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Brain Dump about Brainshark
Updated December 30, 2014

Brain Dump about Brainshark

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Brainshark
  • Slideshark

Overall Satisfaction with Brainshark

Currently, Brainshark is being used almost exclusively by our marketing department. However, we just renewed our contract to a full enterprise audience and have heard interest from other groups who would like to use it for internal training.

Within marketing, we are basically using it as a way to quickly generate presentations with audio and distribute the content to our clients (financial advisors). In the past we'd need to work with a design team to develop slides with audio and get it posted for distribution. Brainshark allows a non-technical, non-design person to use a templated presentation and produce usable content quickly.

We primarily use it for commentary updates from portfolio managers, but have also created more elaborate marketing messages as well.
  • Fast production time - if you want to avoid a large-scale effort, but would like audio with slides, this is about as simple as it can get.
  • Metrics - because we use Brainshark as a marketing tool, we can use metrics to track the success of the message. The ability to drill down to individual user, how much they viewed and location is nice.
  • Media Options - The tool allows use of PPT, audio, PDF, video and more that I'm sure I'm forgetting. It seems like it can display/play most files you throw at it.
  • Animation Editing - We found that once you start attempting complex animations, the minor differences between how they render and are supported often make us choose to produce video for highly graphic presentations.
  • Campaign Development - They used to have a rudimentary campaign functionality, which was removed. What we'd really like is the ability for us to record one of our experts and then splice in all our sales people so it appears they are the ones doing the interview. That would be very beneficial, but currently it has to be done manually.
  • File sizes - We have occasionally had issues with videos not playing/loading smoothly even though they were smaller than the recommended file sizes.
  • Client satisfaction - we send out summaries of our big webcasts/conference calls via Brainshark. We've received lots of replies stating they love the format because they can consume the information on their own time.
  • Time to market - before Brainshark, it took several days, if not weeks to work with a design team to get professional-looking summaries available. Now, we have the process down to a day or two.
While the UI of Prezi was "slick," people got a little seasick after watching it for too long. It seemed too much like a one-trick pony without enough flexibility.
For the niche it fills in the content we produce, there aren't many alternatives. We want something a non-technical, non-design user can use to quickly create content that is distributable to an external audience. I'm not aware of a tool that does that and offers the same features.

It's well-suited for any time you'd like to have a presentation with audio. It doesn't take the place of video and isn't the best for highly graphical items. Technically, you can use video on it, but that's not it's forte. It also has a significant amount of elearning capabilities, but I haven't used these items.


If you are only purchasing a certain amount of server space (not sure if they still sell it that way), you are going to run out. We kept hitting our maximum and had to bump it up.


Also, if you don't have a clear owner, but have lots of users, it will become a rats nest of folders and users.

Using Brainshark

75 - Primarily marketing, but we also have some technical and product team members who are using it for internal training.
1 - Nobody supports it full time. You really just need someone to add/remove users and content. It doesn't require much training and doesn't need to be a technical person.
  • Marketing message sent to clients
  • Conference call summary
  • Internal training
  • We spliced together audio from multiple sales people so it appeared they were interviewing one of our content experts.
  • More internal training and e-learning. We haven't used all the functionality they have to offer in this area.

Brainshark Support

The first line of support is pretty basic, but if you can get to the more senior/technical people, they're solid.