deckcraft
Presentations and slide shows: an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft PowerPoint in pure Rust. Part of the ArtCraft Crafting Apps.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
DeckCraft is a PowerPoint lookalike built from scratch in Rust: slide masters, themes, 150+ shapes, charts, transitions including Morph, animations and presenter view, and it opens and saves .pptx. It's free under MIT or Apache 2.0 on Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and in the browser.
Nothing to host. Installers are signed on Mac and Windows; Linux gets AppImage, deb, rpm or Flatpak. It exports PDF handouts, images and even an animated GIF of the deck, and a command line tool plus MCP server lets an AI agent build slides by command.
Solo presenters who need to open a .pptx without paying Microsoft: try it. Teams that trade decks with PowerPoint users: wait. The maintainers rate it about 55% ready for real work, its .pptx tests only use decks the team made itself, and VBA and add-ins are out of scope by policy. LibreOffice Impress is the mature free option.
The catch: open bugs include Close throwing away an edited presentation without asking, and startup crashes on some Windows graphics drivers. It's a week old and written largely with Claude. Save often.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Dual licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0, no account, no subscription. The ArtCraft logos are trademarked and must be removed from modified builds you distribute.
Self-hosted: Nothing to host. Desktop builds for macOS (universal DMG, signed and notarized), Windows (x64, arm64 and 32-bit MSI or portable zip, code-signed), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak, tarball on x86_64 and aarch64, plus riscv64) and FreeBSD, plus a WebAssembly build for any static web server. Command line tool and MCP server included.
Paid: None for DeckCraft. The same team sells ArtCraft, a separate AI image and video studio on monthly credits; it unlocks nothing here. Versus Microsoft 365, the maintainers put DeckCraft at about 55% ready for real work, with no Designer, Copilot or other Microsoft cloud features and no VBA or add-ins.
Free under MIT or Apache 2.0 with no paid tier. Good enough to open and present a simple .pptx; keep PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress for decks you trade with clients.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; fine for building and presenting your own decks
- Small team
- free to try, but keep PowerPoint or Impress for decks you exchange
- Medium team
- Not ready: .pptx untested on real-world decks, no co-authoring
- Large team
- Not ready: no add-ins, VBA or managed deployment story; revisit after beta
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Trust Signals
License: MIT OR Apache-2.0
Use freely under either license; the Apache side adds a patent grant. ArtCraft logos must be removed from modified builds.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
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