Sharayeh vs Pixno: Which Slides-to-Notes Tool Is Better in 2026?
If you've been using Pixno to turn PowerPoint slides into study notes and you're hitting the free-tier wall — or you need PDF lecture support, Cornell notes, or Arabic output — you're probably here looking for an alternative.
This is a head-to-head comparison of Sharayeh's Turn Slides into Notes and Pixno across the things that actually matter for students and professionals: free tier, supported inputs, note formats, language support, and export options.
We built Sharayeh, so this comparison is biased — but the feature table below is verifiable on each tool's pricing page.
Quick Verdict
- Pick Pixno if you only need basic slide-to-text extraction, you're 100% on PowerPoint, and you're working in English.
- Pick Sharayeh if you need PDF lecture support, Cornell or Study Guide formats, Arabic/RTL output, or more than a handful of free conversions per month.
The rest of this article unpacks why.
Feature Comparison Table
| Feature | Sharayeh | Pixno |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 3 conversions per day, no signup | Limited monthly free credits, account required |
| PowerPoint input (.ppt, .pptx) | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| PDF lecture input | ✅ Yes (digital + scanned with auto-OCR) | ⚠️ Limited |
| Note formats | Cornell, Summary, Bullets, Flashcards, Study Guide (5) | 1–2 formats per conversion |
| Reads speaker notes | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Partial |
| Reads tables in slides | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Partial |
| Output format | Editable Word (.docx) | Plain text / web-only |
| Arabic + RTL support | ✅ Full (UI, parsing, output) | ❌ English-focused |
| Watermark on free tier | ❌ None | ⚠️ Sometimes |
| Max file size (free) | 200 MB | Smaller limits |
| Per-conversion pricing | Free up to 3/day, then Pro plan | Credit-pack model |
How They Handle PowerPoint Input
Both tools accept .pptx. The difference shows up in what gets extracted.
Pixno focuses on the visible slide content — titles and bullet points. Tables, speaker notes, and complex layouts (multi-column, SmartArt) often get dropped or flattened.
Sharayeh reads the full XML of every slide: titles, bullets, tables (preserved as tables in the Word output), and speaker notes (which is where many professors put the actual lecture content). This matters most for slide-heavy courses in medicine, law, and engineering, where the speaker notes contain the verbal explanation behind each diagram.
If you've ever converted a lecture and gotten back a wall of disconnected bullet fragments, missing speaker notes is usually the reason.
How They Handle PDF Lecture Slides
This is the single biggest gap between the two tools.
In real life, lecture slides come as PDFs at least as often as PPTX files. The professor exports them, or you save them from the course site. Pixno's PDF support is limited and often plan-gated. PowerPoint has always been the primary input.
Sharayeh handles PDFs natively on the PDF Slides to Notes tool, including scanned PDFs (OCR runs automatically). The same five note formats — Cornell, Summary, Bullets, Flashcards, Study Guide — are available, and the workflow is identical to PPTX.
If you're a student whose professors share PDFs of slides instead of .pptx files, this alone is reason enough to switch.
Note Format Choice
Pixno gives you slide-to-text. Sharayeh gives you slide-to-format-of-your-choice.
Sharayeh's five formats:
- Summary — top-level takeaways for a quick recap.
- Bullet Points — every key detail, organized hierarchically.
- Cornell Notes — cue column + notes column + summary, built for active recall.
- Flashcards — Q/A pairs you can paste into Anki or Quizlet.
- Study Guide — main concepts, definitions, examples, and review questions for full exam prep.
You can run the same deck through different formats on different days — convert a lecture into Cornell notes for review and again into Flashcards for memorization, both within your free 3/day quota.
For a deeper guide on choosing the right format, see How to Turn PowerPoint Slides into Study Notes (2026 Guide).
Arabic and RTL Support
If you're a Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, or other Arabic-speaking student, this is where the comparison stops being close.
Pixno is English-first. Arabic slides will convert, but the output isn't RTL-formatted, mixed bidi text breaks, and Arabic-specific punctuation (Arabic comma ،, full-width period) is often mangled.
Sharayeh has full Arabic and RTL support across the whole flow:
- Arabic UI on
/ar/tools/turn-slides-into-notes. - Slide parsing handles mixed Arabic/English content correctly.
- Output Word document is properly RTL-aligned, with
<w:bidi/>and<w:rtl/>markup so it opens correctly in Word and Pages. - Arabic-script note formats (Cornell column labels, study guide section headings) are translated, not just left in English.
For a university student studying medicine in Riyadh or engineering in Cairo, this is the difference between usable notes and notes you have to re-format by hand.
Free Tier and Pricing
Pixno uses a credit-pack model — you buy a bundle of conversion credits and burn them down. The free tier is small.
Sharayeh's free tier is 3 full conversions per day, every day, with no signup. That's 90 conversions per month, more than enough for a typical student's full course load. If you need more (or you're a TA processing decks for a whole class), the Pro plan unlocks unlimited conversions and bulk processing.
For most students, the free tier on Sharayeh is enough — you won't hit a paywall mid-finals week.
Output: What You Actually Get
Pixno gives you notes you read in the browser. Exporting often produces plain text or a web-friendly format.
Sharayeh gives you a clean Word .docx by default. You can then:
- Edit it in Word, Google Docs, or Pages.
- Paste it into Notion (use Cmd+Shift+V to paste as markdown).
- Convert it to Markdown for Obsidian:
pandoc lecture.docx -o lecture.md. - Import the Flashcards format directly into Anki.
- Print it and highlight by hand the night before an exam.
The Word output is the more flexible end of the pipeline.
When Pixno Might Still Be the Right Choice
To be fair: if you only need slide-to-text extraction, you're 100% on PowerPoint files, you don't care about format choice, and you're working in English, Pixno is fine. It's a simpler tool with a smaller surface area.
But that's a narrow set of constraints. The moment you bring PDFs, Arabic, Cornell notes, flashcards, or any kind of complex slide layout into the picture, Sharayeh is the better tool.
How to Switch from Pixno to Sharayeh
It takes about a minute:
- Open Sharayeh's Turn Slides into Notes tool.
- Upload the same PPTX or PDF you used in Pixno.
- Pick a note format — try Cornell or Study Guide if you've only used basic notes before.
- Download the Word document.
No signup, no credit card, no migration. The first 3 conversions per day are free.
Related Tools and Reading
- Turn Slides into Notes — the main converter, all 5 formats, PPTX + PDF.
- PDF Slides to Notes — same tool, optimized for PDF lectures.
- PowerPoint to Study Guide — direct shortcut to the Study Guide format.
- Lecture Slides to Notes — student-focused landing page.
- How to Turn PowerPoint Slides into Study Notes (2026 Guide) — full how-to with Outline view and speaker-notes export comparisons.
- Lecture Slides to Study Notes with AI — student-focused walkthrough.
- NotebookLM Alternative: Slides to Notes Compared — head-to-head with Google's NotebookLM.