Gamma vs Canva — do you have the content already?

The short version

• You know the points but not the structure → Gamma
• The structure is settled and it needs to look right → Canva
• It has to match a corporate template → Canva (brand kit)

1. Pricing

Annualised, Gamma's entry plan is about JPY 17,280 against Canva Pro at JPY 11,800. Canva is cheaper, but its AI allowance is expressed relative to the free tier rather than as an absolute number, so usage is harder to forecast. Gamma states 1,500 credits a month, which you can actually plan against.

2. How each one builds a deck

Give Gamma a set of bullets or even a one-line theme and it proposes the number of slides and the heading for each — it takes over the step of working out the structure. What comes back is usually too long, so cutting slides becomes the human job.

Canva starts from a template you choose and fills in text and images. Its AI features (Magic Studio) speed up individual operations — writing, image generation, background removal, resizing — rather than deciding the structure.

Pick based on which part of deck-making you find painful. If it is deciding the shape, Gamma. If it is making it look presentable, Canva.

3. A note on Japanese typesetting

Both have Japanese interfaces and both can produce Japanese decks. But templates designed abroad set line height and letter spacing for Latin text, so Japanese can look cramped, and headings sometimes break in the wrong place.

The fix is simple: shorten the heading. A Japanese character occupies roughly the width of two Latin characters, so aim for about half the length a Latin template accommodates. Cutting words is faster than fighting the layout.

4. Sharing and export

Gamma's native output is a shareable web page, which suits material people scroll through. PowerPoint and PDF export exist, but the underlying structure assumes the web, so it is not optimised for print.

Canva assumes print as a destination: press-ready export, business cards, posters. If the same tool has to cover internal decks and physical collateral, Canva is the wider one.

Frequently asked questions