ToolsSeptember 17, 202611 min read
Claude Slides vs Gamma, what a deck costs on each
Anthropic put Claude Slides on paid plans on 16 September 2026. Gamma already does the same job on a free tier. We priced both at the source this morning.
Claude Slides is Anthropic's deck maker, and since 16 September 2026 it lives inside an ordinary Claude conversation on any paid plan, where Claude Cowork used to be a separate place you had to walk over to. Gamma is the AI deck tool Claude now sits next to, and it has a free tier that works tonight. Both turn a paragraph of notes into slides, and both hand you a real PowerPoint file at the end.
Read at the source this morning, Claude Slides is not on the free plan at all, so the cheapest door is Claude Pro at $20 a month, or $17 a month if you pay for a year up front. Gamma's pricing page, which opens on its annual tab, starts its paid plans at $9 a seat a month, and its free tier hands you credits at signup that never refill.
The difference that decides it is how each one counts what you use. Gamma meters a deck in credits, per slide and per image, and shows you the balance before you press go. Anthropic says a deck counts against your plan's usage limit like the rest of your work, only more heavily, and publishes no number anywhere for how many decks that buys you.
What is Claude Slides, and what changed on 16 September 2026?
Claude Slides is a presentation maker built into Claude, and Anthropic folded its separate Cowork workspace into the main Claude app, so decks, documents and designs are now made from inside any conversation instead of a second product. Anthropic's announcement opens with one sentence that says the whole thing.
Starting today, Claude Cowork and chat are merging into one Claude. Bring a quick question, or hand over a report due at noon, and Claude takes it from there, even after you've closed your laptop.
Cowork was the place Anthropic sent you for the big jobs, the ones that ran long enough that a chat window felt like the wrong shape. Keeping it separate meant choosing where a task belonged before you knew how big it was, and that choice is what got deleted. Anthropic's blog says Claude can now work out what a task needs, so what Cowork and Design could do is available from any conversation, with the context, skills and connectors you already have.
The merge ships 3 things, all in beta and all on paid plans. Claude Docs is a document you write together with Claude, which can draft sections, ask questions and comment on your choices. Claude Slides is the deck maker, with direct editing and export to PowerPoint and PDF. Claude Design, which used to stand on its own, now works inside a conversation and keeps working separately as well.
The rollout is not instant, and the banner sitting at the top of Anthropic's own pricing page says so in one line, that Claude Cowork is now just Claude and it is rolling out to Pro and Max with more plans to follow. Web, desktop and mobile all get it over the coming weeks. Team and Free come after that with no date attached, and Enterprise customers are promised at least a month of notice before anything changes under them.
What the merge buys you in practice is a shorter walk. The deck starts from the conversation where you already pasted the notes, argued about the figures and attached the spreadsheet, so nothing has to be described twice. If you have set up Claude Skills or connected a data source, the deck inherits both without any extra step.
Can you make a deck tonight with Claude Slides or with Gamma?
You can make a deck tonight with Gamma without paying anything, and you cannot with Claude Slides. Anthropic's pricing page lists Claude Design, Slides and Docs as a flat No on the Free plan and Yes on Pro and both Max tiers, so getting to Claude Slides means starting a subscription first.
A free Claude account is still a good account. You get chat on web, desktop and mobile, web search, file creation, code execution, memory and Artifacts. What you do not get is the deck maker, and paying does not always get it either this week, because the feature is reaching Pro and Max accounts gradually rather than appearing for everybody at once. If you upgrade tonight and no Slides tab shows up, that is the rollout rather than your account.
Gamma asks for nothing at signup, and its help centre is blunt about what happens after the welcome screen. Every AI action on the free plan spends credits, those credits never refresh, and once they are gone you either earn more by inviting somebody or you pay. A free account can hold a limited balance at any one time, and there is no cap on how much you can earn by referral.
| The free tiers | Claude, free plan | Gamma, free plan |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $0 |
| Deck maker included | No, Slides needs a paid plan | Yes |
| AI allowance | Usage limits, no credits to count | 400 credits at signup, never refill, held up to 2,000 |
| Slides in a single prompt | Not available | Up to 10, more added by hand |
| Text it reads first time | Not available | Up to 50,000 input tokens |
| Mark on what you export | Not available | Made with Gamma, removed on any paid plan |
So the answer tonight splits cleanly on whether you already pay Anthropic. If you don't, Gamma gives you a finished deck inside half an hour with a badge in the corner, and that is a real result rather than a demo. If you already pay for Claude Pro or Max, Claude Slides is sitting inside a subscription you bought for other reasons, which is the same reasoning that makes free AI agents worth checking before you pay for one.
What does one deck cost on Claude Slides and on Gamma?
Gamma prices a deck in credits you can watch going down, and Claude prices it as usage against a limit with no published number. Neither company sells you a deck for a fixed amount, but only one of them shows you a meter while the machine works, and that single difference is worth more than any feature on either page.
Gamma spends credits on generating a presentation, editing with its agent, adding cards and trying new layouts, metered per slide and per image. The rate moves with the model you pick and the length of what you asked for, which Gamma says openly, and for image work it shows the credit cost of each model before you commit to it. Paid plans refill every month on your billing date, and unused credits roll over up to twice your plan size.
Anthropic meters differently, and its own product page for Claude Design states the rule in one sentence worth keeping.
Artifacts, including work made with Claude Design, Claude Slides and Claude Docs, count toward your plan's usage limits, like the rest of your work with Claude. Larger requests, like a full deck or design, use more of your limit than a typical message.
| How each one meters | Claude Slides | Gamma |
|---|---|---|
| What it counts | Your plan's usage limit, shared with every other Claude task | Credits, spent per slide and per image |
| Monthly allowance | Not published as a number | 1,000 on Plus, 4,000 on Pro, 20,000 on Ultra |
| Price visible before you generate | No | Yes for image models, shown per model |
| When it resets | Rolling 5 hour session, plus a weekly limit on paid plans | Monthly, on your billing date |
| Unused allowance | No published rollover | Rolls over up to 2 times your plan size |
| When you run out | Wait for the reset, move up a plan, or turn on usage credits at API rates | Buy more credits or set up auto recharge |
Anthropic's pricing page says there is no fixed message count, because how much you can do depends on the length of your conversations, the model you chose and the features you used, and everything you do across web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code draws from the same pool. Pro gives at least 5 times the usage of Free in a session, and the Max tiers multiply Pro again. Those are ratios, and a ratio does not tell you how many decks fit inside a week.
The practical difference lands when you plan a month rather than an evening. On Gamma you open the billing screen, read the balance, watch what a real deck costs and multiply, which is arithmetic anybody can do at a kitchen table. On Claude you find out where you stand by looking at the usage bars in settings after the fact. If you are weighing the subscription itself, we compared what a Claude Pro subscription buys against ChatGPT Plus earlier this year.
Do you get a real PowerPoint file out of Claude Slides and Gamma?
Both tools export a real PowerPoint file. Anthropic's Claude Design page names PPTX, PDF and HTML, and its Academy tutorial on slide decks adds a zip of the project files and a hand off to Canva. Gamma's help centre names PDF, PNG and PowerPoint, and lets you export the whole deck or single slides.
Gamma attaches one condition to the file, and it is the badge. Workspaces on any paid plan export without the Made with Gamma mark, and the plan has to be active at the moment you export, so a deck built while you were paying still comes out badged if the subscription has since lapsed. Gamma also notes that subscriptions apply per workspace, which catches people who pay on one workspace and build on another.
The more useful warning is about what the file looks like when it opens somewhere else, and Gamma publishes it rather than hiding it. Exports reflect Present Mode rather than Edit Mode, so some visual differences are expected, and a Zoom to fit setting scales your content to fill the page on the way out. Charts and diagrams render at their proper size in PDF, PPTX and Google Slides exports, though they can land smaller or shifted from where you left them.
One line on that same help page is worth reading twice if your company lives in Google Workspace. Gamma says Google Slides ignores the fonts embedded in an uploaded PowerPoint file and substitutes its own, even though Gamma embeds them correctly on export, and calls that a Google Slides limitation rather than a Gamma one. The workaround is to open the exported file in PowerPoint itself. Anthropic has published no equivalent note for Claude Slides, which does not mean the problem is absent, only that nobody has written it down yet.
Which one lets you fix a slide yourself?
Both let you edit a slide by hand instead of asking again and hoping. Anthropic says Claude Slides gives you direct editing plus export to PowerPoint and PDF, and Gamma is a full editor, with control over card sizes and page setup and an import path from PowerPoint, Google Slides or a document you already wrote.
Anthropic's Academy tutorial walks the Claude loop end to end. You describe the audience, the message and the context in plain language, Claude builds an interactive HTML deck, and from there you edit named slides, add or remove content, bring in charts, images and your branding, then share or export. Sharing runs through 4 permission levels, from private up to full edit rights for people in your organisation, and Anthropic notes the HTML export is the one to pick when a deck leans on interactivity or animation.
Gamma's editing model is the one you already know from a document tool. The deck is a canvas you open, cards you resize, a page setup you choose, and an agent you can call on when you want a section redone. Importing an existing PowerPoint or a Google Slides deck is built into it, which matters when the job is repairing the deck somebody else made last quarter.
The honest difference is where the editing happens rather than how good it is. Claude keeps the deck inside a conversation you can keep talking to, which suits somebody who thinks by arguing with a machine. Gamma gives you a document you open and close, which suits somebody who wants the deck to sit still while they work on it. Neither of those is a flaw, and nobody has run the 2 tools side by side on the same brief and published the result, so any claim that one makes prettier slides is a taste rather than a test.
What do we not know yet about Claude Slides?
Nobody has independently tested how good a Claude Slides deck looks next to a Gamma deck, Anthropic publishes no number for how many decks a plan pays for, and there is no date for the Free and Team rollout. All 3 of those gaps are a day old, and all 3 are questions a reader actually has tonight.
The quality question is the loudest one and the least answerable today. We did not run the 2 tools on the same brief for this piece, and we could not find anybody who has since the merge shipped, so every ranking circulating this week is somebody's impression of a couple of screenshots. That test is worth doing properly, with the same notes, the same slide count and the same export target, and we would rather publish it late than guess at it now.
The money question has a hole in it on both sides. Anthropic's limits are all relative, so Pro is a multiple of Free and Max is a multiple of Pro, which tells you the ratios and nothing about decks. Gamma's pricing page opens on its annual tab, so the seat prices in the table assume you pay for a full year in one go, and the page says annual billing saves you up to 28 percent, which means a monthly subscriber pays more than the figure on screen without the page saying how much more.
2 smaller unknowns matter more than they look. Claude Design, and with it Slides and Docs, has to be switched on by an administrator in Organization settings, so a work account can be fully paid up and still show nothing. And all 3 surfaces shipped in beta, which is Anthropic's label rather than ours, so the behaviour you learn this month is not a promise about next month. Gamma's refund window runs 3 days from subscribing on its side, and depends on how many credits you burned first.
Claude Slides vs Gamma, which one should you open tonight?
Open Gamma if you are not already paying Anthropic, and open Claude Slides if you are. That sounds like a dodge and it is the finding, because the 2 tools do the same job and price it from opposite directions, one selling you a meter you can read and the other folding decks into a subscription you bought for something else.
| Claude Slides | Gamma | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No, paid plans only | Yes, 400 credits at signup that never refill |
| Cheapest paid door | $17 a month, billed $200 for the year, or $20 monthly | $9 a seat a month on the annual tab, $18 for Pro |
| How it meters | Against your plan usage limit, no published number | Credits per slide and per image, balance shown first |
| Exports | PPTX, PDF, HTML, project zip, Canva | PowerPoint, PDF, PNG |
| Mark on exports | None published | Made with Gamma on free, removed on every paid plan |
| Available right now | Rolling out to Pro and Max, Team and Free later | Everywhere, today |
| Where you edit | Inside the conversation that wrote it | In a document editor you open |
For one deck tonight with no subscription, Gamma free is the shortest route that asks for no card, and the badge in the corner is the price of that. If the deck goes to a client and the badge would be embarrassing, the cheapest Gamma seat removes it and hands you a monthly credit allowance that covers a lot of slides.
For anybody already paying Anthropic every month, Claude Slides is the first thing to try, because the notes, the spreadsheet and the argument you had about the figures are already sitting in the conversation, and the deck costs you usage you have already bought. The thing to watch is the weekly bar, since Anthropic says a full deck eats more of it than a typical message and will not tell you how much more.
For anybody who builds decks every week for other people, Gamma is still the safer business decision today, and the reason is forecasting rather than beauty. You can look at the credit allowance on your plan, measure what your real decks cost, and know in advance whether the month works. That calculation does not exist on the Claude side yet, and until Anthropic publishes something you can divide, a studio running on Claude Slides is running on a limit it cannot see. If you want the wider picture of what these subscriptions actually buy, our comparison of AI agent builders and their real prices covers the same ground for automation.
Questions people ask
Is Claude Slides free?
No. Anthropic's pricing page lists Claude Design, Slides and Docs as not included on the Free plan, and included on Pro and both Max tiers. The cheapest way in is Claude Pro at $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month if you pay for a year up front.
What is Claude Slides and when did it launch?
Claude Slides is Anthropic's presentation maker, built into Claude rather than sold separately. It shipped in beta on paid plans on 16 September 2026, the same day Anthropic merged its Claude Cowork workspace into the main Claude app, and it is reaching Pro and Max accounts first.
Can Claude Slides export to PowerPoint?
Yes. Anthropic's Claude Design page names PPTX, PDF and HTML as export formats, and its Academy tutorial on slide decks adds a zip of the project files and a hand off to Canva. The HTML export is the one Anthropic suggests when a deck depends on animation or interactivity.
Is Gamma free to use for presentations?
Yes, within limits. A new Gamma account gets 400 credits at signup that never refresh, can generate up to 10 slides in a single prompt, and reads a memo sized amount of text on the first generation. Anything you share or export from a free workspace carries a Made with Gamma badge until you pay.
How many slide decks can I make on a Claude Pro plan?
Anthropic does not publish a number. Its pricing page says there is no fixed message count, because usage depends on conversation length, the model and the features you use, and its Claude Design page says a full deck uses more of your limit than a typical message. You can see where you stand in Settings, under Usage.
What happened to Claude Cowork?
Anthropic merged it into the main Claude app. Cowork was a separate workspace for long running jobs, and everything it could do now appears inside any Claude conversation, alongside Claude Docs, Claude Slides and Claude Design. Pro and Max accounts get the merged version first, with Team and Free to follow.
Which is better for a client deck, Claude Slides or Gamma?
Nobody has published a side by side test since Claude Slides shipped, so quality claims this week are impressions rather than measurements. On the checkable facts, Gamma removes its badge on any paid plan and shows the credit cost before you generate, while Claude Slides needs a paid plan and meters decks against a usage limit with no published figure.
