Powtoon

Powtoon – Powtoon is a well-known online platform for creating animated presentations and explainer videos. It combines elements of slideshows with animation, allowing users to present information in a lively, cartoon-animated way.

With Powtoon, you start by choosing a template or a blank canvas. Templates are tailored for use cases like marketing pitches, school project presentations, product explainers, or intros.

The workspace is slide-based: you build your story scene by scene. On each slide, you can add characters (cartoon figures or modern graphic figures), text boxes, shapes, and images. Powtoon offers a library of characters with different professions and expressions, and you can make them enter or exit the scene with various animations (fly in, pop up, fade, etc.). There are also fun transition effects between slides and a timeline to adjust timing within each slide. One key aspect is adding animated text and cartoon effects – like hand-drawing text (whiteboard style) or making objects bounce in. Powtoon includes a selection of music tracks to set the mood and you can record voiceovers for narration. While it doesn’t do automatic lip-sync for characters (the characters in Powtoon generally don’t have moving mouths for speech), it does allow syncing the appearance of text and graphics to your voiceover via the timeline. The platform focuses on simplicity: most things are drag-and-drop and choosing preset animations, so no coding or frame-by-frame drawing is needed. The result can be exported as a video or PDF or played via Powtoon’s player. Powtoon is widely used by educators, students, and business professionals to turn otherwise static presentations into engaging animated stories. It basically gives non-designers the ability to produce a cartoon-style video to explain an idea, leveraging pre-made assets and intuitive controls to make the process quick and fun.