Wistia vs. Vimeo vs. Youtube [2021 Updated] - which video hosting should you choose?

Oliver Bridge

Just started a new business, or launching a new marketing campaign? You're going to need a video-hosting tool for storing, sharing, and tracking all of the great content you're going to create.

This article is designed to give you a clear and unbiased review of the main video hosting tools on the market today, and help you make the right decision for your business.

Read on to learn everything you need to know about video hosting.

What is video hosting?

OK let's get ourselves familiar with video hosting. Honestly, there's nothing to be scared of at all.

At a basic level, video hosting tools let you store, publish, and share your video content with the world. But they can do so much more besides, like helping you brand your videos, add privacy to your published videos, oh, and let's not forget support, if you're splashing out on video hosting you'll want some level of customer support you can rely on when you get stuck.

Let's break down each element of video hosting, before we compare the main platforms and what they offer in each department.

What you should look for in a video hosting platform

Video Editing

Video editing lets you manipulate your videos, cropping sections out, adding title cards, chapters, subtitles, and lots more to make your videos more attractive, engaging, and easier to consume. We'll take a look to see if any of the tools let you do this.

Video Branding

If you're a serious business you'll want your customers' video watching experience to match nicely with your branding, so you should look for tools that allow you to customise the video player colour, add your logo to your video pages, choose the perfect thumbnail, remove the playbar, add speed controls, and more.

Video Storage

File sizes can quickly stack up once you get going with your video marketing strategy, so you'll want to find a tool that gives you plenty of storage space for your videos without costing you a fortune. For a guide on file sizes of typical marketing videos, check out this neat file size calculator.

Ps. If you're ever running out of space, use this excellent guide from Techsmith on how to reduce the size of your videos.

Video Publishing (hosting, embedding, sharing)

You'll want a tool that lets you embed video easily in any CMS, and publish to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn & TwitterVideo with one-click, vs. hashing together multiple tools. Succeeding with video is all about distribution so you want a platform that does most of the hard work for you, and ensures you don't miss an opportunity for eyeballs on your videos.

Interaction Tools (e.g. Call-to-actions on your videos)

Video hosting is no longer just as simple as publishing a video and hoping people who watch it will find their own way to your website or related content. No, most tools worth their salt now let you drive action from your viewers with call-to-actions on your videos, and other near features that let you get customers to the right point in the funnel.

Video Analytics

If you've taken the time to create a video and share it with the world, at the very least you'll want to know how many people watch it. But you should also look for more detailed analytics like rewatches, drop-offs, and interactions with your video. Some tools even give you heatmaps, and viewer based tracking that shows you exactly who viewed your videos from your own CRM.

Video Privacy

Privacy is a hot topic since the arrival of GDPR. And for good reason - customers deserve to have their personal data taken seriously. When it comes to video you'll want to look for a tool that gives you full control over privacy, from reviewing and approving content before it goes live, to editing tools that allow you to obscure sensitive info, and altering your videos sharing settings dependant on who you want to see them.

Customer Support

Don't take this lightly. Getting video right can be challenging at times, so you'll want not only a team who is responsive, but one that explains things in a clear and easy to follow manner. We'll compare reviews of customer support, and also review the resources and knowledge-base sections of Wistia, Vimeo, and Youtube.

OK, that's it. Let's get this show on the road and help you find out which video hosting tool is best for your business!

Video Editing side-by-side

I'll admit when I came into writing this side-by-side I thought some of the platforms would have rudimentary editing tools to allow you to crop, and edit your videos before publication. Turns out, I was wrong...

Youtube

Prior to September 2017, YouTube provided a built-in tool that allowed you to edit your videos before publishing to the platform. Not any more. You'll need to find a video editing alternative if you want to edit with YT. Here's five free tools you might want to try.

Vimeo

Like Youtube, Vimeo don't offer any in-built editing tools. You can add things to your videos to drive action from viewers (see the Interaction Tools section later in this article for more on that), but you can't crop or edit your raw footage itself within Vimeo.

Wistia

Again, Wistia don't offer an editing suite, but they do have some incredibly helpful and easy-to-follow guides on how to edit your videos ready for publishing. Check out their Editing Basics for Business Video if you're just starting out.

As you'll see later on in the article, Wistia have killer documentation and customer support across the board.

WINNER - Wistia

Though none of the tools offer in-built editing tools, for any video hosting novice, Wistia has the best guides and resources to help you as you get started with video.

The key takeaway here though is, don't go in expecting a video hosting tool to offer you a solution to video editing, that just isn't on the table right now.

Video Branding side-by-side

Youtube

Branding on Youtube is extremely limited. You get a little 150x150px space for a watermark of your logo. That's it. Nothing else. I guess Youtube wants all of that precious screen real-estate for their branding, advertisers, or related videos.

You can see how to add your Youtube branding watermark here 👇

Vimeo

With Vimeo's basic plan "Plus", you don't get any branding options and you can't remove the Vimeo logo from your video player. If you want something a more custom, where you can remove the Vimeo logo, and change the player colour to suit your brand, you'll need to upgrade to Pro and above. But in our opinion, it's not worth upgrading from Plus just for the "branding" as it's very limited - read on for other features that make it worthwhile.

Wistia

You get Wistia branding on their Free plan, but like Vimeo, once you upgrade to their paid plan (Pro, starting at $99/pm) Wistia lets you customise your video-player with your own logo and brand colours, and by removing the Wistia logo.

WINNER - Tie: Vimeo and Wistia

There's really nothing to pick between the two here. Only the placement and UI of the player controls is different - personally I prefer Wistia's, but it's really nothing to quarrel over.

In our opinion here at Bonjoro, branding controls are probably much less important that "Interaction Controls" like call-to-actions, so read on to see who wins that one.

Video Storage side-by-side

When it comes to video storage, and how it affects your videos performance and hosting costs, there are two factors you'll need to consider: Storage and Bandwidth.

Storage is simply the amount of videos or amount of GB of videos you can store within your video hosting plan, at any given price point.

Bandwidth is the amount of bandwidth you're allowed to consume from people watching your videos. Both of the main players in the hosting market take a different approach here, with Vimeo offering unlimited bandwidth on all plans, and Wistia tiering bandwidth into their pricing plans. Let's take a look at how this all plays out...

Wistia

When it comes to storage Wistia is pretty clear - you get 3 videos on the Free plan, 10 videos included on the Pro $99 plan, and 100 on the Advanced $399 plan. Both pro and Advanced let you bolt on videos for $25c each video, so if you're on Pro, you'll probably want to bolt on until it makes sense to tip into the highest Advanced plan.

Wistia does limit bandwidth, but honestly the way they structure their plans means it hugely unlikely you'll ever hit your max bandwidth. If you're a B2B company you'd have to be kicking out epic content to hit your limit.

You can see all of their plans, and when it would make sense to upgrade your plan here:

If you're still a little worried about how bandwidth would affect your pricing, Wistia created a handy bandwidth calculator tool here.

Vimeo

The big difference here vs. Wistia is that Vimeo doesn't offer a free plan, and rather than price based on number of video, Vimeo price things solely on the amount of storage you use, i.e. how many Terabytes (1000 Gigabytes) all of your videos add up to.

Vimeo claim not to price based on bandwidth beyond their basic "Pro" plan which includes 20GB bandwidth per week (see the pic below), but if you look closely they do have a "fair usage" limit on the two upper plans. But the bandwidth limit on Vimeo's higher plans is a hefty 7TB (the equivalent to c. 250,000 plays of a 5 minute video) - I'd suggest if you're hitting that level you've got some serious skin in the game and cost will be less of factor than functionality and support, which you can read about below.

Youtube

OK, this one will be quick. As Youtube makes money on ads, you won't find any limits on storage or bandwidth - it's in Youtube's best interests for you to host and share your content on their platform, so there's no incentive for them to limit you here.

Incidentally if you're interested to know just how much money Google makes from videos hosted on Youtube, you can see a good estimate for how much it cost Youtube to stream Gangnam style here. Spoiler alert! They made a profit.

Oh, and whilst we're talking about Gangnam style, why not have a little dance around your workspace right now...

Video Publishing side-by-side

Wistia

Wistia has two solutions for hosting and embedding your videos.

All plans come with Wistia's "standard" hosting, which lets you put videos on your site (via embed codes), send them in emails (via thumbnail and a link to the hosted video), and share them on social media (thumbnail and link). But Wistia also offer nifty feature for more advanced users called Channels.

Channels is essentially a way of hosting a group of related videos together, and showcasing them in a professional looking way. Here's what a Wistia channel looks like embedded 'inline' on your website:

You'll see how all of the Channel videos are hosted and wrapped in a good looking and easily navigable series. It looks super professional, and is great if you want your audience to see all of your content in one place, so they can hop from one video to the next. If you remember Wistia's awesome One, Ten, One Hundred series, you'll know the power of hosting your videos in a channel. Oh, and if you haven't seen it yet, you should take a look, it's super-high value stuff on creating video for your brand.

Wistia's own site has a bunch of great ideas for how to use channels like:

  • Favorite or best-performing content
  • Product updates
  • Customer service/help videos
  • Customer testimonials
  • Meet the company/employee introductions
  • Product reviews
  • Original video series (like One, Ten, One Hundred, up above)

BUT, here's the drawback. This won't come cheap - Channels is only available on the Pro plan and upwards, so you're looking at $99 per month minimum right out of the gate, excluding any others costs for more than 10 videos (the max included on the Pro plan).

Youtube

Youtube is pretty much the equivalent of Wistia and Vimeo's standard hosting and embedding, so you can easily embed videos on your site, or link them in emails and social posts, but of course, the content lives and breathes on their own platform, and as such is surrounded by the rest of the Youtube ecosystem.

This means that whilst you might be able to get your audience to your video, there's always the risk that they'll quickly be distracted by something else they see, or another video that loads up after yours has played. Oh, and there's ads too - pre-roll ads can add to the chance of users bouncing from your content before they've even consumed it.

Vimeo

Vimeo is pretty much exactly the same as Wistia here, so like Wistia you can pop put videos on your site (via embed codes), send them in emails (via thumbnail and a link to the hosted video), and share them on social media (thumbnail and link).

There will never be ads or anything before or after your videos, or other videos recommended, so your brand is never associated with another random video or brand like with Youtube.

Unlike Wistia, Vimeo do not have Channels, so you can't group your videos like you can with Wistia as explained above.

BUT, Vimeo social publishing is top notch. They make a big thing out of their social sharing, and it's great. Just hook up your social accounts and you can then share your videos to each channel with just a single click.

You can publish to Facebook Pages, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn Company Pages as native videos, and keep track of all of your stats (views, engagements, and shares) from your central Vimeo analytics dashboard. This means you can easily compare how your videos perform on each social platform and adjust your approach. You can also edit your privacy settings in the publish to social module, so you have full control over where your videos are shared.

WINNER - Tie: Vimeo and Wistia

In terms of standard embedding options there's barely a difference between the two, but whilst we love Wistia's Channels feature, we'll call this one a tie as Vimeo's social sharing is super slick.

Interaction Tools side-by-side

(Pssst. This is a big section because we think it's super important these days)

OK, we should quickly define what we mean by interaction tools. When it comes to video hosting, this basically means anything that you can add to your videos that viewers (leads, customers) can interact with. Think buttons, customizable end screens, email capture forms, pop-over cards with redirects.

This stuff is super-important when it comes to video hosting, because what's the point of a video that doesn't drive action right?

Let's take a look at the tools side by side.

Vimeo

First up Vimeo. Honestly we could write a ton of stuff about their interaction tools, because they are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G, and so nicely designed! But this video from their own site does a great job of showing them:

Here's a quick rundown of the key features:

Updated end screens. This one lets you customize what appears after your video, including adding Call-to-Actions (much like Bonjoro) to drive customer actions.

Mobile-friendly cards. This lets you link viewers to any destination you want, at any point in your video.

Email capture forms. This is all about helping you generate leads, before, during, or after your videos.

Wistia

OK, so here's where it gets hard to choose. All those great interaction features above. Wistia has those too, they just call them something a little different. You can see the breakdown here.

Here's some handy screenshots to show you how they look on Wistia:

Email capture forms are called Turnstile, and look like this...

Rather than updated end-screens, Wistia lets you add CTAs at any point in the video, and even gives you options to auto-pause the video to prompt your customer to take action. You can use text, images, or custom HTML as your videos CTA. Pretty cool huh?

And mobile friendly cards is Annotation Links in Wistia speak. These go in the upper corner of the screens so you don't interrupt the experience as much as a full on CTA...

Oooh. You know when we said the tools were identical? We lied. Wistia have one little extra trick up their sleeves when it comes to interacting with your videos. It's called Chapters. And well, it does what you'd expect, it lets you add interactive chapters to your video - so useful if your customer just needs to jump right to a specific moment of value for them.

Youtube

Youtube has two video interaction tools you can use.

Cards

End Screens

Let's take a look at them...

Cards

Cards is very similar to Wistia and Vimeo, and lets you add interactive cards to your videos that pop up whilst the viewer is watching. You can add a few different types in YouTube, polls, links to other channels, links to your own site, and more.

N.B. Your channel needs to be in the YouTube Partner Program in order to access "Link" Cards, to link viewers to your external website. This lets YouTube check that your site complies with their community guidelines. If you want to apply for the YouTube Partner Programme, you need to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months, and then apply. Find out more here.

Adding cards is pretty easy once you find it in your Creator menu (go to Creator Studio -> Video Manager -> Edit Video -> Cards). You can add cards at any point in your video easily. Here's great rundown of using cards:

End screens

End Screens lets you drive action from your viewers at the end of your videos. Just like cards you can link to other videos/playlists, channels, or link to external websites. And of course you can use your end screen to promote subscriptions to your channel.

Here's how End Screens works:

N.B. Just like Cards, you need to be part of the YouTube Partner Program to link to an external website.

WINNER - Wistia

Honestly this was SO close, but the feature that nudges it for me is Wistia's Chapters. If you're a B2B business, being able to let viewers navigate to specific parts of your videos is just so useful. It means you don't have to create new videos for every lesson or feature on your site, and instead you can just break down your video into easily navigable chapters. Without this feature you have the headache of adding video notes with timestamps that users have to manually pick out - a much weaker user experience.

Obviously with it being so close, price is a big factor for just this one extra feature, so check out the Pricing comparison further down and think about how important Chapters will be to your own workflow.

Video Analytics side-by-side

Want to know if your creative endeavours have been worth your time? You'll need analytics.

A good hosting platform should do three things when it comes to analytics:

1. Give you a solid overview of your videos' performance across the channels you've shared it on, with an intuitive UI that lets you filter by things that matter, like device, region, channel, source etc.

2. Give you a granular view of audience engagement on each individual video, for example how much they watch, where they drop off

3. Top-level reporting capabilities that let you see short term and long term trends that you can take action on to improve what you're doing, with options to share these insights with your team.

Let's break down how each of the platforms performs on this front.

Vimeo

Vimeo's reporting is pretty great. The UI in particular is super user friendly; nothing feels hidden away behind unnecessary buttons.

It would take a long time to go into everything but here's a look at the best bits of Vimeo's reporting:

Dashboard

The layout is great - you get a quick feel for how your videos are doing on all sorts of levels from total views, views by date, region, device, source, and more.

And each of these top level views can be drilled into quickly with a single click from the dash...

Video Report

This is where you drill down into how your videos are performing against one another, and how each one fares when it comes to impressions, views, finishes, and average % of each video watched. With Vimeo you also get a handy engagement graph that shows you how much of your video people are watching, like this:

All of this data is exportable into a CSV file too if you need to do any reporting outside of the Vimeo tools.

Interaction tools analytics (Business and Premium only)

Remember those interaction tools we talked about higher up, well you can track those too. This means you can view performance of you email capture screen, cards, and calls-to-action end screen.

Vimeo lets you see three things for each:

Impressions: How many times the interaction element was displayed

Submissions/Clicks: How many times a viewer submitted their email or clicked on that element

Rate: Submissions/clicks divided by impression, so you can see your conversion rates with each element.

You'll be familiar with all of this is you run any lead gen' tools, or run ads. It's all clear and easy to use.

That's it. Some great analytics, all neatly and simply laid out for you.

Let's move on to Youtube...

YouTube

YouTube actually has a ton of analytics. The UI used to be more like Google Analytics and sort of hard to navigate around, but with the move from "Creator Studio" to the fresh "Youtube Studio" they've simplified things A LOT.

There's still a lot of depth, but they've hidden some of the less used granular elements, and elevated the info that you need to see most often. The new Analytics part of the UI is so much more user friendly, as seen here:

OLD 🤯

NEW 🤩

Here's a breakdown of the Analytics UI, and some of the more useful stuff you can do with it.

Overview

An overview of total video views across your channel, including handy pre-built widgets like a snapshot of your top performing videos.

Reach

How many people are seeing your videos, including where people watched your videos, and where they came from if they watched on Youtube.

Engagement

Tells you how much people are engaging with your videos. Handy graphs like top videos per watch time, and you can even drill down into each video like you can in Wistia and Vimeo to see engagement drop-off graphs. This is also where you can see how viewers interact with your End Screens and Cards (see Interaction Tools section above).

Audience

A general overview of your audience on YouTube, including subscriber levels and engagement and the demographic breakdown of people watching your videos, including what countries they are watching your videos in.

Revenue

Once you start making revenue through Youtube the Revenue tab in your Analytics report will show your earnings. The dashboard is broken down like this:

You can see revenue over time, estimated revenue, all broken down into the constituent parts. It's a simple UI if you're a YouTube creator.

Other

You can still access more granular reports like Device Type in the new UI, but they're accessed via the "See More" link, and housed under a "More" dropdown. This keeps the main reporting uncluttered which personally we like.

If you want a great overview of the most useful reports, this blog, "YouTube Analytics: The 15 Metrics That Actually Matter" (via Hubspot) is super useful.

Wistia

OK, how about Wistia's reporting?

Wistia has crushed it in most areas so far, so you'd expect a great showing here too.

Let's take a look..

Wistia have such a knack of breaking things down into clear language and sensible logic. It's no different here. Here's a look at some of the key features. If you need more info, Wistia's documentation on their site is phenomenal.

High Level Stats

This shows you account and project-level trends across your videos, so you can keep tabs and compare and contrast plays and engagement rates.

Video Stats

This is more about how each individual video was viewed, including an engagement graphs (like Vimeo and YT), but also via Heatmaps! Let's look at each of these closer:

Engagement Graphs

For each video you get a really pretty engagement graph like this. You can even see how many emails you're collecting via "Turnstile" their email form interaction tool. Well thought out, and super easy to use.

Heatmaps

Oh, Boom! Wistia has something that neither Vimeo or Youtube can offer here. You can now see exactly how much of your video was watched on a per user level! That is insane! Here's a handy image from their site that shows how this works.

Needless to say, this is a total killer app.

Viewer Stats

Here you can drill down into individual viewer stats for your videos. And a REALLY cool feature is the View Stream, a live feed of all of your public video views, with heatmaps! Check this out:

OK that's all the major cool stuff, but if you want to know more about Wistia's reporting capabilities head here.

WINNER - WISTIA

Don't get me wrong Vimeo's reporting is super pretty, and YouTube have done a great job simplifying the UI, but...Heatmaps! Come on!?

Another major plus, like we said earlier, is that Wistia's documentation is second to none. This makes understanding and navigating their Analytics super, super easy.

Video Privacy side-by-side

Video privacy setting are of course crucial if you want to use your videos in different contexts. At minimum you'll want to be able to share videos as private links, or invite team members to view draft videos before you publish them live.

Let's take a look at how each of the platforms handles privacy:

Youtube

YouTube is super simple. They have 3 options:

  • Public videos. Standard YouTube videos that will show up on search results. This is what you'll use the most.
  • Unlisted videos. These won't show up on YouTube. but anyone with the link can see them. This lets you share them with your colleagues or with customers and/or members of your community. Just remember that your video could be seen by others if those viewers share your link onwards.
  • Private. These can only be seen by you, and others you choose via email address. This is best for internal videos, or customers you want to share privately with a specific partner or customer. Here's an awesome video by Derral Eves that shows just how this one works:

That's it. No point going over board here. It's simple and obvious with YT.

Vimeo and Wistia give you much more flexibility. Let's take a look...

Vimeo

Vimeo breaks it down like this:

  • Anyone. Just what it says - anyone can view your video if they find it on the web. Remember, Vimeo does not index your videos on any search engines, so they will need to have been sent the video, or the landing page with the video on to see it.
  • Only Me. Only you can see this. Sounds weird, but useful if you want to create a video to go on a test site, or an early version of a page that you know will not be seen later on.
  • People I follow. This means only people you are following on Vimeo can see your videos, and it will appear in their feeds.
  • People I choose. Basically this is the same as YouTube's Private option, where you select people one by one via email. But the difference here is that they will need to have a Vimeo account to view your video.
  • People with the private link. Basically anybody you sent the private video link to. Again, remember they could share this link onwards, so only choose this if the video doesn't contain sensitive info.
  • Only people with the password. Pretty self explanatory here, this one lets you add a password to your video, which you will need to manually share with people when you direct them to that video.

Vimeo also has a few extra options when it comes to privacy on embedded videos. Both of these are only available on the top paid plans.

  • Embed Permissions (domain-level permissions). Basically you can specify which websites have permission to embed your video. This is pretty awesome if you want full control over which sites your video is seen on.
  • Unlisted Review Pages. This lets you create Private projects that only your team or invited collaborators can share, comment and work on. Great for larger teams where only specific team members need to work on specific projects without that video getting in everyone else's way. (Available on the Pro account only).

Wistia

OK, we're almost there! Finally Wistia.

First up, just like Vimeo, it's important to note that your Wistia videos are never indexed by a search engine, such as Google, so they are only visible to the extent that you share and embed them.

Wistia essentialy gives you 5 options for sharing and embedding videos:

  • Private Sharing. This is all about giving your team access to collaborate with you. You can grant colleagues access to specific controls around editing and sharing your videos. This is just like Vimeo's review pages above.
  • Embedding. Again like Vimeo, you can control where your videos can be embedded at a domain level, so you can limit videos to your site only, and other sites who have permission to embed your video.
  • Sharing a link. Anyone with the link can see your video. As before, bear in mind that this link could be shared onwards, so it's not the right option if you want full privacy, for that you should use password protected.
  • Locked and Unlocked. This lets you lock and see or edit certain elements of your video. The person accessing the video will need to create a Wistia login and password once you send them the video link here, so this isn't the same as password protecting your videos. For that see below. Wistia's GIF does a good job of showing this in action. By default Wistia projects are Unlocked and any direct links shared to the video can be accessed without a login. Even in this state, you can tweak what viewers can see from sharing buttons to stats (like video plays), and you can also limit if people can upload and download your video.

Locked project within Wistia can only be accessed with a specific invite via email. This has to come from one of the following people:

  • The Account Owner
  • An account Manager
  • A Collaborator with Admin permissions to the project
  • A Collaborator with the Share permission

The options here actually get super granular where you can restrict what people can see on a named basis. I won't cover off all of the details here, but if you need granular permission from collaborators to a large group of customer where you want to ring-fence and charge for content, Wistia will have you covered. Check out their docs over here.

  • Password protected

Ok, just remember this isn't the same as Locked/Unlocked.

Only those with the video password can view it. You will need to manually provide them with the password, so remember to share it in a secure environment if the video contains sensitive data. Here at Bonjoro we do this on Whatsapp, and then both delete the message once the video has been accessed.

The password option is neatly housed in the video customization menu, so it's super easy to add.

WINNER - WISTIA

Ok this is turning into a trend. Whilst Vimeo's options are probably enough for most users, Wistia's simple UI when it comes to granular sharing options means it wins this one.

But if you don't need this level of privacy functionality, Vimeo, and Youtube even might suit you down to the ground.

Customer Support side-by-side

For this we'll remain impartial and rely on customer reviews on G2 Crowd.

Wistia

Wistia kills it here with a 9.3 score on customer support from over 150 reviews. Check out the reviews here.

Anecdotally we've almost never heard anything bad about Wistia's support and this comes through strongly in their reviews. Both customer success interactions and their documentation are regularly highlighted as best in class.

Here's a few snippets about customer support from their reviews:

"Also, when I need help, I can actually communicate with a helpful person. Over the years, nobody at Vimeo seems to want to communicate and YouTube simply is not interested in helping customers."

"Their attention to technical detail combined with their great help/tutorial content is a great mix."

"On top of their functions, they offer tons of helpful blogs and great support with real people! You won't find a better platform or team to host your videos!"

Vimeo

Vimeo scores just under the 8.6 across the video hosting category for customer support, but a fair bit lower than Wistia at 8.5 out of 10 from a total of 235 reviews. You can see their reviews right here.

YouTube

You would expect YouTube being such a massive company to get hammered on the customer support side of things, but they actually do OK.

But, it is worth noting that when I read all of the G2 reviews, no-one on G2Crowd even mentions Youtube's support. Being a B2C company there is clearly a different expectation level that works in their favour. But it also shows that YT low touch usability is so good, support is rarely needed.

You can see the reviews right here.

WINNER - WISTIA

If you've read the rest of the article, this would have been expected. Wistia clearly run a tight ship and this flows right down through their organisation from customer support to documentation. They have a killer team and it shows in their reviews on G2Crowd.

Why many online creators now use Bonjoro

Hosted video is cool, and can do wonders for you business. But, and this is a big but...

What if you don't have the time and resources to create professional looking videos, and spend time editing, tweaking, and publishing each one?

Or they just don't fit in with the way you run you sales and marketing funnels - maybe they're too involved, and you just need a quick way to make videos on the fly to connect with and educate your customers?

This is where Bonjoro comes in handy. Let's find out more about it...

Let's get personal with video

Bonjoro lets you record quick personalised videos at critical moments in your customers journey, to convert more leads, activate and educate new customers, and drive growth in your business by getting reviews, referrals and upsells from your existing customer base.

All you need to do is plug Bonjoro into your existing CRM or ESP workflows - e.g. new lead, new customer, loyal user. Bonjoro then notifies you at the perfect moment to record a personalised video to this lead or customer from your desktop or mobile app (both iOS and Android are supported)

The beauty of this approach is that video doesn't have to be a one size fits all approach. Each customer might have different needs, and with a quick 30 to 60 second personalised video you can delight and engage that person in a much more powerful way, than just directing them to something you created for the whole world to see.

This approach is perfect for SMBs who simply want to connect with their customers on a human level, and elevate their entire customer experience from the moment they become a new lead, through to loyal superfan.

And the secret sauce to Bonjoro isn't any creative skill, or nifty video editing. Nope, the secret ingredient is YOU. Anyone can record Bonjoro video and get results.

Here's a great example of a Bonjoro video from Design Pickle's Head of Customer Success, Alex Guevara - he just nails the whole "I'm here to help you vibe", and the customer will instantly go from mere prospect to engaged superfan!

Click here to watch Alex's video, and see how personal video is done by the best 👇

What else does Bonjoro offer?

Great question.

Bonjoro has a bunch of cool features to help you scale the sending of personal videos. The key ones are: Mobile apps, Integrations and Workflows (including Zapier), and a bunch of interaction tools like Message Templates, Conversations, and video Call to Actions. Oh, and a couple of features we should totally mention: Customer Context, Custom Branding, and something called Rollups that lets you send one video to a small group of VIP leads or customers! I'll explain these in full:

Mobile apps

With Bonjoro you're not limited to just recording on your desktop, where your lighting might be glum and everyone in the office can overhear you. Nope, you can take your Bonjoro app out into the wild, and give customers a taste of your real context and personality. This is sooo handy if you're on the move a lot.

Integrations and Workflows

OK, now this is really Bonjoro's killer app. You can create Workflows in Bonjoro based off trigger events and tags in your own CRM or tools. Basically this pulls your customer into your Bonjoro app at the exact moment you need to send your video. So imagine you get a new enquiry on your website, boom, they're immediately added into your Bonjoro app so you can record them a quick video and close that deal!

Custom branding

With Bonjoro you can easily customise your videos with your own logo, landing page, subject lines, footers and team information to ensure all your messaging is perfectly on brand. Cool huh?

Video Tracking

This is super cool. You get real time notification whenever a customer interacts with your videos. Think Mixmax but with video. You can see everything right down to when your email was delivered, including a complete delivery history, right through to opens, views, thanks, replies, and clicks of your call-to-action button. This means you can see which prospects or customers are truly engaged with you and your brand and engage them accordingly.

Message Templates

This is a handy way of letting you store regularly used video templates. Each template links together your email design, video landing page, and call-to-action, so all you need to do it record the video and hit send. No need to write up a new subject line, or message to go with your video - it saves you so much time, and you can create different templates based on your goal and where the customer is in your funnel.

Conversations

Oh, and customers can respond directly on your videos so you can spark up conversations that lead to conversions or deeper relationships :)

Customer Context

This is something no other company offers. Your customer data is visible as you record your videos, either pulled from your CRM, or enriched by us via our own backend database. This allows you to tailor each and every message as you record for a genuinely personal experience that will delight your customer.

Roll-ups

This is a time-saving way to send Bonjoro videos to a small group of recipients. Just bulk-select which contacts you want to “roll-up”, then send one video to all of those contacts. This makes it super easy to keep in touch with your community or team, or work on up-sell existing customer segments when you have new products, features or offers coming out.

Snag a Free 14 day Trial of Bonjoro!

If you want to connect with your own customers in a more personal way, and start turning prospects into superfans with video, you should totally check Bonjoro out. They offer a Free 14 day trial on all plans right here.

Pricing comparison

Wistia Pricing

When it comes to storage Wistia is pretty clear - you get 3 videos on the Free plan, 10 videos included on the Pro $99 plan, and 100 on the Advanced $399 plan. Both pro and Advanced let you bolt on videos for $25c each video, so if you're on Pro, you'll probably want to bolt on until it makes sense to tip into the highest Advanced plan.

Wistia does limit bandwidth, but honestly the way they structure their plans means it hugely unlikely you'll ever hit your max bandwidth. If you're a B2B company you'd have to be kicking out epic content to hit your limit.

Vimeo Pricing

The big difference here vs. Wistia is that Vimeo doesn't offer a free plan, and rather than price based on number of video, Vimeo price things solely on the amount of storage you use, i.e. how many Terabytes (1000 Gigabytes) all of your videos add up to.

To figure out where you'll fall price wise try this handy little video file size calculator. It will show you roughly how much storage you'll need.

Vimeo claim not to price based on bandwidth beyond their basic "Pro" plan which includes 20GB bandwidth per week (see the pic below), but if you look closely they do have a "fair usage" limit on the two upper plans. But the bandwidth limit on Vimeo's higher plans is a hefty 7TB (the equivalent to c. 250,000 plays of a 5 minute video) - I'd suggest if you're hitting that level you've got some serious skin in the game and cost will be less of factor than functionality and support, which you can read about below.

Youtube Pricing

Free of course. But remember you will have ads rolling on your videos. But we think that is totally balanced out by the opportunity to get your video in front of thousands or hundreds of thousands of extra eyeballs if you've created great content and optimised your videos well.

Bonjoro Pricing

Like Wistia, Bonjoro offers a free plan that gives users the chance to take the tool for a spin before making a full-on commitment. Their free plan allows users to connect their CRM and create 50 videos a month. The $25 per month Startup plan offers users customizable branding, three automations, and 3 message templates. And the Grrrowth plan, at $45 a month offers access to 10 templates, unlimited automations, and the ability to send group videos with a neat power-user feature called Roll-ups.

And yes, if you need something a bit more personal, Bonjoro offer a custom plan, too.

Where they shine is that they offer an easy, flexible solution to brands who might not have the resources to develop polished video content, but understand the importance of using video to power up their sales and marketing efforts. All plans offer CRM integrations (direct or via Zapier), and no bandwidth limits. You’ll also have access to reporting tools that track opens, views, and more.   

WINNER - TIE

Honestly, there can't really be a winner when it comes to price. Hopefully this article has given you enough insight to make your choice based on specific features that suit your business rather than just on price alone. We'll leave you to decide the winner here.

BONUS: Video Funnel Playbook

If you're looking for inspiration for using video to grow your business, Bonjoro just launched a MASSIVE playbook covering tons of use-cases for using personal video in your business.

Here's what's inside:

  1. Over 30 tried & tested, high-converting video-funnels for sales, marketing, and customer success teams
  1. The exact subject lines, message prompts, and call-to-actions you should use in your videos
  1. An invite to the exclusive Bonjoro Facebook Community where other businesses are sharing their most successful videos funnels

Once you've read the playbook, don't forget to put your new tactics into play with your FREE 14 day trial of Bonjoro.

Category
Comparisons
About the author
Oliver Bridge
Growth Grizzly
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