Animoto

It is hard to mess up. Drag and drop and you can have a nice-looking video published in well under an hour. The copyright-free music is already there, nice options for styles. The addition of Getty images and video is very nice.

It is not super customizable. The text has to go in one of the predetermined places. That's great for continuity throughout the video, but sometimes you might want the text to move just a smidge so it doesn't cover something. It would also be nice to bulk edit the different frames. And processing the video before you can preview it sometimes feels tedious - but that's not enough of a reason to not use the software.

Extremely user friendly software with reasonable pricing. Animoto is highly accessible and would be a great video development tool for people with limited video/design experience, or people with limited time. My team uses Animoto to create product/campaign launch videos for clients, as well as promotional videos for our own services. If you have a handful of images or video clips ready to go, you can create a short compelling video in as little as twenty minutes!

Customization of video templates is pretty limited (in terms of style, speed, layout, amount of content per slide, fonts, etc.). Templates are still great considering the ease of use and low cost. Sometimes it's challenging to fit a full thought onto a slide due to the limited number of characters Animoto allows in a line of text... but that's probably a good thing to keep videos from becoming text-heavy.

There's nothing in the software that you can't do with Facebook or Avid, Final Cut, Premiere or a free iphone App.

I recommend not doing business with this company. We had a subscription for a year. On the following year they auto-billed $588 and never sent any warning about this or even a receipt.

My credit card showed the payment was charged and I contacted the company the "same day" to cancel the annual subscription and refund us.

There customer service policy is No EXCEPTIONS No REFUNDS. What kind of crappy business is this? I would expect this kind of service at a car dealer. That's why people hate car dealers.

The quality of the videos are incredible. Everything is drag and drop, so adding videos and photos to a project is easy. There are music tracks to choose from, and you can also upload your own. Captions and titles can be easily added. There are quite a few templates to choose from, and I am usually able to find one that matches the theme and mood of the video I'd like to create.

I pay for the personal plan so I can download my videos in 720p. It is disappointing sometimes to see the templates that are not available to me because I am using a lower price paid plan. The animoto logo is still attached to the end of every video, even though I am a paid user. Usually that is reserved for the free plans, so it's very clear that animoto sees their personal plan is the no frills plan.

Compile my clients event photos into a quick 3-4 minute video segment that I can send to them after they pay their final invoice.

I do not like the new pricing structures within the past couple years. It used to be a non-tiered plan and now it has three tiers with the lowest tier only offering 720 video, which is kind of a deal breaker for most. The next step up is nearly six times the cost of the lowest tier, which makes it not the most affordable for those that don't create more than a video a week.