Genially App Review

Genially App Review

Can you afford to use it?

Ethan Kidhardt

General Information

Title: Genially Location: app.genial.ly ·DescriptionGenially is an online, vector based, PPT replacement app that allows for highly advanced presentations, collaboration, and data collection/management between groups. It is beautiful, intuitive, rich with templates and graphics, and easy to use. This presentation you're reading now, was made in Genially, so you can see for yourself how smooth and pleasant it is! Audience This app can be for anyone and everyone, from teachers to business professionals, to teams and collaborative environments. It's built to be, what looks like, a nearly universal PPT replacement tool, with special focus on collaborative and data management for bigger businesses. It's extremely powerful and robust.

This is the constant reminder to pay them more money for the 'advanced' features.

Here's what it looks like!

You'll instantly know how to use it if you've used PPT, Slides, Prezi, and other similar presentation software.

These are the options on the left

Examples of the hundreds free vector illustrators, which are really nice!

Evidence

Evidence is this document which was created in Genially for free, following their completely free plan.

First Impressions

My first impression was actually your (the professor's) presentation for module 2, and I really liked the voice recording feature, and the clean appearance. So I thought I'd take a closer look! Animations are smooth, the interface is highly intuitive, and it can do, far far more than I, or almost anyone, needs. Graphics options are rich, with endless vector shapes, multimedia options, and an ocean of templates to choose from. You can instantly start designing. It wasn't long however, until I hit a paywall. In fact, the first template that I tried to use resulted in the paywall, unfortunately. I looked for a trial period so that I could practice the advanced features, but there is no trial period! First impressions were: "It's beautiful and easy!" but also, "What? I have to pay money to get basic features, and I can't even try them before I pay?"

The Paywall

This super aggressive pricing does NOT allow for a monthly plan for bothstudents and educational professionals. The ONLY option is to buy an annual plan! And without a trial period for advanced features, one has to pay 39.90/USD just to try it out. It's impossible to TRY the "Edu Pro" plan unless you buy the ENTIRE year.This is ridiculous, and highly aggressive.

Here are their pricing plans to seduce you into a year long contract

Final Price: 15/usd/year for students.

Final Price: $250 usd/year for teachers

Final Price: $ 60 usd/year for teachers

No monthly plan!

No monthly plan!

Expensive monthly plan!

What can you do on a budget?

So then, what IS available for free?

• Basic PPT features.
• Link Sharing
• Simple, beautiful experience

Hundreds of Templates! But the really nice ones are all blocked.

The ones with stars are not free. The simple ones are free

The ones with stars are not free. The simple ones are free

Useful for teachers?

In what ways would it be useful for teachers?

A huge array of templates

Collaboration

Genially has hundred, if not over a thousand templates to choose from, and all are beautiful.

Slides collaboration is very useful. You can work together to edit the same document with colleagues.

It's online; and basic features are free!

Interactivity

Gamification is an option that I was unable to explore withoutpaying for a year of service. But there are a ton of options!

Because it is online, anyone can access it from anywhere. It's not bound to someones hard drive. It's also backed up! On top of this, it's free!

The Down Sides

Teachers Won't Need 95% of the Features

Very Aggressive Marketing

This is a deal breaker for me. With no trial period and no way to avoid paying 49.00/usd just to test out features, I cannot justify buying it. You're either forced to buy a full year for $60, OR the month plan for $40.

Genially is incredibly robust, but for teachers, the most basic functions of a PPT, a public link, and audio-link features are what would be used the most. The incredibly advanced design, video, and data analysis tools will not be useful.

Overwhelming

Most of the Features Are Free on Google Slides

Google Slides may not be fancy or super beautiful, but virtually everything that Genially can do, Slides can do for free, but it will take longer to create, because the tools and interface are much more basic.

This software is incredibly broad and profound. While the basics are easy to understand, the dept that Genially reaches are overwhelming. The connection between data management and collaborative environments is complex. It's not providing a PPT service, it's providing PPT+a full range of data, collaborative and data analysis tools.

Competition

For the price they're charing, there are also expensive alternatives, such as Prezi, or some advanced Microsoft services, not to mention a huge variety of cheaper online PPT/sharing options out there. If you're going to pay money, it would be wiser to pay for a service that is better designed for teachers.

Pricing

To use the collaborative tools, teachers and schools will need to make a heavy investment. For a single teacher, to use all of the tools, it will cost nearly $250/USD/Year, which is out of my price range!

Conclusion....

After spending a considerable amount of time exploring the features and digging deeper into the marketing and features that require pay, for teachers, I would only reccomend two features:1. The basic free PPT function. 2. The audio link function, which requires payment $60/USD/Year to access (and opens up other features) Ultimately, the $60/usd/year plan is the top choice for teachers, and if someone has that much money to test it out, then it might be worth it just for the simple PPT+Voice feature alone. There are potentially a host of other tools that COULD be useful, but without a trial period, I cannot test them (such as the Gamification feature). Recommendations Would I recommend the basic free functions? Sure. Would I reccomend $60/year or $250year for advanced services? No, I don't think it's a justified value, unless you have the money. Will This Improve Student Learning? No. Not in my case. For a teacher in primary school who would really only use the PPT and audio recoriding functions, the value equation doesn't add up. What is free however, is pretty decent! The Future: A Prediction Here is my prediction: Google will improve/update Google Slides which will be a free service and render both Prezi, Genially, and other expensive presentation software mostly not worth the investment. Even now the cost-benefit is hard to really see.

Conclusion, Part 2

Ultimately, the decision not to use Genially is more from the standpoint of their aggressive and partially misleading marketing, and what I would call deceptive, monitization of features. For example, a watermark will appear in every presentation, as a 'feature' in the Student and Educational Pro. plans, then on the Master Plan, the watermark is an 'eliminated feature'. It costs money to get the watermark, and costs money to remove it! It's not so much the features that turn me off with Genially, because the simple presentation, sharing, and audio clip insertion is brilliant--it's just what I want; but what I would call a deceptive marketing philosophy indicates to me that their ultimate priority is making money instead of creating an amazing using experience. Consequently, while the free features are decent, and a $60/year plan gives you some good benefits, I will not be using it unless they provide me with a trial period where I can explore the features before making a decision.