Wistia vs OpenShot Video Editor: Which is a better fit?

Durgesh: Hi, my name is Durgesh. I am a content creator for icsbits.com, which is a cybersecurity mentoring platform for potential cybersecurity enthusiasts and professionals. And I give Wistia a four star out of five. Before using Wistia, we used Camtasia and their publishing platform. Of course, we also tried to use YouTube and all of the other open source free applications that are available. I chose Wistia for a couple of reasons. One is the ability to create different projects and also keep them private, do collaboration with others in the team. And the other reason I chose Wistia is the analytics that it provides us with a lot of information about the watched videos, the number of hours watched, and the clicks on any sort of call to action type of features on the video. So those were some of the reasons why we chose Wistia over the other platforms. Sure. So started using Wistia as the free tier. It was really simple. So go onto their website, put in a couple of information, your email address and name of the company just to get started. And then you are signed into their free tier account where you can use that for unlimited use. However, they have limitations on the number of videos. And so I had to reach out to them to see if they can help me understand how I can test certain lengths of the videos. And they were able to actually help me out by extending some of those limitations because I was working with them. And also, I started using Wistia in a very early stage in their development. So I probably have some cool features there on the free tier that nowadays you may not be able to get on a free tier, but their support has been extremely useful in terms of getting to know the product. And so yeah, onboarding was really, really easy. You do it on your own, you sign up and then you ask for help when you need it. So one consideration for using Wistia is your use case. So if you have a use case that you are trying to create content for an organization, a company, this is an excellent product, but there are some caveats to using Wistia versus YouTube because you are limited to certain quotas on how many videos you can upload. Of course, they provide you with tiered memberships. So those are something you want to look for before you start using the platform. Because with any platform, once you start putting all your videos in and you start investing in that platform, you want to make sure it can scale out and then it's also affordable as you move through this process of using Wistia or any other product. But in this case, Wistia.

Jacob I.: Hi. My name is Jacob and I am the owner and head IT of Rocky Mountain Expert Computer Service. We've used OpenShot for quite a while and I'll tell you it is one of the best programs I've ever had the privilege to bring into our company. Five out of five. So before OpenShot, we used a variety of different programs. The biggest was Final Cut Pro, which of course is the standard in the industry. However, one of the biggest drawbacks of Final Cut Pro simply is the cost. As a small to medium business, it is not very cost-effective to spend that kind of money and we were looking for something with a little more flexibility, a little more open source and OpenShot fit that to the tee. So one of the things that we were looking for in a video editing program was something similar, familiar so that it would be easy to pick up and learn and for anyone who's used another similar program called Audacity, which is basically the same thing for audio only, OpenShot filled that void simply because it was very similar to what we had been using before. So deploying the software was remarkably easy. First and foremost, it's a simple installer file that you download straight from their website. But on top of that, getting to know the software, they make it remarkably easy. They have a variety of tutorials on their website. There's a copious amount of YouTube tutorials all over the internet and if it's not able to do something that you need, chances are there's a plugin that someone has created in order to accomplish just that very thing. So one thing that you want to be aware of if you're getting OpenShot is that while it does open most of the formats from things like Adobe and things of that nature, it can't necessarily save them in those formats. So if you are needing a piece of software in your workflow that will interact with Adobe, have to say, you probably should go with Adobe. However, if you need a video editor and you're willing to learn a new system and honestly, if you're willing to learn a very robust, simple system, OpenShot is a great addition to your business that honestly, it'll catapult you much higher than using, oh God, Windows Movie Maker or anything like that. This is definitely a much more professional grade version. But it's maintained by a bunch of people who are really passionate about video editing.