After trying almost ALL the carousel generators out there (and getting frustrated with all of them for different reasons), I was genuinely excited to try Carousify.

Unfortunately though, Carousify falled short of my expectations too...

Here are the issues I'm having:

1) The copywriting on the carousels is below average at best – and down right terrible at worst. It's like the AI wasn't trained on creating scroll-stopping hooks, compelling narratives, or even the most basic copywriting & social media content writing frameworks. Every single carousel I've tried to create turned out boring, with an unclear message and a confusing narrative. And some of them didn't even make sense at all (and no, this wasn't due to giving bad inputs: I gave the same inputs into 2pr – another AppSumo tool – and the copywriting on the carousels turned out great, even though 2pr's carousels fall short in design). Yes, I know I can manually tweak every word in Carousify. But first of all, that would take a lot of time. And secondly, the copy is so bad that it's simply not even worth tweaking. And before you brush this off as a minor inconvenience: not only are the carousels painfully uninteresting; half the time, I didn't even know what I was reading about (even though I fed the AI the topic and the description). So not only does the AI not understand basic marketing, copywriting, and storytelling / content creating principles – it's like the AI doesn't even do a good job of understanding the topic, and translating it into a logically structured, clear message.

2) Adding to my previous point, the AI tends to copy A LOT from the description you feed it. So, say you feed it the post's captions – well, be prepared to see the exact same wording in the carousel. Or say you give it a section from a white paper – get ready for the same corporate jargon, with minimal changes. This might be fine if you're creating content for the sake of it. But if you have ANY tangible goal with your content – such as engagement, performance, reach, leads, sales, etc. – you're in for a disappointment.

3) Automatic carousel generation doesn't work (for the most part). Although I didn't spend more than 2-3 hours playing around with the tool (which is already a pretty big time investment tbh), I couldn't find a straightforward way to create on-brand carousels with AI from scratch. To be fair though, Carousify does allow you to use its pre-built templates – and then you can create (off-brand) carousels automatically with just a topic + description. And yes, it also has the "Smart Carousel" function that will finish a carousel after you've created the first 3 slides manually. But in my experience, there's no way for Carousify to a) understand your visual brand, b) understand your topic + description, and finally c) create an on-brand carousel about your topic with a click of a button. Maybe its just me, but based on my brief research into this tool before purchasing, I was under the impression that this was exactly what Carousify excells at – well, I was wrong.

4) Carousel design makes frequent mistakes. Blocks of texts stretching halfway off a slide? Or blocks of texts placed directly on top of each other? – I've come across design issues like these in almost every single carousel that I've created in Carousify. Yes, I know I can tweak this manually too – but at that point, I'm probably better off just using Canva.

Honestly, I genuinely don't get all the 5-taco reviews... I'd give this tool 1 taco IF it weren't for the concept: every other carousel tool I've tried sucks in some way too, but creating carousels for social media is a real JTBD. All this to say: there's definitely a market opportunity for the right tool in this field, and I was really hoping that Carousify could be that tool.

But in its current form, it's not ready – not by a long shot. Even so, I'm giving +1 taco for the concept, hoping that it will improve over time.

Finally, to make my review fair, I'd like to highlight that while I did play around with Carousify for 2-3 hours, I never reached out to their support to discuss my issues. Doing so may have helped me resolve at least a few of the problems I was experiencing, I don't know. But in my defense: the goal of this tool is simple. So, if I need to ask for support to get its basic functionality to work, I'd argue that's already a problem.