Panopto Reviews

In the higher education market, the choices tend to boil down to Panopto or Kaltura. Panopto has a robust lecture capture system that supports a wide range of formats and inputs. The ability for the student to select the source they want to see (slides, camera view, etc.) for the lecture makes it much easier to "set it and forget it." The live transcription and searching within the video also are valuable tools. Panopto is not nearly as well polished in the backend as Kaltura (especially after Kaltura's most recent backend overhaul). On the support end, Panopto's role permission and sharing options are confusing. Its integration with the LMS is not as robust as Kaltura's, and its analytics are lacking. Panopto was more cost-effective than Kaltura.

Panopto is great for "one to many" deliveries for lectures as well as short video introductions, assignment, briefs and other information for students. It is less appropriate as a conferencing tool which many of our staff are looking for so that students can interact live with the presenter. Students can ask questions but it is hard to manage this if you are live streaming and presenting information.

Panopto, as designed to, meets our scheduled lecture and personal recording needs extremely well. It could be used for recording less formal teaching situations, but more planning might be required.

Panopto is most useful for helping to engage students in learning, widening participation by increasing flexible learning opportunities, and enabling innovation with video in learning and teaching.

Panopto works well to easily capture, store and share videos to the cloud. Since there are not any plugins needed to watch videos in a web browser, it becomes simple for end-users to watch videos on nearly any modern device. We use Panopto for lecture capture, training videos and students can create videos of their speeches and presentations to share.

Panopto is great added to Canvas if you'd like a good screen capture program to add videos to courses. It offers the ability to add quizzes and make your videos have closed captioning, which is very good when making your content accessible for viewers with hearing impairments. It offers a timeline editor where you can add things like Powerpoint, Youtube videos, and quizzes directly into your videos. The quizzes can be taken while watching the video and in Canvas, you can choose to have it add a grade in the grade book for taking a quiz that is incorporated into the video, which is pretty nice. It isn't a fully functional polished video editor though. More like an enhanced screen capture program with a few bells and whistles.

There are easier tools out there that do similar things and are faster without having the budgeting wildcard of Panopto's pay-per-view pricing. While the editing feature is nice, it is pretty temperamental and does not integrate or export to a format that is compatible with other programs such as Adobe After Effect, Premiere, Final Cut or Camtasia.

That said if you're working with a smaller budget/audience Panopto might be a friendlier alternative to something like Kaltura.

Panopto is good for recording lectures, whether they be in physical classrooms or by instructors sitting at their office computers. Being completely cloud-based takes the load off internal resources. Panopto is first a recorder, unlike many of its competitors which focus first on being a media library/repository. Panopto is really weak on student video assignments because it is overly complicated for a student to submit a video to an instructor's folder. It is affordable compared to the competition but does have shortcomings for student assignments.