger change, I basically had to go back to Riley and ask it to do it for me, which made the limited manual controls feel even more noticeable.

The AI editor, mostly good, with one real persistent issue. The AI editor worked pretty well when I gave it individual requests, but it struggled when I tried to do several things at once. I gave it three requests in one go: shorten the presentation from seven slides to five, add more visual elements, and add another slide on a specific topic. It only followed the first one and brought the deck down to five slides. The other two weren’t done, so I had to go back and ask for them separately.

Once I did that, it handled the requests much better. I asked it to add another visual element and it added a chart, and when I asked it to change the theme to black and blue, it followed that pretty much exactly. The only thing was that even after I kept asking for more visual elements, the presentation still didn’t become that much more visually interesting. The changes were there, but fairly minor, and the deck still felt quite basic overall. So I’d say the editor was good enough for straightforward changes, but I definitely had to break things down one request at a time, and even then it didn’t completely fix my main issue with the visuals.

Speaker notes, a genuine letdown. I asked Riley to add speaker notes, and it told me that it had done it. So naturally, I went looking for them afterward, and there was nothing there. I couldn’t find any speaker notes on the slides at all. That was more disappointing than simply finding out the feature wasn’t available, because the tool actually told me the job was done when it clearly wasn’t. It also made me wonder whether I needed to double check some of the other changes it said it had made.

Credits. This was genuinely one of the better systems I’ve tested. I started with 1,000 AI credits, and the initial presentation generation used less than 300. I then went through the presentation and made several AI edits, and even after all of that, I’d only used a little over 500 credits in total. That’s actually pretty good compared with a lot of the other tools I’ve tested, where one presentation and a couple of edits can burn through most or all of the free allowance. Here, I had enough credits to properly generate the deck, make changes, and actually test the editor without constantly worrying about running out.

Export. Export was thankfully pretty straightforward, and this was another thing I appreciated about Simplified. I could download the finished presentation for free as either a PDF or PNG, without having to upgrade just to get the actual files. Considering how often I’ve run into export being locked behind a paid plan in this series, having it available without any extra fuss was definitely a plus.

Performance, Reliability & Everyday Usability

Outside of the slower generation time, everything else was pretty consistent for me. The AI editor worked reliably when I gave it one thing to do at a time. The main issue was when I bundled several requests together, because it would only pick up one and ignore the others. That did mean I had to make more separate requests, though, and each of those edits used credits, so the credits started to dwindle faster than they otherwise would’ve.

Pricing Breakdown & Limitations

Pricing here is a little all over the place depending on the plan and whether I’m looking at monthly or annual billing. The important thing is that these prices cover Simplified as a whole, not just the presentation maker, so I wouldn’t really judge the value based on the PPT feature alone.

• Pro: around $19 to $29/month, depending on billing
  
• Business: around $79/month, with support for multiple seats and social accounts
  
• Growth: starts around $119/month for larger team setups
  

Given how much else is packed into Simplified, the pricing makes more sense if I’m using it as an all-in-one content platform. For presentations alone, though, it’s a much harder value proposition to judge.

Privacy & Data Handling

Simplified’s privacy policy is pretty general because it covers the whole platform, not just the presentation maker. It explains how they handle account information, usage data and the other information collected while using the different tools, but I couldn’t find much detail specifically about the prompts I put in or the presentations it generates. In particular, I couldn’t find a clear statement saying whether that content is used to train their AI models.

So overall, I didn’t find anything that immediately stood out as worrying, but I also wouldn’t say the policy gave me a complete picture of what happens to presentation content after I upload or generate it. If I were using Simplified for anything sensitive or confidential, I’d probably want to clarify that with them first rather than assume my content isn’t being used for training.

Comparison With ImagineArt

Given how similarly these two platforms are positioned, both massive multi purpose AI suites where I only tested the presentation piece specifically, comparing them directly felt like the right call.

Honestly, I found them pretty hard to separate. Simplified gave me a slightly better first draft in terms of the actual content, and I also got more use out of its credits across the full process. I could generate the presentation and still have enough left to make several edits without immediately worrying about running out. On the other hand, ImagineArt’s manual editor was definitely better if I wanted to take over and make changes myself, with more things I could actually tweak directly. I also liked its export options a little more.

The bigger issue is that neither one really solved the visual side for me. Both could make the changes I asked for, but the presentations still ended up feeling fairly basic visually. So while they each have their own strengths, I wouldn’t say either one clearly won this comparison for me. Overall, they’re pretty much neck and neck, just good at slightly different things.

Final Verdict

The overall impression of Simplified’s presentation maker was pretty similar to ImagineArt’s for me. It was a mixed experience, but I was definitely leaning towards negative by the end, mostly because of how basic the final deck looked. I actually liked the generation process a bit. It asked me follow-up questions before making the presentation, and the first draft itself was pretty good. The content was informative and covered the topic well enough. I also liked the credit system more than I expected. I started with 1,000 credits and still had around half left after generating the deck and making several edits, so I had enough room to actually play around with it. Being able to export for free as a PDF or PNG was another nice bonus.

The visuals were where I kept getting stuck, though. The deck looked pretty plain from the beginning, and even after I specifically asked it to add more visual elements, it never really got to the point where I thought, okay, now this actually looks good. The AI editor was useful when I gave it one thing at a time, but it struggled when I gave it multiple requests together. Then there was the speaker notes issue, where it told me they had been added and I couldn’t actually find them anywhere. That was pretty annoying and did make me want to double-check everything.

Compared directly with ImagineArt, I honestly think they’re pretty similar. Simplified was a little better when it came to the content and how far the credits went, while ImagineArt gave me more freedom in the manual editor and slightly better export options. But both had the same bigger problem for me: neither really managed to make the presentation look as polished or visually interesting as I wanted. So I liked different things about each, but neither one really did enough to pull ahead.

Overall: 4.5/10.

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