Likelihood to Recommend JW Player has flexible plans that won't cost you a lot of money. If you are a startup, JW offers a variety of plans that will suit your specific needs and grow with you as your company grows. You do not need to be a video expert to understand how to upload a video, which allows nearly anyone in the office to do it.
Read full review For companies that want to integrate their videos into actionable steps like behavioral follow up through a CRM, Wistia is the best tool to use. You can automate your systems to track when a video is viewed, engaged with or how long a person has been watching along with heatmaps to show where people were most interested and least interested so you can adjust your videos to optimize their performance.
Read full review Pros Responsive HTML5 Provides share functionality built into the player Platform use enables playlist functionality and playlist players which can be customized or versioned for specific uses Videos uploaded to the JW Platform automatically provide multiple image frame options for selecting video thumbnail Read full review Wistia enables a lot of customization in the video player, making it personalized to your business. The user experience is pretty intuitive and easy to use without too much training. Wistia's help articles, blog and instructional videos were very helpful as we began investing more resources into video production. Read full review Cons Definitely missing the ability (in and easy way) to have clickable links in the video. Analytics is a little cumbersome and not very user-friendly. Read full review Obtaining embed codes for a significantly large number of videos can be very time consuming as there is no way to automatically pull a report. Within a project, there is no way to set the list to show a specific number of videos and you may only have a certain number of videos shown unless you click to expand the list and continue to do so. Once the list is expanded and you click in to a video, when clicking back, the list reloads and you must expand the entire list again which can become very time consuming. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Just made the decision to renew given demonstrated improvements being made to the platform to expand compatibility for its player use on devices such as Apple TV, as well as improvements made recently to its JW Platform Dashboard
Read full review Wistia is super easy to use and very reliable, anytime a video needs to be updated, the existing media can be replaced, but the url remains the same so anywhere this media is shared or embedded, it is immediately updated. Their support is extremely helpful, and there is very rarely any issues with this product.
Read full review Usability Reliability and compatibility on a majority of platforms. Would have received a 10 except recent versions of browsers such as Firefox are now defaulting against Flash components and thus prompting approval from users BEFORE loading which is a HUGE obstacle to an effective user experience thus creating concerns by end-users unnecessarily and risking that they will NOT accept the prompts, thus leaving unable to view video content hosted using the JW Player. Assurances by JW support suggest they will resolve this, so we'll see...
Read full review Great, simple, usable product. Would have given it higher marks, but sometimes the folders and permissions aren't the most intuitive. Interface for uploading, tagging, describing videos is simple. Sharing is also relatively intuitive. Overall, a clean and simple interface and most of our marketing team had no issues using it. I think it was easier than using Vimeo.
Ian Nate Digital Marketing Operations Manager
Read full review Reliability and Availability After several years, we have not come across a situation for which Wistia was not available when needed.
Read full review Performance I have never had any technical issues with Wistia. The service is fast and reliable. video play back begins as soon as a few seconds of video have buffered. The stats are accurate and available within a few hours of current use. I have integrated it with Marketo and found that the integration is clean and is easily incorporated into the campaign logic flow. (ex. If the user played more than 50% of the video, do Action-A, otherwise do Action-B.
Read full review Support Rating Support is reasonable. I from time to time have made suggestions on improvements that would be nice to see (like the ability to have a clickable link within the video - that is easy to create, without tons of coding) and it seems as though I never see it happen or get much response to "suggestions" to upgrade the software. The good news, other than a few things as I mentioned above, overall, I don't have many "technical issues" in the platform, which is a good thing. On occasion, I have seen some "issues" with the delivery of the video, but it has been pretty scarce. So it is dependable.
Read full review We have only had to reach out to Wistia support a handful of times in the 4 years we have been using Wistia. They have always been quick to respond and help us solve the problem. The system is self-service so there should be very little to no need to reach out to support on a regular basis.
Read full review Implementation Rating One of the primary features promoted by JW Platform is its SEO definition. However, there did not seem to be a way to integrate that data to our platform if selected thus only leaving the benefits of that data to be established on the individual video page hosted by JW Platform, which isn't useful in the end to the client value we are trying to deliver for our
VideoproFile.net solution
Read full review We were in the process of changing our website so that took some time to get Wistia implemented in to our website.
Read full review Alternatives Considered JW had more player options, a better/more intuitive user interface, was altogether faster both in rendering the uploaded videos and in time to load on the web page. The integration with
OpenX for pre-roll was faster and easier than with
Brightcove , and lastly, they offered a great price for service.
Jim Cairl Director, Online Advertising and Operations
Read full review Wistia is for business. Period.
Vimeo has none of the benefits for a business that Wistia offers. The SEO value and SUPER FAST playback speed are essential. Wistia has it all. Personally, I can rarely get thought a video if hosted on
Vimeo because of the glitchy playback and slow rendering.
Read full review Scalability We use many platforms and Wistia has been a standout in terms of reliability and scaleability.
Read full review Return on Investment JW Player has was less expensive (without sacrificing quality) than our previous video platform so the ROI was instant. We were easily able to add a variety of video advertising options including pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll. The quality and consistancy of the look of the video has enabled us to grow our video views by well over 100% since starting with JW. Read full review Doubled lead capture from lead magnet on website from one year to the next. Increased email interaction on newsletters when embedding Wistia video thumbnail into email campaigns (10-15% links clicked bumped to 30-40% links clicked). Can save us about 50+ hours of one-on-one client meeting time per year for pointing clients to video content rather than presenting the same info in a live setting. Read full review ScreenShots