JW Player (or JWP) is a video platform boasting 40,000 broadcasters, publishers, and other video-driven brands whose business relies on video as users. It provides these companies with a way to accelerate and scale their video strategy and is a video platform that can be used to stream video, engage audiences on any screen, and monetize content.
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Wistia
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Wistia is a video marketing platform that helps teams create, host, market, and measure their videos and webinars. Wistia is used to create professional videos, host webinars, collect and send leads to a connected marketing automation platform. Wistia additionally offers customers support and educational resources.
JW had more player options, a better/more intuitive user interface, was altogether faster both in rendering the uploaded videos and in time to load on the web page. The integration with OpenX for pre-roll was faster and easier than with Brightcove, and lastly, they offered a …
JW Player is the most widely used internet video player out there, so it was an easy choice for us to trust JW with our video content and delivery. What impressed me most was their hunger to improve and satisfy our business needs. Many of their competitors weren't nearly as …
JW Player is competitive with VideoJS and MediaElements. Though we preferred VideoJS based on some features for its player attributes for years, we ultimately switched to JW Player due to its platform capabilities, functionality and recent investments the firm was making to …
Vidyard was much more expensive even though it has tighter integration with HubSpot. This put Wistia in a better category from a cost perspective because most of the heavy lifting with automation is handled on the HubSpot side of things. Vidyard also felt like it was geared to …
Wistia is for business. Period. Vimeo has none of the benefits for a business that Wistia offers. The SEO value and SUPER FAST playback speed are essential. Wistia has it all. Personally, I can rarely get thought a video if hosted on Vimeo because of the glitchy playback and …
I found Vidyard to be a tad clunky, at least when I tried to use it. Vimeo's design features didn't seem as modern to me and didn't integrate as well with other apps/website platforms, at least when I was investigating a video hosting platform. Wistia is more expensive than …
We've used Youtube in the past, and still use it to host some videos today, but we didn't like how mainstream it feels when you embed it on a website. For one thing, you can't customize the appearance so it feels out of place with our branding and color scheme on our website …
Honestly, I haven't gotten too in-depth yet, but that is the closest thing. Gotta give that point to Wistia, though, still because in my experience, at least, trying to learn Vidyard's features did not seem to be the right path at the time when Wistia was not causing any …
Vimeo is less customizable. They both offer a free plan and paid premium plans. Vimeo doesn't have the A/B testing and ability to focus on the marketing aspect of the videos to obtain more revenue. The CTAs are much better in Wistia and are much easier to work with.
Wistia had the best site speed performance out of these competitors and had the most functionality. We really loved the ability to track usage and plays on the videos, the lead capturing, bookmarking, CTA build-outs, and all of the customizations we could do with it compared to …
Wistia is pretty comparable to Vimeo but it seems to cost more for the same features. I liked the Wistia brand and the great educational and entertaining content they produce which is largely why we chose Wistia. With a smaller budget, I would probably go with Vimeo next time …
Wistia offers more features overall and a better interface. I have found that they have the best analytics and provide helpful insights into the performance of each video. You can integrate incredibly easy into websites, without technical savvy or any kind of expertise with …
Wistia proved to strike a balance between features, support, reliability, and ease of use. Some offer deeper features, but require much more of executional teams, which increases drag and friction in continually distributing new content.
We haven't really explored other products. I've been using Wistia for so long that there was nothing like Wistia when I started. It's still a solid product for a good price.
In the past we have tried to host some of our video content in Dropbox. Wistia has proven to be a much better solution as it allows for much more flexibility in sharing the content externally and also having an easy interface for admin users to add and locate video content.
Wistia provides the functionality that most companies need for video marketing and video hosting/analytics. When we compared with Vidyard, the cost of Vidyard was far higher, but the functionality did not seem to be much more advanced than Wistia. Wistia seems to be a good …
Wistia is slightly more expensive, but the metrics/data provided, combined with the ease of use, makes it the perfect choice for us. Being able to break videos into series/projects is very useful. Additionally, the chapter feature makes it easy to allow users to watch all or …
We looked at self-hosting videos on our client sites using AWS and Cloudflare, but we really didn't want to have to code our own product or have to deal with server configurations. Wistia made it simple to sign-up, upload, and start embedding our content on our sites. We also …
Vimeo Pro works well for artistic folks, those on a budget, or those not looking to leverage video for demand gen or lead capture. It served us well for a while, but just wasn't cutting it. Wistia has more on the integrations end than Vimeo, and we have benefitted the most from …
We have found that many companies do not whitelist YouTube, and it is against policy to access the channel. By using Wistia, we can get around that predicament.
Wistia was our default choice because of the popularity and the quality of videos generated by the team. We did not evaluate other software platforms and directly went with Wistia.
I think they do a great job of converting a video into various formats (file/size) that will accommodate a variety of devices. From computer to phone to tablet, it streams really nice with little or no latency. I would really, really like to see an easy way to add clickable text and links to the video (in a similar fashion to how YouTube does it).
It's so awesome to see my videos come up on Google Search. A click brings viewers right to my website!!! Incredibly powerful. If I were just posting on YouTube, visitors would end up there and then off to the next best cat video instead of taking action with me on my website.
Obtaining embed codes for a significantly large number of videos can be very time consuming as there is no way to automatically pull a report.
Within a project, there is no way to set the list to show a specific number of videos and you may only have a certain number of videos shown unless you click to expand the list and continue to do so.
Once the list is expanded and you click in to a video, when clicking back, the list reloads and you must expand the entire list again which can become very time consuming.
Just made the decision to renew given demonstrated improvements being made to the platform to expand compatibility for its player use on devices such as Apple TV, as well as improvements made recently to its JW Platform Dashboard
Wistia is super easy to use and very reliable, anytime a video needs to be updated, the existing media can be replaced, but the url remains the same so anywhere this media is shared or embedded, it is immediately updated. Their support is extremely helpful, and there is very rarely any issues with this product.
Reliability and compatibility on a majority of platforms. Would have received a 10 except recent versions of browsers such as Firefox are now defaulting against Flash components and thus prompting approval from users BEFORE loading which is a HUGE obstacle to an effective user experience thus creating concerns by end-users unnecessarily and risking that they will NOT accept the prompts, thus leaving unable to view video content hosted using the JW Player. Assurances by JW support suggest they will resolve this, so we'll see...
I just love the interface and the way things are organized. You can find all of the various controls and have the ability to enable/disable each. You can also get to help quickly from any screen. The screens are not cluttered and have a good use of whitepace, without the need to page through controls or reload the screen.
Couldn't be happier with the overall performance of the platform. Videos load fast, rarely have loading issues, look sclean and the styling and sizing doesn't have issues. The data comes in quickly and in real time. Also, on the administrative side, the videos seem to upload well without much issue. There's always issues uploading video, but we had way less upload issues with Wistia than with Vimeo.
Support is reasonable. I from time to time have made suggestions on improvements that would be nice to see (like the ability to have a clickable link within the video - that is easy to create, without tons of coding) and it seems as though I never see it happen or get much response to "suggestions" to upgrade the software. The good news, other than a few things as I mentioned above, overall, I don't have many "technical issues" in the platform, which is a good thing. On occasion, I have seen some "issues" with the delivery of the video, but it has been pretty scarce. So it is dependable.
We have only had to reach out to Wistia support a handful of times in the 4 years we have been using Wistia. They have always been quick to respond and help us solve the problem. The system is self-service so there should be very little to no need to reach out to support on a regular basis.
One of the primary features promoted by JW Platform is its SEO definition. However, there did not seem to be a way to integrate that data to our platform if selected thus only leaving the benefits of that data to be established on the individual video page hosted by JW Platform, which isn't useful in the end to the client value we are trying to deliver for our VideoproFile.net solution
JW Player is the most widely used internet video player out there, so it was an easy choice for us to trust JW with our video content and delivery. What impressed me most was their hunger to improve and satisfy our business needs. Many of their competitors weren't nearly as interested in our bottom line as they were in their own
Wistia is in the process of making their livestreaming way better than the free alternative like YouTube and a well known competitor like gotomeeting. It's easy to add in cohosts, interact with chat members, add in polls and other features which can be a bit clunky on gotomeeting.
Doubled lead capture from lead magnet on website from one year to the next.
Increased email interaction on newsletters when embedding Wistia video thumbnail into email campaigns (10-15% links clicked bumped to 30-40% links clicked).
Can save us about 50+ hours of one-on-one client meeting time per year for pointing clients to video content rather than presenting the same info in a live setting.