British company Sparkol offers VideoScribe, a video editing application supporting whiteboard style animations and presentations.
$14
per user/per month
Zight
Score 8.7 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a solution with a community of over 4M users, offering visual asynchronous communication, eliminating the need to use different applications for screenshots, GIFs, screen recordings, and web recordings.
If you need to spice up your presentations but don't have the money/budget/team for full video production or animation, this software is for you. In skilled hands it can also look as good if not better than productions that would cost 5-6x more, including turnaround time. I think the basics of video still apply here, you want to have a story, a narrative, some storyboarding and an idea of where you want to go, but the tools this software provides will help you achieve that (and edit it later) quickly and efficiently
I appreciate when I can take screenshots, and send them to coworkers. When I need to illustrate when something is not working properly, I can easily take a screenshot of the error message, and send it off to IT. This way they are able to resolve the issue much sooner. I will receive website leads, take a screenshot of the lead, and forward it on to the sales team
It's fast and customizable! You can import your own vector graphics and PNGs to utilize or take advantage of their huge library of resources, from graphics to icons and sound
You don't have to have a background in animation or graphics (though it doesn't hurt) to utilize the program, really expanding who in your company can take advantage of it
The support and resource documentation is amazing. From multiple series of videos to text-based help and I believe if i remember correctly even emails when I first signed up, it's hard to feel frustrated or lost with how to start with all the support available
Some of the vector rendering for imported pieces could still use work, I've discovered a workaround for adding a stroke to images to help smooth the edge but this can be tiring
The PNG rendering often seems to be under a super heavy compression and can pixellate even higher-res images that are brought in. I utilize almost exclusively custom created graphics to use in this program so seeing that fixed would be great
It would be nice if there was a super-basic audio editor in the program, even something that didn't do much but let you edit the start and end of clips
Can get buggy or slow to load when you have a large library of media saved
The GIF/video capturing can bug sometimes when you are in full-screen mode, but I have a feeling that's connected with going over the limit of the freemium account 😅
In all honesty I don't even have time to look for an alternative to CloudApp at this point in our business. CloudApp works for what we had planned to use it for and unless a competing service that offers the same quality and ease-of-use along with video screen capture comes out I will renew indefinitely.
I would give cloud app a 10 out of 10 if the video screen capture portion of the tool worked flawlessly and the addition of few suggestions like full-page screen grab and the quicker ability to download screenshots or screen videos to my hard drive. I don't mean to repeat a feature request here being that features would heavily improve usability in my particular usage situation.
I would give cloud app a 9/10 score on overall support mostly because I have had very little need of any support at all being that the tool was designed almost to use itself. In my opinion this level of forethought is equal to customer support. As of yet I've only had one real problem with cloud app which was the loss of a 20 minute video screen capture. Unfortunately I have not had the time to contact support about this loss. The only other minor issues that I confronted was within the initial set up which I was able to resolve via their website's support pages.
I was extremely satisfied with how quick and easy the implementation of Cloudapp was on my MacIntosh using MacOS Sierra was, along with how amazingly fast I was able to be up and going with the tool. most often with sass tools we are lucky if we can use 50% of the features without having to have consultations and a ton of back-and-forth email on how to use other features of the product. Cloud app has made it extremely user-friendly with almost no need for customer support. To My business, that equals time savings which as most business owners know, can be far more valuable than a few dollars saved.
Every video or graphics program has its own purposes, VideoScribe is very specifically for taking images, moving them around with nice visual transitions and having something come together quickly. I've also used it to animate infographics in far less than half the time it would have taken me in Premiere. It definitely has serious limits in the type of animation you can do, which is important to be aware of, but if that works within the framework and scope of your budget, then it's incredible.
Remember - the only limits to how sophisticated you can make this look are how creative you are, to begin with. I did things with this program I don't think I'd seen in any of their samples, simply because I have a background in it all and had a new set of tools to play with.
I need to point out that I love Snagit. It's a fantastic product, but there are different use-cases. CloudApp for me is about quick and efficient sharing. Snagit doesn't really allow for that. Yes, they have a cloud sharing option, but for the entirety of me using the program, it hasn't worked right. You'll have to try both to see what I mean.
Won over $300k+ in new biz by changing from an old PowerPoint deck to a short (4-5 min) video and reframing how we shared the information
Modified the same deck to be shown at annual conventions as a less "pitch" and more "informational" way of educating the audience, and never saw as many people visiting our booth for information. Likely could attribute additional new biz leads to this effort as well
Got to save a LOT of money in the time and production of the deck which was then able to be utilized instead on other things to make future decks better, like a new microphone and better monitors. Seriously I can't believe how inexpensive this program is
