Descript is a collaborative audio/video editor, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that works like a doc. It includes transcription, a screen recorder, publishing, full multitrack editing, and AI tools.
$12
per month
Microsoft Powerpoint
Score7.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation software designed to allow users to create slide-based presentations including video and images, as well as slide transitions and animations.
Descript is well-suited for fast editing of training videos, tutorials, podcasts, and screen recordings, where transcript-based editing and quick cleanup save time. It works best when you need a simple workflow to record, transcribe, remove filler words, tighten sections, and apply basic enhancement tools like noise cleanup. It is less appropriate for high-stakes projects where losing edits would be very costly, or when you need strong guarantees around long-term project history, backups, and recovery. Based on our experience, if you are doing many hours of edits and expect to revisit projects months later, you may want an additional export/archive process outside the platform.
The learning curve with Microsoft Powerpoint is not too steep, and most everyone can create really nice-looking presentations. The thing I like most about the new advancements in Microsoft Powerpoint comes to formatting. If you are creating a newsletter, don't get bogged down by all of the annoying formatting rules and issues you would have if creating in Publisher or Word. Microsoft Powerpoint makes it very simple. You can add text boxes and move them anywhere on the page. The templates are a nice touch, but they could use more, as most of these are outdated. I believe there are many free websites for downloading more templates.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
UX Performance. Because it's synced to the cloud, there can be some delay or lag in the UX when editing.
Editing Transcriptions. Machine-based transcriptions always need some post-editing. While Descript makes it pretty easy, I still think there is some room for improvement. For instance, I would like to be able to automatically update for all occurrences of a word after fixing it in the transcript.
Automatic importing of YouTube and hosted video files. I often have to download a video from YouTube to be able to import it into Descript. Would be nice to be able to just paste in the URL to the video and have Descript automatically import it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It's pretty user friendly, has a easy-moderate learning curve. However during updates they do change the features in different panes / sections that make them harder to find. The text editor is near perfect, some of the other tools such as colour, templates, audio etc. are arranged in a slighlty less intuitive manner
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It’s great overall! I can think of a few improvements that would make it a 10, for example: better Smart Art graphs, automatic distribution of columns and rows in tables, and being able to more easily save templates for graphs. For example, if I could determine that a same brand name in all graphs would have a specific color, it would be great
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I've never had any issues with its availability. As it is installed on my machine, it's ready when I need it, online or offline. Creating large slide decks with complex elements like video and audio doesn't affect its stability. The only limitation would be the capability of your own computer, as far as I can tell.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The performance is very strong. It loads reasonably quickly. Large presentations load relatively quickly too, given their complexity, and once loaded each slide is readily available. It's easy to scroll up and down through your slide deck and go to the slide you want. Videos, pictures and music all load on demand, controllable by clicks.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We had a very frustrating experience with Descript and their support.
We used Descript to record and edit several videos. The edits were done around May, mainly using the web app. When we opened those same projects in December, many of them looked like raw recordings again. Cuts were missing and effects were missing.
Support and engineering told us they checked their logs and only saw “creation → recording → transcription,” and they said they could not find proof the edits were ever made. That explanation does not match what we saw in the app. The affected videos show two project backup files. In Descript, backups only appear after you start editing (the app even says so). But when we checked other projects that we know are raw, those do not show any backup files. We asked a simple question: if backups appear only after editing, why do the “raw” affected videos have two backups while truly raw videos have none? They did not answer this clearly.
One rep also said they noticed a spike in network errors in May. That is exactly when the edits were done, which makes it very likely the edits did not save or sync correctly. Instead of admitting this could be the cause, support kept pointing to “no logs of edits” and that it was our fault.
They refunded one month, but called it a “courtesy.” That was disappointing. We also stopped using Descript while they were investigating because we did not feel it was safe to keep working in the platform. If that one-month refund was meant to cover the time we could not use the service during the investigation, that still does not address the real damage. We lost many hours of work, we paid our editor hourly, and we paid for the subscription for convenience and reliability. For the amount of inconvenience and loss we experienced, one month is clearly not enough.
I have never had to use the actual support. Most of my questions are "how to" questions and there is a rich internet full of users sharing their tips and tricks with this application. Sometimes I find the answers on Microsoft support site but often I don't
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Descript is by far superior to the other editing software you can get on Apple computers. It's able to do a lot more and really save us tons of time. Other Adobe apps are great, but take a while to learn. Descript is very user-friendly, making it easy to start from day one with very little training.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Adobe Illustrator is an excellent software but it's not easy to use for [everyone without] having any training or previous experience in working with illustrator. Microsoft Powerpoint is very easy to use and it's fantastic as it saves time more than illustrator. Another thing is it takes small space while illustrator takes a significant amount of space in the business machine
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Scaling up use of Microsoft Powerpoint would be a simple case of buying further licences. The software is intuitive and therefore training demands from scaling it to more departments or more individuals would be relatively straightforward. Google Slides may be easier to share among those organisations that use Google's suite of apps, however.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I can get video completed much more quickly and cheaply
We can produce more video content because of the speed with which we can have a finished product
We can have shorter timelines for example I record on Monday and we publish on Tuesday which wouldn't be otherwise possible with other methods I've used
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
