Wistia Reviews

Wistia Review – Pricing, Features & Alternatives

Wistia is an underrated alternative to YouTube or Vimeo. This Wistia review will analyze the plentitude of features and pricing details and compare it to its alternatives. In addition, we are sure you will be surprised by the boatloads of details offered about who is watching your videos: from where, how long, and all that fun information that helps you fine-tune your video marketing strategies. But is it the right video platform for your business?

About Wistia

Are you looking for reliable video marketing and podcast software that can help you build your brand? Look no further than Wistia! Brendan Schwartz and Chris Savage, the masterminds behind Wistia, envisioned creating a video marketing tool that would benefit over 500,000 companies worldwide.

Now, their dream has become a reality as Wistia is being utilized by more than half a million businesses, including big names like MailChimp, Starbucks, HubSpot, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co. With Wistia, you can scale up and build a powerful brand marketing that can take your business to the next level.

The mission of Wistia is to make business more human, and this is reflected in the way they have built their software. Wistia is a safe and reliable video hosting platform that helps you get the most out of your video content. With Wistia, you can easily create, manage, and share video and audio content with your employees and clients.

You can also grow your email list, develop more intelligent ads, and track the impact of your videos or podcasts not only on your website but also on social channels. Additionally, Wistia offers ad-free hosting, advanced analytics, and other built-in marketing tools.

By using Wistia, you get the best of both worlds. As a wise man once said: “If you feel good playing and working, your audience will feel the same.” Wistia’s video and podcast hosting platforms are designed to make video marketing easy and effortless. Once you install the software, sharing content becomes natural and instant.

Wistia originally started as a basic video hosting tool in 2006, but it has since evolved into a fantastic video marketing and podcast software. Wistia helps you create, host, analyze performance, integrate, and build your brand and business. It is a complete package for those looking to expand more in video marketing.

How to use Wistia?

To better understand what Wistia is, let’s talk about how Wistia works.

First, we must state the obvious: Wistia is more than video hosting software. It is a complex online marketing tool that gives your company complete control over content marketing. You can create and post both videos and podcasts.

You are given several options to customize the video player or podcast player:

Recently, Wistia released a nifty Chrome extension called Soapbox that will let you create and send personalized sales videos and podcasts or presentations from a web browser. Moreover, you can also download the Wistia videos this way.

Hosting and creating videos and podcasts are only the tip of the iceberg. Once Wistia sends your creation out in the wild, you will see the full power.

To summarize, Wistia empowers marketers to track and analyze podcast listeners and video viewers. The software allows them to investigate the metrics and measure each individual’s viewing session, location, IP address, and organization.

For example, you can extract an engagement graph to see which parts of your podcast or video viewers like to replay and which sections they skipped. Or maybe you want to examine the heatmap full of information about the viewers of every podcast and video you made.

Is Wistia easy to use?

Not tech-savvy? No need to worry! Wistia is intuitive and easy to use. However, if you get into an obstacle or can’t find your way through the many Wistia features available, they prepared FAQs, a Learning Center & Original Series. They are famous for their speedy responsiveness.

As everyone’s concern is that Wistia pricing plans are a bit high, keep in mind that the structure is based on the number of videos and podcast episodes you host. Moreover, the price will get higher if you have a lot of content. And if your primary concern is how much Wistia costs, check the Wistia pricing section for detailed information again.

Wistia Detailed Features

Still not clear what Wistia is?

This Wistia review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning its bucketful of features. Moreover, if you want your videos to look professional, with a great player, conversion forms or links in the video, and in-depth analytics, Wistia is a likely candidate.

In the following, we will discuss Wistia features – and there aren’t a few of them.

If you are using Wistia for the first time, it welcomes you with a straightforward layout and many helpful tricks and tips to start your journey. Wistia is designed to make the user experience feel like a game. You can organize everything into projects; each project can contain unlimited videos or audio.

If you opted for the free plan, you have a limit of 3 videos. Users with the Pro Plan start with ten, and each supplementary video will cost 25 cents.

What is excellent about Wistia is that it allows you to record your video or podcast directly from the platform. Second, you can find the record option in the Project Actions menu, activating the camera and microphone. Next, you can start recording your first video just like that.

As for supported file formats, they won’t impede your creation process. They support MOV, MPG, AVI, MP4, DIVX, etc. The maximum accepted size per file is 8GB; keep in mind that it will convert to MP4 format. Moreover, Wistia can also host documents, audio files, or images.

Another great feature of the numerous Wistia is that it creates a different version of the original once you upload the video. These are called derivatives. It is the same video rendered in different sizes – this way, even the users with limited bandwidth will be accommodated. This Wistia feature will detect the viewer’s internet connection quality and then choose the best video size to play for them. In conclusion, no long loading times and buffering interruptions for any of your users; yay!!

The Wistia video player offers some ways to customize your content. For example, you can change the playback button’s appearance to match your brand’s color (and offer a more personalized feel to your content).

While the video or podcast is playing, you can add interactive CTA buttons. With this feature, the possibilities are numerous:

Moreover, you can set up password protection to restrict your videos and make them available to the chosen ones.

One of my favorites from Wistia features is the Turnstile feature. This one turns your content into a potent marketing tool by:

You can connect Wistia with several email providers, such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, and more. This way, you can automate your email marketing to keep track of the leads you collected from viewers. Furthermore, the turnstile feature makes your email marketing manageable by letting you choose the data you want to collect from viewers and customize the forms.

If your marketing strategy involves getting leads by allowing them to see, for example, only 15 seconds of free content as a teaser, you also have this option. You can set up gated content to restrict certain parts of the video. Then ask for emails, contact info, or even payment before viewing the rest of the content.

I won’t repeat myself. Embedding a video to your website with Wistia is as easy as everything else. You must click a button to generate it and copy and paste it. It’s faster than you can pronounce it. It also automatically generates embed codes for email marketing campaigns (for this, you will need to set up an email provider) and publish directly to social media platforms.

Wistia’s embed codes are also SEO-friendly. They are made in such a way as to improve the ranking of your content for all major search engines (yes, I’m talking about Google). If I compare Wistia vs. Vimeo or Wistia vs. YouTube, well… all the viewers will be redirected directly to your website and not to a third-party hosting site.

As for video metadata, Wistia uses all the best practices in the industry to store it within a JSON-LD file that will be automatically added to the website’s header. The data included in this file are the title, length, thumbnail, and description of your video or podcast, all adequately formatted to put you in front of your competitors on the search engines.

Wistia Soapbox is a unique tool designed to simplify the process of creating, editing, and sharing videos. Aimed at professionals, it allows users to record both their screens and themselves simultaneously, making it ideal for presentations, demos, or feedback sessions.

With its user-friendly interface, Soapbox ensures that even those without video editing experience can produce polished and engaging content. Features like the ability to switch between screen and camera views, or use a split-screen mode, give creators flexibility in how they present their message.

However, it’s essential to note that Wistia has decided to transition away from Soapbox. With the introduction of screen and video recording capabilities directly within the Wistia platform, the company sees an overlap in functionalities.

As a result, they have announced that Soapbox will be fully retired by September 1, 2024.

This move is a strategic decision to streamline their offerings and provide users with a more integrated experience within the main Wistia platform. Current Soapbox users should be aware of this change and make plans to transition their video creation processes to Wistia’s native tools or explore alternative solutions.

Wistia features also include in-depth analytics showing you how each video performs. The analytics have view count, overall engagement, and play rate. You can set all these charts to display data from individual videos, videos from a specific date range, or all videos.

When talking about Wistia vs. Vimeo analytics, the ones offered by Wistia are often eclipsing the performance of similar platforms. You can see how viewers watched and interacted with your content as a bulk or individual through detailed heatmaps and engagement graphs.

Heatmaps represent a detailed report that lets you see which section of your content viewers found exciting and show you how interaction changed at different times in the video. In addition, heatmaps include data on how long users watched your content, location, IP address, etc.

Moreover, Wistia also has you covered when measuring the ROI by letting you analyze leads gathered from your viewers.

Wistia Detailed Integrations

If all the mentioned features didn’t convince you that this is a powerful video marketing software, maybe all the integrations will work.

Wistia integrates easily and well with software like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot.

What is also great is that email marketing integrations are available in every pricing plan. This allows viewer data collected with Turnstile to be sent quickly to email providers.

Wistia bandwidth

When it comes to video hosting, bandwidth can be pretty confusing. Even for the experts, it isn’t easy to anticipate how much you’ll need and the final cost.

Bandwidth represents all the information passed to a viewer when the play button is hit and all the player’s data. The thumbnail image loading, the media load, plays by you, media download, and video thumbnails.

Furthermore, Wistia video hosting has a high limit that makes it accessible to most users (stating that 99% of their users are far from this limit). If you are unsure of the limit, it has available a Bandwidth Predictor Tool.

The default bandwidth available on Wistia Video Hosting is 200GB. But in case you need more, there are some pricing plans available.

Alternatives for Wistia

As video is getting important for all content marketers, the demand for reliable video marketing software is snowballing. At the same pace, the need for video hosting platforms is increasing.

There are many great options on the market, and Wistia is among them. However, although it is an excellent tool, it isn’t perfect for everyone. For example, suppose you have a tight budget for hosting more than ten videos. In that case, you might want to search for Wistia alternatives.

Top Wistia Alternatives

Wistia Review Conclusion

Is Wistia worth it? If you are a content marketer and video content is an integral part of your strategy, it sure does. Wistia is a simple hosting solution that will help your business grow. The founders did their best to provide a secure platform to share your content with clients, employees, partners, or investors. It also is handy to share videos and podcasts on the website or social media and gather essential information about the viewers.

The intuitive and straightforward interface reflects Brendan and Chris’s mission to make business more human. In conclusion, the software has many great features, including SEO-friendly embed codes, CTA buttons, customizable players, and gated content.