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 enables organizations and brands to produce high-quality visual assets, such as slideshow presentations, infographics, storyboards, and Facebook ads. Visme falls within a new category of services that combine features from both presentation and collaboration apps.
Visme’s library of templates, stock images, animations, and other assets is ample. That means companies can work from ready-made samples and quickly turn them into their own branded content. Visme’s tools are easy to use, too—with a few exceptions. Support for collaboration could be better, however, and Visme charges a lot more than its competitors. Our Editors’ Choice pick among apps for creating branded content is Canva. Prezi is our Editors’ Choice winner for presentation apps, while Miro earns the Editors’ Choice distinction for collaborative whiteboard apps.
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. It has features for saving your brand or company’s color palettes, images, videos, and other assets. That way, it’s easy to make sure you’re using the most current branding. Visme comes with a wealth of templates and access to lots of stock images, which makes it simple for non-designers to use the app and get good results. Visme is available on the web and as a desktop app for macOS and Windows.
How Much Does Visme Cost?
Visme has four tiers of service: Basic, Personal ($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 worth paying for, as the Basic and Personal options are highly restrictive. For example, even the somewhat pricey Personal account includes a mere 250MB of storage. At this tier, you also don’t get a Brand Kit, Visme’s highly desirable tool that lets you upload fonts, color palettes, and other template items to maintain brand consistency across projects. At least Visme removed its former limit of 15 projects for Personal accounts. You’re restricted to exporting to JPG, PNG, and PDF, though, which means no PPTX, HTML5, GIF, or video formats. Collaboration is severely limited at this tier, too. The Free account has even more restrictions, but at least you can use that option to get a taste for the interface without putting down a credit card.
The Business tier gives you more freedom, but it still has some limitations I find stingy considering the price. For example, you get only 3GB of storage per person. At this tier, you can store projects in custom folders and use the Brand Kit tool, however. You can also export your works to JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX, HTML5, video, and GIF formats. There are no restrictions on importing PowerPoint files either. 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 makes that request. 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 nonprofit organizations who reach out to the company.
How Do Visme’s Prices Compare?
Visme’s prices are high, especially considering that you need to subscribe to the Business tier to reap much value.
Canva costs just $12.99 per month for up to five people. For this price, you get 100GB of storage space, custom templates, and the ability to publish your content directly to social media. You also get not one, but 100 Brand Kits. It’s a much better deal than Visme.
Prezi is suitable for many of the same use cases as Visme and it charges between $180 and $228 per person per year for its best plans. Miro charges $192 per person per year for its Business plan. Mural costs $144 or $240 per person per year (equivalent to $12 or $20 per month), depending on the plan you choose. All of those rates are more than $100 per year less than Visme charges for its equivalent Business tier.
Even business-grade Microsoft 365 plans that includes PowerPoint cost less than Visme. Those rates run between $99 and $240 per person per year. All of those plans bundle other Office apps too, such as Word and Excel.
Building 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 a 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 it’s not the same as Google Workspace‘s 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 you align them.
Collaboration Tools
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 from a long list of possibilities: administrator, copywriter, designer, marketing manager, marketing user, regular user, and more. Visme also doesn’t readily provide a summary of how these roles differ. Many apps do. When you invite a new manager to an account, the app should tell you what permissions a manager gets 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; or coediting the file with others. You can only coedit 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. 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 of any changes to a file, such as when a collaborator adds comments.
Visme’s integrations enable you to use marketing info from Google Analytics, HubSpot, Jotform, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, 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 something only an Enterprise user can request. Our Editors’ Choice winner Canva is our top pick for creating branded content; it costs less than Visme and offers better collaboration features.