The best Google Slides add-ons in 2026

Ten add-ons that install into Google Slides itself — AI decks, audience interaction, bulk editing, merge and data. What each does on the slide, what it costs, and the Apps Script ceiling that explains the slow ones.

Google Slides add-ons split into four groups that have almost nothing to do with each other: generate a deck from text, make the room answer back, fix a hundred slides at once, and get real data onto a slide. Most roundups rank them in one list, which is why people install the wrong thing. This page is grouped by the job, and the job is usually obvious once it is named.

Sister directories: AI add-ins for PowerPoint, Google Docs add-ons, AI for Google Sheets.

Fair warning: Quiriz is ours, and it is in this list. I have said plainly where the others beat us — for making a deck out of nothing, several of them are the better buy. Capability claims come from each add-on's own Marketplace listing or documentation, checked September 2026. Pricing changes often; confirm on the vendor's page before buying, rather than trusting any roundup including this one.

Four jobs, not one list

• Make a deck out of text. Paste notes, get slides. SlidesAI, Plus AI, Gemini.
• Make the room answer back. Polls, quizzes, drawings, live responses during the presentation. Pear Deck, Nearpod, Live Polls Maker. Overwhelmingly a teaching category.
• Fix many slides at once. Batch resize, align, restyle, replace fonts, clean up an inherited deck. Slides Toolbox.
• Get real data onto the slide. Numbers and charts from your own systems, kept current. Nearly empty — Slides itself covers half of it, and the rest is a reporting add-on.

Naming the job first saves an afternoon of trials, because a tool that is excellent at one of these is useless at the other three.

The six-minute ceiling nobody mentions

Nearly every add-on in the Workspace Marketplace runs on Google Apps Script, and Apps Script cuts a single execution off at roughly six minutes. A sidebar cannot hold one long job open and wait for it.

So anything touching many slides — building a deck, sweeping for markers, refreshing every chart — has to be a loop of short server calls, one slide or one object at a time, with progress shown as it goes. An add-on that appears to grind through a long deck steadily is usually doing the only thing the platform allows. Google's own Gemini is built in rather than scripted, and is not bound by this.

It applies to us as much as to everyone else here.

Quick comparison table

Gemini in Slides (built in, not installed)

The job: write slide content and generate images, without installing anything.

Gemini is woven into Slides: help writing text on a slide, image generation from a description, and a side panel that can reference your Drive files. Because it is native it is not subject to the Apps Script ceiling, and it can reach your Drive in a way no third party can.

Where it stops: Google folded Gemini into the paid Workspace plans in 2025 and retired the standalone AI SKUs, so this is effectively for paying Workspace customers. Access on a free personal account is limited. And it writes words and draws pictures — it does not compute the number that belongs on the slide.

Pick it if you already pay for Workspace. Use it before buying anything else.

SlidesAI

The job: paste text, choose a theme, set a slide count, get a deck.

The lowest-friction text-to-deck tool in the Marketplace, and it works the same way in PowerPoint — useful if your organisation straddles both. Quality is solid for standard business and teaching content, and it runs natively in Slides rather than exporting from somewhere else.

Where it stops: theme-driven rather than template-driven, so a strict corporate master usually means restyling afterwards. And it writes prose, not analysis: a figure on a generated slide came from whatever you pasted in.

Pick it if you have the content and want slides with minimal fuss.

Plus AI for Slides

The job: generate a deck, generate a single slide, rewrite a slide, reformat an existing one.

The strongest third-party generator that behaves like an editing tool rather than a one-shot. Generating a deck is the headline; the features that get used daily are smaller — rewriting one slide, or taking a slide you already have and reformatting it into a cleaner layout.

Where it stops: same as every generator. Words, not numbers.

Pick it if you build a lot of new decks and want better ones faster.

Quiriz for Google Slides

The job: build the recurring deck from your own data, and bring it current before the next meeting.

Ours, so read it accordingly. This is the fourth group above, and it is not a deck generator. Ask a question in the sidebar and get a chart or a table on the slide; each inserted object carries the question that produced it, so next quarter the deck can be refreshed instead of rebuilt.

A whole deck works from one prompt: pick the data, say what the deck is for, and Quiriz plans the slides and shows the plan first — each slide's title, the question it will ask, and what it will show. Edit it, untick what you do not need, then build. Slides land in your template's own layouts with charts in the deck's theme colours and takeaways beside each one. Every build closes with an Executive summary slide written from what the other slides actually showed, and a refresh rewrites that summary last, from what the pass read.

Note the marker spelling if you write questions into a template: the Google add-ons use =QUIRIZ("net sales by month", "chart") — no dot. Excel and Word use =QUIRIZ.ASK(...).

Because Apps Script cuts off at six minutes, Refresh all and a build run as loops in the sidebar, one slide or one object per server call, with a Stop you can press between calls.

Where it stops, honestly: it will not design anything. No deck-from-a-topic, no imagery, no "make this look good" — for a new deck that has to impress, SlidesAI or Plus AI is the right purchase and we are not competing for it. It needs your data in Quiriz first, which only pays back if the deck recurs. And if you just want one chart from a spreadsheet you maintain by hand, Insert → Chart → From Sheets is free and already in the menu.

Pick it if you present the same review deck every month and the tedious half is the numbers.

Pear Deck

The job: turn a presentation into a lesson the class answers.

Adds formative assessment and interactive questions to slides, so students respond on their own devices while you present. One of the most-installed Slides add-ons there is, and the default in a lot of schools for good reason.

Where it stops: built for teaching. It works in a business meeting, but everything about it assumes a classroom.

Nearpod

The job: embed activities directly into slides.

Open-ended questions, polls, quizzes, collaborative boards and gamified activities, embedded in the deck rather than bolted alongside it. It also converts existing Slides or PowerPoint decks into interactive lessons rather than making you start again.

Where it stops: also a teaching product, and a heavier one than Pear Deck. Worth comparing the two directly rather than picking on a roundup's say-so.

Live Polls Maker

The job: polls, quizzes and Q&A inside the deck, answered from the audience's phones with results shown live.

The lighter, business-meeting version of the two above. If you want one poll in a town hall rather than a whole lesson platform, start here.

Slides Toolbox

The job: the unglamorous one, and the one people are most grateful for.

Batch editing across a whole presentation: resize, align, manage fonts, tidy text. Inherit a ninety-slide deck from someone who left and this is what makes it consistent in ten minutes instead of an afternoon. No AI anywhere in it.

Slides Creator (merge from Sheets)

The job: one personalised deck per row of a spreadsheet.

The Slides equivalent of a mail merge: a Google Sheet supplies the rows, a template deck supplies the layout, and you get a presentation per row. Genuinely useful for certificates, per-student packs or a per-client one-pager.

Where it stops: merge fields carry values. They cannot carry a different analysis for each recipient — that is a different job, and the same line we draw in the mail merge guide.

Charts: what Slides already does for free

Before installing anything for charts: Insert → Chart → From Sheets pulls in a chart that already exists in a Google Sheet and keeps it linked, so an Update button appears on the slide whenever the spreadsheet changes. That is free, built in, and covers a real share of what people go looking for add-ons to do.

What it does not cover is the rest of the slide. The chart has a link; the headline and the takeaway bullets beside it do not, and they are what the room reads first. That gap is the whole reason a reporting add-on exists.

How to install an add-on

1. Open a presentation and go to Extensions → Add-ons → Get add-ons. The Workspace Marketplace opens inside the file.
2. Find the add-on and click Install.
3. Review the permissions, then grant them. The add-on appears under Extensions in every presentation on that account.

On a managed Workspace account an administrator may have restricted installs, in which case the add-on must be allow-listed or deployed domain-wide.

Worth thirty seconds every time: most add-ons need only the presentation you have open. A broader request — all your Drive files, or your email — should have an obvious reason in what the add-on does.

Which should you pick?

• You pay for Workspace. Try Gemini first — you are already paying for it.
• Free Google account, want AI decks. SlidesAI for the simplest path, Plus AI if you will keep editing afterwards.
• You teach. Pear Deck or Nearpod. Compare them directly; they overlap heavily and suit different styles.
• One poll in a meeting. Live Polls Maker, not a lesson platform.
• You inherited a messy deck. Slides Toolbox, today.
• A deck per row of a sheet. Slides Creator.
• One chart from a spreadsheet. Insert → Chart → From Sheets. Install nothing.
• The same review deck every month. Quiriz for Google Slides — a different purchase from the generators, not a competing one.

Frequently asked questions

Google, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Docs and Google Workspace are trademarks of Google LLC. Quiriz is an independent product, not endorsed by or affiliated with Google. Other product names belong to their respective owners.