Cincopa vs. Panopto

Cincopa is great for small businesses that need to post photo or video galleries on their websites. Cincopa can do many other things, however, I have only used them for photo galleries. Cincopa also makes it easy to post a video on websites.

The more I used it, the more I appreciated its ease of use. If I ever ran into a situation that I felt might be a learning opportunity at some point in the future, I would simply log in, record a session, and only allow access if/when it was appropriate later. Since the more recent versions also work on mobile phones, there really wasn't a time when I couldn't record something to review or present later. During covid, teachers didn't have access to their normal equipment, and students weren't always able to get access to a robust recording setup to do their recordings. Some students actually did recordings of presentations in their cars, or in the stairwells. Portability is powerful. I think that we all run into situations where our presentation didn't go quite as well as we had intended. As Panopto grew, they focused more on allowing the user to control their content and perform some basic (I would argue more than basic) editing, which made actions like awkward pauses easy to "fix" as you could create smooth, blended transitions easily.

Incentivized

• Responsive - if your platform is not responsive it will display the gallery this way across all platforms.
• Fast - if you have slow uploads it will increase your load speed.
• Easy - you can upload all your photos at once or one at a time. Then use a preset gallery to display them.

• It captures multiple streams simultaneous (video, desktop, audio only etc) and is pretty smart when it comes to working with imported PowerPoint Decks.
• The end product can easily be shared in multiple formats and it has pretty rich content editing abilities for doing basic post-production clean up.
• They have recently introduced an in-line quizzing feature which can integrate with your LMS's Gradebook.
• The Analytics feature is very strong - we can get student level analytics when we integrate/embed the videos into our LMS.

Incentivized

• Cincopa only allows for one size of photo. For example, if I want to include a vertical photo and a horizontal one, I have to have the Cincopa team custom-code this feature for me. It should be an out-of-box feature.
• Our designer had to put some parameters in Cincopa, so that the galleries fit in well with our website. It's not intuitive to the average person.
• The analytics are very lacking. We have a podcast page where about four to five podcast series live, but the analytics are the same for all of those series because Cincopa only records when someone sees the first slide of a gallery, not individual slides. So, there's no way to know if one podcast is more popular than the other. And, since Cincopa is an iframe, we can't gather this data with Google Analytics either.

• Captions are always a problem for us. We would like to caption all our videos and currently, the automatic captioning is not very good.
• We would like integration with our VLE grade book to allow seamless submission and grading for students.

Incentivized

It solved the problems we were facing at the time.

Cincopa is very easy to use, especially to the uninitiated. You don't need a degree in CS or years of experience to set-up a fantastic looking gallery. The interface is self-explanatory for the most part and very easy to use. The drag-and-drop functionality makes it simple and inviting for all users.

Incentivized

Needs some work, but I'm sure improvements will come over time

Incentivized

Panopto has been quick to answer any questions, but their rollouts and updates have caused issues where we felt a little blindsided by unexpected changes. Their development cycle is slow and often their promises for future updates have been extremely slow or never come.

Incentivized

When looking for a gallery system on BigCommerce, we looked at POWr, Owl Carousel, and JuiceBox. We settled on Cincopa due to the embed options, drag-and-drop functionality, and the lack of development needed to integrate into our website. Additionally, Cincopa's price point (especially with a free option) put it in the lead over similar products like JuiceBox.

Incentivized

Panopto has the best captioning features that I've seen for a video repository. This enables us to caption videos quickly and efficiently. It also has tags and chaptering which makes viewing videos easier. We can also link videos inside Panopto to outside entities without needing them to have a Panopto account. Panopto works best if you have a LOT of video content, but if you only have some or don't care about organization, SharePoint (or Microsoft Stream) might be a cheaper/more efficient option.

Incentivized

• We use the tool primarily as a customer loyalty measure. Customers can view all submitted images and videos, also from other people and share with other people.
• In addition, the tool serves to promote the image of our company by giving the customer pleasure. The residence time of the customers on the page with the picture gallery is very high.

• During the pandemic, Panopto allows our faculty to quickly stage up lectures that were normally delivered in person, and these recordings reached thousands of students who could not come to campus for class.
• Both faculty and student report high satisfaction with the flexibility and convenience of having Panopto video content available in a course to watch and rewatch for learner reinforcement.
• Panopto's adaptable media distribution reduced impact on student technology and internet speeds when they might not have access to broadband connections, allowing them to continue to access essential course materials.
• Speech to text capabilities. increase accessibility compliance of media content.
• Archiving training materials in Panopto allows faculty, staff, TAs, and students to easily find recordings for reference.

Incentivized