muse.ai vs. Panopto

Muse.ai offers a great option for video hosting for videos for bloggers, online content creators, course creators, coaches, online marketers, or anyone needing to host videos on a secure, fast, efficient, easy to use and affordable platform. The price is super affordable compared to other video host platforms. Muse.ai offers many features and functions for video hosting including some video player customization, public, private and embedded only video options, different sharing options and auto transcription. I have not found the automatic transcription/captions to be very accurate so I still use another program for my captions and manually upload them. (Muse.ai does offer the option to add your own captions so this is not an issue for me and only takes a couple more minutes time.)

Incentivized

The more I used it, the more I appreciated its ease of use. If I ever ran into a situation that I felt might be a learning opportunity at some point in the future, I would simply log in, record a session, and only allow access if/when it was appropriate later. Since the more recent versions also work on mobile phones, there really wasn't a time when I couldn't record something to review or present later. During covid, teachers didn't have access to their normal equipment, and students weren't always able to get access to a robust recording setup to do their recordings. Some students actually did recordings of presentations in their cars, or in the stairwells. Portability is powerful. I think that we all run into situations where our presentation didn't go quite as well as we had intended. As Panopto grew, they focused more on allowing the user to control their content and perform some basic (I would argue more than basic) editing, which made actions like awkward pauses easy to "fix" as you could create smooth, blended transitions easily.

Incentivized

• user friendly
• affordable
• excellent uptime
• good customer support

Incentivized

• It captures multiple streams simultaneous (video, desktop, audio only etc) and is pretty smart when it comes to working with imported PowerPoint Decks.
• The end product can easily be shared in multiple formats and it has pretty rich content editing abilities for doing basic post-production clean up.
• They have recently introduced an in-line quizzing feature which can integrate with your LMS's Gradebook.
• The Analytics feature is very strong - we can get student level analytics when we integrate/embed the videos into our LMS.

Incentivized

• better audio transcription
• more video player customizations

Incentivized

• Captions are always a problem for us. We would like to caption all our videos and currently, the automatic captioning is not very good.
• We would like integration with our VLE grade book to allow seamless submission and grading for students.

Incentivized

Needs some work, but I'm sure improvements will come over time

Incentivized

Panopto has been quick to answer any questions, but their rollouts and updates have caused issues where we felt a little blindsided by unexpected changes. Their development cycle is slow and often their promises for future updates have been extremely slow or never come.

Incentivized

Initially, it came down to the price. Muse.ai was $60 a year vs $200 for Vimeo. (Wistia is even more). Muse.ai may not have as many bells and whistles and options as Vimeo BUT they have everything I need for video hosting for videos on my blog, for my clients and within my member website for my online courses, classes and workshops. It is very easy to upload, customize, choose your settings and grab your embed or share links for your videos on their platform. I have only had to reach out to their customer support a couple of times, but each time I received a fast and friendly response.

Incentivized

Panopto has the best captioning features that I've seen for a video repository. This enables us to caption videos quickly and efficiently. It also has tags and chaptering which makes viewing videos easier. We can also link videos inside Panopto to outside entities without needing them to have a Panopto account. Panopto works best if you have a LOT of video content, but if you only have some or don't care about organization, SharePoint (or Microsoft Stream) might be a cheaper/more efficient option.

Incentivized

• saves me several hundred dollars annually compared to other video platforms I previously used ($140 less annually than Vimeo, for instance)
• saves me time in uploading and customizing my videos and grabbing the embed code
• so far, 100% uptime - meaning my clients and customers aren't having issues accessing content
• mobile-friendly video player, ease of use for my customers and clients who are viewing the videos

Incentivized

• During the pandemic, Panopto allows our faculty to quickly stage up lectures that were normally delivered in person, and these recordings reached thousands of students who could not come to campus for class.
• Both faculty and student report high satisfaction with the flexibility and convenience of having Panopto video content available in a course to watch and rewatch for learner reinforcement.
• Panopto's adaptable media distribution reduced impact on student technology and internet speeds when they might not have access to broadband connections, allowing them to continue to access essential course materials.
• Speech to text capabilities. increase accessibility compliance of media content.
• Archiving training materials in Panopto allows faculty, staff, TAs, and students to easily find recordings for reference.

Incentivized