Deckhand vs Google Slides
Google Slides is a browser-based slide editor with real-time collaboration, templates, comments, version history and Gemini built in; it runs on Google's servers and your decks live in Drive. Deckhand is a single binary that presents a folder of HTML files from your machine. They do not compete on authoring at all: Slides is an editor, Deckhand is not. The overlap is the moment you present: notes on a phone, a remote, the audience on their own devices.
Owning the deck
A Google Slides deck is a document in Google's format. You can export it to PPTX, PDF, ODP, images or plain text, and every export loses something. You need a Google account to make one; viewers of a shared link do not.
A Deckhand deck is a folder: 01-title.html, 02-problem.html, an optional
deck.json with notes. Open any file in a browser and it is your slide. Put
the folder in git and keep it for twenty years. The trade-off is plain:
there is no editor. You write the HTML, generate it from data, or ask a
language model to produce it.
Presenting
Google Slides Presenter View shows notes, a timer and the next slide in a second window on the presenting computer. From the phone app you can present on the phone itself, cast to a Chromecast (with the notes on the phone) or present into a Google Meet. Using the phone as a remote for a presentation running on a laptop is not a built-in feature; people use third-party extensions for that.
Audience tools give you Q&A: a short link appears at the top of the slides, people open it from any device and post questions, vote on them, and you can put a question on screen. In Workspace you can restrict who may ask. That link is for questions; the audience does not see the slides through it. To follow along they need the deck shared with them, and their copy does not move with you.
Deckhand prints a remote link and an audience link with QR codes. The phone becomes the remote, with current and next slide, notes, timer, laser pointer, black screen and a way to show the audience QR on the stage. Everyone who scans the audience QR follows the slides live on their own screen, over the LAN, with no account and no app, and can browse back and forth on their own. There is no Q&A feature. Everything runs on your machine; the optional Hub adds viewers outside the room, permanent links and audience statistics.
Side by side
| Deckhand | Google Slides | |
|---|---|---|
| Editing | None; HTML by hand, script or AI | Full browser editor, templates, Gemini |
| Collaboration | Git, if you want it | Real-time co-editing, comments, history |
| File format | HTML files you own | Google's format; export to PPTX, PDF, ODP, images |
| Account needed | No (Hub: e-mail magic link, optional) | Yes to create; no to view a public link |
| Works offline | Yes, entirely | Partly, with Chrome offline access |
| Presenter notes and timer | On your phone | Presenter View window on the computer |
| Phone as remote for the big screen | Yes, built in, QR code | Not built in (third-party extensions) |
| Present from the phone itself | No | Yes: on device, Chromecast, Meet |
| Audience follows live on their device | Yes, LAN link, synced, no account | No; the Q&A link only |
| Audience Q&A | No | Yes, with voting and moderation |
| Slide isolation | Sandboxed iframe, strict CSP | Not applicable |
| Install | One binary | Nothing, a browser |
| Cost | Free and open source; Hub free tier, Pro plan | Free with a Google account; Workspace plans |
When to pick Google Slides instead
Pick Google Slides when several people build the deck together, when the deck has to look fine without anyone writing CSS, when your organisation already lives in Workspace, when you need Q&A from the audience, or when you will present through Meet. Deckhand has nothing to offer on any of those points.
When Deckhand fits
Pick Deckhand when you want to own the slides as files, when the room may have no internet, when you want the audience on their own screens without accounts, or when the deck is produced by an AI or a script and you refuse to paste it into an editor one slide at a time. Pick it when the phone remote has to work in any venue with nothing to install.
Try it
brew install stranix79/tap/deckhand, then
deckhand present examples/ship-it --open. The format and the prompt for
generating a deck are in the
README; the hosted Hub is
at deckhand.show.