Streamable vs. Vimeo vs. Wistia

As a video agency founder, I've used several different video hosting platforms for both my clients and my own videos. Oftentimes, businesses just want a simple way to embed videos on their website. While they can use YouTube for free, they are stuck with a cluttered interface and related videos (sometimes even their competitors!) popping up on their videos. Other options like Vimeo or Wisitia are great, but for most businesses, they have too many features, and because of that, you are paying way more than what you actually need.
Streamable is extremely simple and fast. It checks all the boxes for what a business needs in a video hosting solution - privacy control, a simple clean embed, and the ability to replace videos without breaking links. And it's super affordable. Highly recommend Streamable!

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Video Hosting
• Sharing Videos
• Video Management
• Download Videos From The Web

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• More Detailed Analytics

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

I usually extract the links of all lectures from the embed code, but now Vimeo is not allowing that feature. Instead, I have to copy the whole embed code and then extract the URL from the embed code separately. This process has become cumbersome and a bit of hassle since I don't need the whole embed code.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I use Vimeo all the time, and never had any issues with the system.

Incentivized

After several years, we have not come across a situation for which Wistia was not available when needed.

Incentivized

Vimeo does well in performance with systems with ease. I have not encountered any issues with loading pages or slowing down in other software or systems.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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 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.

Incentivized

Vimeo does provide the legwork of content curation and management of sources. The quality of content is not bad from a viewer's point of view. I think the analytics could use a little bit of improvement, only because my department has a lot of users.

Incentivized

We were in the process of changing our website so that took some time to get Wistia implemented in to our website.

Incentivized

Streamable is significantly cheaper than Vimeo and Wistia. Although Vimeo and Wistia have more features (like video marketing tools), for video hosting Streamable is the best bang for your buck. For the majority of small businesses Streamable is going to be the best solution for you

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.

Incentivized

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.

Nothing that I could think of. Maybe changing the way of extracting the URL's from the embed codes.

Incentivized

Vimeo does well with integrating videos in the Absorb LMS that I currently manage.

Incentivized

We use many platforms and Wistia has been a standout in terms of reliability and scaleability.

Incentivized

Everything works fine in Vimeo, and the users like the quality and sound of the lectures when viewed on Absorb LMS. They can view the lectures on the desktop and mobile devices.

Incentivized

• Our video hosting costs are about 50% less than using Vimeo

• It allows clients to serve a massive amount of video content within an LMS without eating up disk space or sacrificing bandwidth.
• The overall cost is very low compared to other tools and there is no 'pay per view' style unstable pricing.
• The tool has allowed students in other countries to access content faster.
• NEGATIVE - the upload limits per week, especially on the basic/pro accounts are too restrictive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized