Brightcove is a video hosting and marketing platform, allowing businesses to manage their videos from one central platform and gain in-depth insights and analytics into their viewers and video performance.
While users tend to enjoy Brightcove’s extensive analytics, many customers complain about its poor interface and subpar customer support.
Furthermore, Brightcove lacks transparent upfront pricing (pricing isn’t available on the site), and many believe that it’s too expensive for what it offers (third-party review sites claim that pricing starts at $199/month).
Fortunately, many great alternatives to Brightcove exist, whether you’re looking for video on demand hosting or a streaming service. If you’re looking for a video hosting and management tool, check out the following 10 alternatives below.
Best Brightcove Alternatives
1. Kaltura
Kaltura is a video cloud platform and the best alternative to Brightcove. Whether you want to hold virtual events or online conferences, Kaltura is growing faster than Brightcove for a reason.
Kaltura has several use cases. Like Brightcove, it provides a video content management system, allowing you to upload, edit, transcode, and manage your videos.
With its super light video player, your viewers will enjoy a seamless viewing experience. You can add captions (either manually or have them automatically generated), audio descriptions, your own branding, and more.
Kaltura will give you helpful analytics and insights, on a level that outperforms Brightcove at every step. For example, you can use advanced tools like heatmaps and live notifications to better understand user behavior.
You can use Kaltura to run virtual events and set up online communities. Educators will find it useful for online lectures and virtual classrooms, with a campus portal and LMS integrations built in.
Even local governments can use Kaltura for virtual town hall meetings and so on. The best part is the flexible pricing – on the pricing page, you can see pricing details or request a quote for your specific use case, whether you want to set up a video portal or a virtual classroom.
Find out more Kaltura like tools here.
2. Vidyard
Another excellent alternative to Brightcove is Vidyard. If you are creating sales videos and find that Brightcove doesn’t fit your needs, Vidyard is for you, as it places an emphasis on helping sales and marketing teams.
One area in which Vidyard outperforms Brightcove is video personalization. By adding details such as a user’s name to a video using Vidyard’s personalization tools, you’ll be able to increase engagement and sales and build better relationships.
From holiday greetings to post-purchase follow-ups, personalized videos can help you make a bigger impact.
Overall, I expect that you’ll find Vidyard easier to work with than Brightcove, especially if your focus is on sales videos. Using its simple tools, you can create videos by recording yourself and/or your webcam and publish them instantly, even embedding animated previews into emails.
With superb video hosting and advanced analytics, Vidyard will help you improve your bottom line. For example, you’ll get reports showing how users progressed through your video sales funnel, helping you better optimize it for conversions.
Interesting Comparison: Loom vs Vidyard
3. Vimeo
Vimeo actually has video hosting and marketing solutions for small businesses.
Compared to Brightcove, Vimeo is more intuitive, and it’s better optimized for smaller businesses on a budget, with smaller teams. Furthermore, on G2, a user-generated review site, Vimeo scored better than Brightcove in all aspects, including ease of setup and ease of use.
So, what can Vimeo offer businesses? To start, pricing is simple and transparent.
Businesses can get up to 7 TB of storage, depending on the plan they choose, and collaborate with team members (again, the number of team members you can add to a collaboration account depends on your plan). You can use the review tools and time-coded notes to work on videos with your team.
You’ll be able to host your videos on Vimeo or publish them to other social networks. Furthermore, you can protect them with passwords and make them private.
Analytics and viewer behavior data will be available, and they will integrate with your Google Analytics account. You can embed CTAs in your videos, add cards with links to your blog or website, capture email addresses and sync them to your email marketing account, and more.
To make your life easier, Vimeo integrates with a number of popular tools, including Box, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Google Drive, Slack, Adobe, and many others.
If you own a small business and have less than 10 team members you work with, I would strongly recommend considering Vimeo instead of Brightcove. It will be easier to work with – and a lot cheaper, too.
Explore the best Vimeo alternatives to consider here.
4. StreamingVideoProvider
StreamingVideoProvider is one of the best alternatives to Brightcove on the market, with many of the same features but without the exorbitant pricing. Unlike Brightcove, StreamingVideoProvider is upfront and transparent about its pricing.
StreamingVideoProvider, despite its name, isn’t just for streaming live videos. You can also host videos for on-demand viewing (VOD, or Video On Demand).
Furthermore, using its pay-per-view tool, you can restrict access to your videos unless people pay for them, allowing you to monetize both VOD and live streams.
With its white label hosting solution, you can brand the hosted video page with your own brand and logo, erasing any trace of StreamingVideoProvider’s branding.
Another way to monetize your videos is to put your own ads before, during, or after the videos. This feature isn’t available on all plans, but it allows you to put Google Ads or ads from another VPAID/VAST server on your videos.
When you do stream live, you can stream to multiple channels (like Facebook and YouTube) at once, depending on your plan.
Do you love how Brightcove protects your videos from being downloaded by people using third-party video downloader sites? StreamingVideoProvider offers the same protection, using high-end encryption to prevent that from happening.
Not only that, but you can limit your videos to specific IP addresses, thus only allowing employees to view them. Or, you can let anyone view them but block certain geographical locations.
It’s also possible to protect your videos with a password.
With SVP’s CDN, all your videos will be delivered and streamed quickly. You’ll get awesome analytics, so you can understand who your viewers are and what their habits are.
The analytics even integrate with Google Analytics, so you can import your video analytics into your GA dashboard.
StreamingVideoProvider also has excellent customer support. All plans include live chat and email support, and some plans include phone support and/or a dedicated account manager.
Compare that to Brightcove, which only offers email support on both its Starter and Professional plans (phone and live chat support are available as an optional upgrade on the Professional plan but not on the Starter plan).
5. Streamable
Are you looking for a free Brightcove alternative? While free alternatives won’t come with as many advanced features as Brightcove, there are plenty of options available, and Streamable is one of them.
Designed for independent creators and businesses, Streamable is a video hosting platform that comes with several editing tools built in.
You can upload videos that are up to 10 minutes long and have a file size of up to 250 MB for free. You can edit, resize, trim, and rotate your videos before publishing them.
If you need to upload videos that are larger or longer, or if you’d like to remove ads from your videos, you can sign up for a free trial for one of the premium plans. See updated pricing here.
6. IBM Cloud Video
IBM Cloud Video is the perfect alternative to Brightcove if you need extensive and professional video storage and streaming service with better customer support.
IBM Cloud Video has transparent pricing and starts at half the price of Brightcove (see updated pricing here). All of IBM Cloud Video’s plans come not only with chat support but phone support – you can actually talk to a real person on the phone, even during your free trial.
It allows you to host videos for on-demand viewing and stream them live. In both types of videos, you can embed forms within the video player for lead generation.
You’ll be able to see which content leads are viewed to help you determine which topics generate the most leads.
IBM Cloud Video makes it easy to engage viewers during live events by setting up chat rooms where people can talk with each other. Brightcove does integrate with Chatroll for similar purposes, but you’ll need a separate subscription.
Furthermore, you can engage viewers during live events by setting up interactive polls at strategic times, thus ensuring you receive accurate feedback. You can also add clickable ad overlays to videos.
There are a few ways to monetize your videos. You can make money from a pay-per-view model, charging subscribers for the right to view your videos.
Alternatively, you can offer membership options instead of pay-per-view. Another way to make money is to put ads in your videos.
When streaming videos live, you can stream them to multiple channels. One thing that makes IBM unique is that it offers event management solutions to reduce the risks that come with holding live virtual events.
Furthermore, it can offer production support through its partners all around the world. In other words, you can have a video production crew come down, in person, to provide on-site support and help you in your video campaigns.
Not only that, but you can even receive post-production support in the form of promotional, marketing, and product launch support.
7. Dacast
Dacast is a Brightcove alternative geared more towards small businesses than those needing enterprise-level solutions.
At the same time, it received much better reviews on the review site G2. Reviewers felt that Dacast better met their needs, and they also felt that the customer support at Dacast was better than at Brightcove.
Furthermore, Dacast scored better when it came to ease of setup, ease of use, and ease of administration. So, if you feel like Brightcove isn’t intuitive enough, Dacast is bound to be a better choice.
Brightcove might be a larger company than Dacast, but that doesn’t mean it’s better.
Dacast allows you to host videos for on-demand viewing as well as host live virtual events over video.
There are a couple of ways to monetize videos. Lock videos behind a paywall and only allow customers who pay for them (pay-per-view) or who have an ongoing subscription to access them.
You can set promo codes and flexible subscription options, including both monthly and weekly subscriptions, and serve customers all over the world with a paywall that comes with a dynamic currency converter – regardless of which country the viewer is in, they will see pricing in their currency.
A total of 135 currencies are supported, as are 10 languages.
One pay-per-view option is to allow customers to pay once for multiple videos instead of paying for each video separately.
You can discard pricing altogether and monetize your videos with ads instead of hiding them behind a paywall.
You can broadcast in full HD 1080p resolution. The HTML5 player ensures your videos show up correctly on mobile phones and tablets, and you can white-label the interface and customize it to match your brand.
You can even use the special embed code to embed your videos on web pages.
Dacast’s support team is available 24/7 to help you, at any time of the day or night. That’s opposed to Brightcove, which limits support to regular business hours (except for urgent problems, in which case the wait time depends on your plan).
Nonprofits and churches can also use Dacast. In fact, Dacast is often used by churches to stream their services over the internet in real time.
Pricing is very affordable for what you get, with plans starting at just $39/month (billed annually), which gives you 24/7 customer support, unlimited concurrent viewing, live streaming, video hosting, and more. Always check the pricing page for updated pricing details – right now, a 30-day free trial is available.
Also Read: Best Vidnami Alternatives
8. Vadoo
Vadoo is a Brightcove alternative for those with limited needs who would like a platform that offers a free plan.
Using Vadoo, you can upload and host videos, with an easy-to-use video player and a customizable, white label video portal. Whether you can remove Vadoo’s branding does depend on the plan you get.
Vadoo is simple and intuitive. It’s not confusing to use like Brightcove, although it doesn’t have as many advanced features, either.
Still, if your company doesn’t need all of Brightcove’s features, Vadoo is perfect for you. You’ll enjoy interactive video tools and video analytics, with up to 10 TB of hosting storage available, depending on your plan.
Not only can you brand the video player, but you can customize it in other ways, too. For example, you can add speed controls or remove the play bar – making the video player your own.
You can also protect your videos with a password to ensure only those they are intended for can watch them.
There’s another feature that makes Vadoo unique – the video chat bubble feature. It allows you to add a video chat bubble to the corner of your website.
It’s a great alternative to standard chat bubbles you see across the web, as it allows you to share a message in a video format. It can be a lot more powerful and personal than a text chat bubble, and you can use it for support purposes, training, and more.
Vadoo is also great for creating video landing pages. Landing pages with videos tend to convert better.
Not only that, but you can send those landing pages in your promotional emails, including a preview of your video as a GIF. That can lead to a higher click-through rate and increased conversions from your email campaigns.
Using Vadoo’s Screen Recorder, you can quickly record your screen, webcam, or both at the same time. Then, you can edit your videos by adding arrows and other annotations and save them locally to your device or to the cloud.
Besides being a video hosting platform, Vadoo also allows you to record and create podcasts. You can upload your podcast to the web, create podcast pages, or share your podcast to podcast streaming platforms like Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, and many others.
Vadoo’s free plan is free forever – it’s not a time-limited trial. At the same time, it limits you to 10 videos and 1 GB of storage, which is something, but not much.
However, premium plans start at just $10/month (or $8/month with yearly billing), which is just a mere fraction of what Brightcove charges. Take a look at their pricing page for updated pricing data.
9. JW Player
JW Player is a flexible video platform with flexible pricing. According to JW Player, nine out of 10 companies rate JW Player higher than other video platforms, though coming from JW Player, that statistic is probably a little biased.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that JW Player is an awesome platform. You can host your videos using JW Player’s security features to protect your videos.
The beautiful video player and CDN ensure your viewers enjoy the best possible experience. With smart content matching and recommendations, you can keep your viewers engaged while they watch and increase conversions.
Using JW Player’s monetization features, you can add a wide range of advertisements from different sources to your videos, earning revenue on multiple platforms. Header bidding built into the player ensures you maximize your revenue.
JW Player is just $10/month. That gives you access to most of the features, though you’ll be missing out on some tools, like real time analytics, Android SDKs, a self-hosted player, live event streaming, and more.
If you need more features, you can get the Enterprise plan. Again, as I mentioned, pricing is very flexible here, so you’ll pay according to your needs.
Remember that a free trial is also available and it will allow you to enjoy most of the Enterprise plan features at no cost. The trial lasts for 30 days.
As always, check the pricing page for updated information.
10. Flowplayer
Flowplayer calls itself the smallest and most flexible online video player. Despite that, it comes with a huge range of awesome features that businesses of all sizes, as well as entrepreneurs, can enjoy.
The “small” part refers to the video player, which is designed to be beautiful but minimalistic, with a focus on keeping things simple and improving the user experience. If you like minimalism, Flowplayer is the Brightcove alternative for you.
Flowplayer is good not just for hosting but for live streaming, too. You can go live with just a click, but consider scheduling a countdown beforehand to increase excitement and build up to your virtual event.
One cool feature you’ll probably like is the ability to take video clips while holding a virtual event. You can then save those video clips for later; viewers of the live event will also be able to rewind and rewatch the event as needed.
With real-time analytics, you can see viewer analytics as the stream is ongoing.
You can add advertisements to your videos and keep 100 percent of the profits. There is support for Google DFP, Google IMA, AdX, and others.
So, how much does Flowplayer cost? The Starter plan is $49/month, but it includes a whopping 500 GB of streaming, 160 minutes per video, and 50,000 plays.
If you require more than that, you can sign up for a custom Enterprise plan.
All in all, Flowplayer is a good option if you want to go for a minimalist video player and a platform that is cheaper and more user-friendly than Brightcove.
According to SimilarTech, Flowplayer is also used by businesses in a wider range of niches than Brightcove.
Wrapping It Up: What Is The Best Brightcove Alternative?
I recommend Kaltura, as it matches Brightcove in terms of features but without the high and secretive pricing and with better analytics. You can host, stream, and monetize videos, and a lot more.
