If you’re a professional wondering whether to go with Vimeo or Wistia as your go-to video-hosting/distribution platform, then we can help you decide.
Both offer a few different plans you can choose from, so let’s take a closer look.
Vimeo or Wistia—which one’s best for your business?
This chart compares Vimeo Advanced features with Wistia’s paid program
Below, we’ll compare both platforms based on multiple features, such as price, analytics, personalization, lead generation, SEO, software integration, social sharing, customer support, collaboration, etc.
Please note: For Vimeo, we’re only going to take paid plans into consideration because the free one isn’t recommended for businesses.
Price comparison
Both Vimeo and Wistia offer free plans. Features and storage capacity increase as you move up the tiers.
For businesses, Vimeo Standard and Advanced are suitable.
The Standard plan will set you back $35 per month and lets you upload/create 120 videos per seat per year . If you’d like to review and compare the plans more thoroughly, read this post.
Wistia’s paid plan starts at $19 per month. It includes all the features in their free plan plus a customizable player, basic CTAs. To unlock more features, you’ll have to go up the tier. Here’s a quick glance at the plans they currently offer:
The Plus plan offers 20 free videos and additional ones will cost you $2 per media file you upload. The total media limit for a Plus account is 75
Wistia’s plans are more expensive even when compared to Vimeo’s highest-tier plan.
Winner: Vimeo
Video analytics
Vimeo’s Advanced plan offers analytic tools that can help businesses perform an in-depth analysis of their content.
Additionally, from the dashboard, you can monitor every play, share, like, and repost you get on the videos you’ve published on social media. Marketing integration is also possible.
Wistia’s Pro and above tier plans offers advanced analytic tools, such as heatmaps, that marketers may find more impressive than Vimeo’s.
The video heatmap is a cool tool that gives you a graphical representation of a single viewing session.
It can help you understand how your audience watches your videos; what sort of content performs better on certain distribution channels, etc. You can derive a lot of valuable data from this feature.
Credits: Wistia
Another great thing you can do with your video content on Wistia is A/B testing. This can help you gain insight into what works and how you can improve your content creation and dissemination strategy.
You can try out different thumbnails; color combinations and then compare results. You can also determine how video placement impacts performance and optimize accordingly.
Though both platforms offer great analytics, Wistia has an edge over Vimeo on this front.
Winner: Wistia
Video player personalization
Higher tier plans from Vimeo and Wistia allow plenty of freedom when it comes to video player customization. You can change your video player’s colors and add your company’s logo, too.
Vimeo’s Standard and Advanced features when compared to Wistias lie on equal footing.
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Lead generation
Vimeo’s Standard and Advanced plans offer lead generation tools. With these, you can guide your viewers toward certain web pages using CTA, or gain leads with a gated video that allows people to proceed after giving you their email, for example.
Wistia’s paid plans’ lead generation tools include turnstile, CTAs, and email address collection within video.
Both platforms’ paid programs provide similar lead generation capabilities.
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SEO
Vimeo paid plan members can optimize their content with the platform’s SEO tools.
Marketers can utilize these tools to improve their content’s discoverability and reach a wider audience.
Wistia also offers SEO benefits. Metadata is added to your webpage header with ease. This combined with relevant keywords can give your content a boost when it comes to SEO ranking.
For SEO, Vimeo and Wistia offer similar benefits.
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Advertisements
On Vimeo, there are no ads before, after, or on your video.
Wistia doesn’t show ads on its players. The intention is to capture the audience’s full attention and minimize distractions that may pull visitors off your page.
Integration capability
Wistia and Vimeo’s paid plans allow users marketing integration. Vimeo higher-tier Advanced plan offters further integrations.
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Video publishing and sharing
Vimeo allows users to natively publish videos to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Native videos are great for business because social platforms tend to give more weight to this type of content compared to shared links.
Wistia also lets you amplify your content reach. You can share videos natively to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts.
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Live streaming and virtual events
Vimeo Advanced and Enterprise allow unlimited live streaming and virtual event braodcasts.
Wistia does not support live streaming at this time.
Winner: Vimeo
Customer support
Vimeo customer support varies for different plans.
Free users can expect a first responce within three days.
Vimeo Starter users can expect to get a first response within four hours. Follow-up responses may take longer.
Standard accounts will hear back from Vimeo in about two hours.
Advanced subscribers get the first response in an hour. Chat support is available for live events.
Enterprise users have 24/7 customer support access via the contact form, and live chat (for live stream issues). Phone support is also available.
Wistia strives hard to support its customers and people have raved about how responsive; helpful, and knowledgeable the support staff is.
For this category, Wistia takes the lead.
Winner: Wistia
Collaboration tools
Vimeo’s collaboration tools have a user-friendly interface with automatic version history saving.
Higher-tier members also have the ability to conduct private video presentations. Video access to team members can also be controlled based on the role they’ve been assigned.
Wistia’s collaboration and reviewing features aren’t as impressive as Vimeo’s but they still get the job done.
Winner: Vimeo
Video monetization
Since there are plenty of independent artists and film producers on the Vimeo, the platform has made it possible for its users to monetize their content. You can choose a plan that fits your requirements.
Credits: Vimeo OTT
Wistia offers paywall integrations that can let you can monetize your videos.
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Final verdict: Wistia vs Vimeo
If you started out wondering if Vimeo is any good or if Wistia is worth it, then we can confidently say that both platforms are top-notch! But what is best for you depends on your unique requirements.
Vimeo falls in the big leagues. It stands as a competitor against the video behemoth YouTube and is widely regarded as its more professional alternative.
Wistia, on the other hand, is designed with a more specific intent: to help companies who want to use video on their websites for marketing, support, and sales purposes.
Platforms like Vimeo and Wistia offer the tools that can empower you to monitor how your content is performing. You can also use the analytics to upgrade and tweak your strategy as you see fit.
All of these efforts, when it comes to video content creation and marketing, help build brand affinity and leave a lasting impression on your audience. This is something you must not overlook in today’s video-driven landscape.
