New York-based Animoto offers their video editing platform supporting individual video creators and businesses with different tiers of service up to their business plan for marketing teams wishing to create high quality to distribute across social media sites.
$0
per month
Vimeo
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Vimeo is a video experience platform. They enable anyone to create high-quality video experiences to connect and bring ideas to life. They proudly serve their growing community of nearly 300 million users — from creative storytellers to globally distributed teams at the world's largest companies.
Animoto is great for small to mid-sized business looking for control over their own video marketing. Allows someone with initiative and "scrapbooking mentality" to create professional-looking videos with ease. If you have even the smallest of marketing budgets, Animoto is perhaps the most worthwhile investment--that is, if you're able to get decent photographs or video clips to build from.
For an overall professional appearance of Vimeo, I think it looks fabulous for the clients we work with. I think it works extremely well to host videos for courses and training that can be paid training. The privacy feature is great for that. I've never used it for going LIVE and wonder if that might be a good option for businesses but since I haven't tried it, I'm not of the capabilities. And I'm not sure how the clients are able to get on the LIVES. It does have so many new features since I started 4 years ago, and that means that there is a higher learning curve if you want to make full use of this platform.
User-friendly interface for administrators of the account and external viewers. Being able to easily navigate a new platform or software is ideal for anyone.
Seamless sharing and embedding across many platforms. Vimeo is well-recognized so it makes it easy for other platforms to recognize Vimeo. The compatibility is outstanding.
As an administrator of the account, being able to select viewing privileges may seem like a basic function, but it's so necessary right now with how heavy our organization is utilizing the platform. We can mass upload content early and only release it for the public over time by simply changing it to a public video.
Great visual tool that lets you intelligently communicate what you are seeking to explain to your audience. More features I might suggest would be anything that makes it more interactive with the viewer in real-time.
Price - For the full featureset of Vimeo, you will be paying $900 a year as of 2020, and this is expected to only go up over time. Thankfully, Vimeo offers lower tiers with less functionality, and most people will not need the unlimited streaming viewers or whopping 7 TB of storage that you get for the highest level of membership. But it is still a premium price for a premium service.
"Suggested" Algorithm - The equivalent of YouTube's suggested videos feature is the Vimeo Staff Picks, which recommends curated content from their team of editors. While this content generally has a high level of production, it is not especially relevant to the video you are watching, or to your watch history as a user. I rarely watch suggested videos in Vimeo.
Search - The Vimeo search page is beautiful, having huge thumbnails of videos with a clean, visually-appealing layout. However, the results themselves leave much to be desired. When I search for "jung" to try to find videos on Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, of the first 18 results, not a single result is actually about C. G. Jung. On Youtube, the first 14 results are all about Jung. When I search for "c. g. jung" on Vimeo I find a number of relevant results, so it's not that the videos are not available in Vimeo. Rather, the search algorithm is not returning relevant results.
The design is clean and intuitive for the most part, which allows for ease of use by both novice and experience users. We are grateful for the ways that the front-end video player is easy to navigate and intuitive to use, and the backend is generally designed the same way. Tools and options are where you expect to find them, and it was easy to navigate the storage on the backend through folders and content filters
We haven't actually needed much support so that in itself says a lot about the software. It was easy to use and had great tool tips that guide you through the tool so you don't even need to reach out to support. There are help files that are there when needed, and some of these are helpful to us as well because again, we didn't have to reach out and wait for support.
Terrible support. When I subscribed to Premium we were guaranteed support. However, after the first e-mail I received from them, I never heard from them again. I sent several emails over the course of a couple of weeks acknowledging that due to covid, I did not expect a miracle overnight and that I was keen to work on the issue with them. I have not heard from customer service at all. This is very disappointing. We lost customers due to the poor quality of the livestreams and were left to sort the issue out without their help.
We had invested in making our own videos using YouTube, and even Camtasia. But they were still us interpreting on behalf of our audience which took forever. Once we found Animoto, it was so much easier to upload the pics our audience would send us. From there we had a 100% positive response, that we had indeed captured what they were trying to say.
YouTube was the platform we primarily used previously, after having restrictions and having locked out of a couple of accounts we needed a better platform. We also lost some of our videos. We also have an internal app to track client videos and Vimeo supported it better. With the increased storage and the number of videos we create, we decided Vimeo would be better.
