All three platforms advertise their own brand to consumers, Screencast and Vimeo provide additional custom branding control at a paid level, and Vimeo providing the most branding control.
However, Vimeo does have third party advertising in the form of banner ads on Basic and Plus member pages (removed with a PRO plan at $240/yr), which can be a barrier for some not-for-profit, government, and educational customers. Vimeo does not have pre-roll, post-roll or overlay ads within videos.
Screencast is the only platform that does not include any third-party advertising at all. Reference the following chart and detailed comparison for more information: However, it may leave an incomplete understanding of all the considerations. The above chart summarizes the most common decisions that result in a free platform choice by TechSmith customers. What free online video platform is right for my screencasts? “Screencast” refers to the free Screencast™. Unless specified, all functionality statements refer to the free versions – “Vimeo” refers to the free Vimeo Basic plan. Next, we will compare feature sets of the three most popular OVPs, emphasizing the differences between free flavors of the platforms as it relates to educational, how-to, and training screencast videos. Screencasts are videos created by recording what is taking place on your computer screen, which is the primary use cases of TechSmith customers. Which online video platform is best for my screencasts? It also should be noted that as cloud storage and other platforms invest in video specific features, there is an increasingly grey line between these and OVPs however, this article is limited to the latter. Note that ‘All Other’ includes more than 50 other choices ranging from social media sites (Facebook), online course providers (Udemy), cloud storage (Google Drive), and other OVPs (Wistia). In the last year, Camtasia users alone have published over one million videos directly to YouTube, and we estimate there are tens of millions of videos on YouTube made with Camtasia. Our customers’ three most popular OVPs are YouTube, Vimeo, and Screencast™, with YouTube by far being the most popular. But a large number rely on individually accessible cloud platforms, primarily online video platforms (OVPs). Many of our customers place content in learning management systems, knowledge bases, and self-hosted solutions specific to their company or institution. We have helped our customers share videos to their storage destination, and learned a lot in the process. At TechSmith, we’ve helped customers publish over a hundred million videos over the last decade using our desktop products Camtasia, Snagit, and Jing.