Video Hosting Platform: Wistia vs Cincopa
Looking for the best video hosting platform for your business? In this blog we’ll discuss the differences between two great video hosting platforms that can help you take your video strategy to the next level. Let’s go!
What’s video hosting?
Video hosting is a digital service that allows you to upload, store, manage, and distribute video content to your target audience online. It involves uploading video files to a specialized platform that is designed to handle video playback, storage, and delivery to viewers.
Regardless of your use case, video hosting platforms typically provide tools and features to manage and customize the viewing experience, such as embedding videos on websites, controlling playback settings, and analyzing viewer engagement.
Why do you need video hosting?
Here’s a short answer–ease of maintenance and security.
Hosting your videos on a third-party site offloads your work of maintaining a video infrastructure, optimizing your page speed, and ensuring your content is secure everywhere it goes.
If you’re just starting to dip your toes into video content, some free solutions like YouTube, Google Drive, and Facebook allow you to host and embed videos on your website. Bear in mind that your viewers may be distracted by ads and prompted off your site to explore more content on those video-sharing platforms.
If you’re ready to take your video strategy up a notch, you’ll need some advanced features like video analytics and heatmap, video marketing toolkits, and comprehensive content security options to scale your business easily.
What to look for in a video hosting solution
Videos have become an essential part of marketing strategy in businesses. In fact, 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 90% the marketers say video marketing has given them a good ROI, according to Wyzow’s Video Marketing Statistics 2024.
To help you evaluate video hosting solutions out there, we’ve compiled a list of baseline features you need to take into consideration when choosing a platform for your hosting needs.
Video and Streaming Quality
Imagine you have a beautifully crafted website, but the quality of the video embedded looks like a commercial from the 1960s, or the video buffering time takes forever.
It doesn’t look good. Worse yet, it’s likely to hurt your user engagement.
Though video player quality varies across providers, for an optimal viewing experience, look for a player capable of delivering videos in a resolution from 480p up to 4K using adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR). It’s important to remember that not all your viewers have the same internet speed to enjoy the same playback quality. Choosing a video hosting solution that automatically transcodes your videos into different versions will enable your viewers to stream videos with little to no interruptions.
Content Management Capability
Consider this as a warehouse for your content. Storage is one factor, but you should also look for features that help you keep your videos organized and easily searchable when they’re all in one place.
On top of that, you’ll need video analytics to gauge your content performance, and security protocols to make sure your videos–your precious brand assets, will not fall prey to content piracy.
Player Customization
Remember the marketing rule of 7? A customer needs to see your brand at least 7 times before they commit to a decision. This makes keeping your branding consistent a must-do in your practice if you want to maximize the impact of each encounter with your potential customers.
Player customization gives you full control of how you display your videos, with options to add a logo watermark and change player colors to match your brand, and customize or hide player control elements to help you achieve your video marketing goals.
Sharing and Embed Videos
The most important aspect and the ultimate goal for anyone who sets out to look for a video hosting platform is to be able to share them with your audience. If you’ve got a collection of videos you want your viewers to watch in a distraction-free zone, look for sites that allow you to create a dynamic branded landing page to share your videos via a url. You should have the option to password-protect your page or set it to public for better content discoverability.
If you’re looking to embed videos or an entire video library on your website, make sure the video player is responsive to devices of any size.
Marketing Tools & Video Analytics
Marketing tools like customizable players and brandable video portals help companies stay on brand across all digital channels. On-video call-to-action (CTA) and lead-generation forms give you the ability to engage your audience and get tangible results from your marketing campaigns. Analytics provide useful data like views and audience demographics, helping you improve your content strategy.
By using these tools together, platforms can create better content, reach the right audience, and measure performance accurately. It’s like having a map to guide you on your journey to success in the world of online videos!
User Management
You may be a marketer working with video producers, graphic designers, and web developers on various projects. Find a platform that gives you complete control of user permissions and content access, so that you collaborate on the same project seamlessly from anywhere.
Integrations
Switching from one software to another is a killer to your productivity. So, do yourself a big favor–find a video hosting site that integrates with your current tech stack. Generally, you’ll want to make sure the video platform connects well with your CRM and marketing automation tools so you can keep funelling your database with the user engagement data and leads captured through your videos to your database.
Content Privacy and Security
Creating content takes a lot of time, so restricting your content access and making sure only those who have access to view your content can see it is paramount. Some ways to protect your videos include password protection, right-click download disabled, IP and domain whitelisting, and email gate. For secure internal access, be sure to check if Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication is available to ensure your content is only accessible to internal stakeholders.
How Wistia and Cincopa compare
So, you know what to look for in a video hosting platform. Now let’s dive into some features and give you a side-by-side comparison between Wistia and Cincopa.
Video Player Customization
Both Wistia and Cincopa offer customization options for their video players, including the ability to add custom logos and interactive watermarks, change player colors, and add a custom image or animated thumbnails to your videos.
Winner: Wistia
Video Gallery
Galleries are like the houses you build for your videos to live in. Cincopa has tons of gallery pre-built templates that fit into different use cases. No matter whether you’re creating videos for online courses, making a playlist of your podcast, or turning your product videos into a binge-friendly channel, there’s always a template for you!
Wistia offers one Netflix-like template for their video gallery (aka Wistia Channel). It’s a no-code solution for marketers to get their video and audio content up on a beautiful page quickly and easily, even if you have no design experience at all.
Both platforms give customization ability to their templates so you can get your branded video gallery out there without touching a single line of code.
Winner: Cincopa
Video Marketing
You’ve made and uploaded that video, now what? Your videos should be an integral part of your marketing strategy and ready to reach your audiences anywhere they are.
Cincopa has a suite of built-in video marketing tools at your fingertips–from lead generation to viewer engagement analytics and integration with marketing automation platforms. Want your customers to take their next steps? Throw in a CTA or a lead gen form and connect your CRM and email marketing platform to Cincopa so all your leads and engagement activities can flow down in your pipeline, with no manual work necessary.
Wistia is a leader in video marketing. They’ve also got tools like Turnstile–a lead generation tool, Call-to-Action, and annotations links, to help you generate leads and drive viewer engagement.
Both platforms automatically transcribe your videos and create a transcript for your video content. Plus, your videos are optimized for search engine ranking with JSON-LD, so you can sit back and rest assured that your content will show up in search results.
Winner: Cincopa
Ways to Share Videos
Getting your videos out there is an important step to take. Cincopa gives you the flexibility to centralize your content in one media library, and embed them across your digital channels. We know online presence is key, so you get unlimited embedding to sprinkle your content across the web the way you see fit.
Plus, you can publish your videos and start live streaming from Cincopa’s brandable landing page for public or private sharing. If you want to have a full-blown video site, you can easily post your videos on CincoTube, your very own branded, YouTube-like video platform to not only manage and share your content, but also build an ecosystem to optimize viewer engagement.
With Wistia, you’ll be able to embed standalone videos, live events, as well as a one-page video channel on your website. A sharing link is also available for single media files and channels. However, there’s no way for you to set up multiple channels and allow your users to easily navigate to different topics within the same site.
Winner: Cincopa
Video Analytics
You can only improve what you can measure. We know videos are an important part of your business, and you need analytics to gauge the performance of your content.
Capturing your viewers’ engagement with your videos is not enough alone, you need this piece of the puzzle in your CRM to get a full picture of your customer journey across all the touchpoints.
Both Cincopa and Wistia offer advanced analytics with video heatmap and viewer analytics. The best part is–the analytics are real-time. You can start tracking how viewers interact with your video the moment you hit publish. Regardless of where you embed your videos, you’ll always see a breakdown of the views, plays, total watch time, and engagement.
For see how videos work within your marketing funnel, both video hosting platforms offer integrations with leading CRM and marketing automation platforms to help you better measure your marketing impact.
Winner: Tie
Security
Both Cincopa and Wistia take security seriously. Cincopa offers strong security measures like password protection, download prevention, IP and domain whitelisting, and email gate. This protects videos from unauthorized access. SSO/SAML can be configured for enterprise-grade security standards.
Wistia provides password protection and domain restrictions for limited access. Both use SSL encryption for secure data transmission.
Overall, they offer reliable security, ensuring content protection and safe viewing experiences.
Winner: Tie
Pricing
Wistia offers a free-forever plan that allows you to upload up to 10 media files and limited customization options. You can also start a free trial for their Plus, Pro, and Advanced plan.
- Plus: $19/mo
20 media files, $2.00 extra for additional media, up to 75 media files, 3 team users
- Pro: $79/mo
50 media files, $1.00 extra for additional media, up to 500 media files, 5 team users
- Advanced: $319/mo
250 media files, $0.50 extra for additional media, up to 2,500 media files, 20 team users
- Premium: Contact Sales
1,000 media files, $0.25 extra for additional media, up to 5,000 media files, unlimited team users
Cincopa also has a free-forever plan for you to get started. You get 20 videos, 500 images, unlimited galleries, and unlimited embedding. Free trials are available in Plus, Corporate, and Enterprise.
- Plus: $25/mo
50 videos, 1,800 images, and 75 audio files, 2 team users
- Corporate: $99/mo
250 videos, 7,000 images, 300 audio files, 6 team users
- Enterprise: $350/mo
250 videos, 7,000 images, 300 audio files, 20 team users
- Custom Enterprise: Contact Sales
Unlimited media files subject to fair use policy
Bonus points
Your one platform for all multimedia hosting
You can host videos, images, audios, and documents seamlessly, and you also get tons of customizable premade gallery templates to house them! This comprehensive hosting allows for an all-in-one content management experience.
Sharing videos in multiple ways–create your YouTube-like video site
Unlimited embedding, enabling users to share content across platforms without restrictions. Customizable landing pages and CincoTube enhance content presentation and sharing options.
Professional services and top-notched customer support
Cincopa’s professional services ensure a tailored experience with personalized assistance, customization, integration, and technical support. This dedicated approach makes us a top choice for professional-grade multimedia hosting and management.
Conclusion: So, which video hosting platform is better?
If you make it here, hands-down you’re eager to know which video hosting platform is better for your business.
Both platforms offer robust features for video hosting. Wistia shines with its customizable player options and advanced analytics, making it ideal for marketers seeking detailed insights and branding control.
However, Cincopa takes the lead with its versatile video gallery templates, comprehensive video marketing tools, and unlimited embedding capabilities. Additionally, Cincopa’s pricing plans are competitive, offering scalable solutions for businesses of all sizes.
Don’t take it from us. Hear it from our customers!
