Item: Vimeo
Rating: 8
Author: Rocky Kev

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My department originally needed a video hosting platform that had privacy built in. YouTube wouldn't have worked for us, Amazon S3 didn't have the capability to deliver streaming video at the time, and Wistia was too expensive for our needs. Vimeo Pro was affordable and worked. My team uses Vimeo Pro to host all of our training videos - the training videos are organized on our main site, and are embedded from Vimeo Pro.

Pros and Cons

Private Video Hosting
Lots of options - privacy, video customization, API calls
Streams videos without much hiccups
Affordable
Easy to host videos quickly
Video templates - so you can have a set of options saved and reuse it over and over again

Tends to give video errors of 'this video is private' when it's not. It then fixes itself a few minutes later.
Their reporting tool is inaccurate and unclear of what anything means.
It still has a history of wanting to look like Youtube, with a video feed and a social media side, that just has no value for me.

Return on Investment

Of the video hosting options, Vimeo Pro provides the most bang for the buck. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close!

Alternatives Considered

Wistia

Wistia's pricing is so weird. They charge you monthly, and by how many videos you host.

Vimeo has a flat fee, with an upload limit (which I was close to hitting once in 4 years).

Wistia has better tracking and organization, and it's cleaner. But Wistia's embed is pretty heavy on a site.
Vimeo's embed was highly customizable, and I (the developer) was able to make my own version of the video player with it's own sets of features.

Other Software Used

15Five, Asana, Slack, HubSpot Sales, WordPress

Likelihood to Recommend

Vimeo Pro is well suited if you need to host internal videos and don't want to do a lot of configurations to set it up. Once your videos are uploaded, you can then embed them or share them anywhere, and very quickly too. You can set the video to only show on specific sites, and organize your library of content in folders.

If the video is vital - like a sales video, where a error can cause a customer to never return - I recommend Wistia instead (even though it's more expensive.). Vimeo Pro is much more cost effective overall.

Vimeo Pro works!

Overall Satisfaction with Vimeo Pro