Vouch bills itself as a platform for asynchronous video communication, including its ability to capture video testimonials. Its main strength lies in its ability to capture video quickly and efficiently.
But Vouch is not the only testimonial collection platform on the market, and other solutions like our own — Vocal Video — make the process of producing “professional-style” video testimonials and displaying testimonials easier, faster, and more authentic.
For example, while Vouch gives you a basic set of tools for editing the videos you collect, Vocal Video edits your videos automatically by inserting music, text overlays, animations, motion graphics, and your branding, so you can collect professional-looking testimonials and share them with just a few clicks.
Here, we discuss the ins and outs of Vouch and compare it to Vocal Video in-depth. Overall, we’ll look at seven Vouch alternatives, including:
If you’re ready to start gathering authentic social proof of the value of your business, create a free Vocal Video account today.
How to Build Testimonial Libraries with Vouch
The goal for most Vouch users is to build a library of testimonial and review videos that are easy to share with their team at every point in their workflow.
With Vouch, you start by creating a “campaign” (the equivalent of our Video Collector) from scratch or using Vouch’s templates.
To set up your campaign, Vouch prompts you to record a welcome video for your customers, write a message, and come up with the questions you want people to answer in their testimonials.
Once your questions are in place, you make some decisions about how you want the finished videos to look.
For example, a nice touch from Vouch is that you can decide whether you want respondents to record their face or their screen. For some businesses, a screen-based testimonial can show how easy it is to use a piece of software or how smooth the booking process is. Vouch also lets you set the aspect ratio for the videos, telling the customer whether they’re recording a 16:9 landscape video for a website or a portrait video for a Reel or TikTok.
After you set these parameters, you brand your Vouch campaign by choosing your colors and adding your logo.
And when you’re happy, you generate a URL or QR code to send to your customers by email or SMS, add to your website, or post on social media and LinkedIn. Vouch also lets you embed a button on your website to take your customers to your campaign recorder at any time.
When a respondent records a testimonial with Vouch, it’s sent to your library. From there, you can add the videos to a playlist, share them directly to Twitter, download them, or send them to another management system where you work with your team — including CRM and marketing automation systems like HubSpot and Salesforce. Vouch also has a built-in tracking system to measure views, downloads, and shares once your videos go live.
The Drawbacks of Vouch
Vouch video has some solid features for companies who want a general purpose asynchronous video communication platform that can also be used to capture testimonials. But there are some things that Vouch could do better, and some points of friction for both the organization collecting testimonials and the people responding.
Vouch encourages the people recording testimonials to stick to a time limit and make notes to help them stay on message. It’s important to get a good take because, once the video is sent to the library, the editing features are limited to trimming and transcription. You can use a slider tool to cut the beginning and end of the clip. You can shuffle the order of the responses. If you have a paid plan, you can make corrections to the transcription.
Vouch’s limited editing tools mean that you can’t make changes to the middle of each clip and you can’t adjust the volume if you’re creating a highlight video with multiple speakers. Unfortunately, this means that you might have to discard some of the responses you collect through Vouch or download the videos to another editing platform to get the results you want.
This can also create an additional problem if you want to build a large video library using Vouch because even their paid “starter plan” pricing only allows three downloads per month. If you have to download every video to run it through an external editing program, you’ll burn through this allowance very quickly.
Vouch’s Free Features Are Limited
At the time of writing, Vouch only offers a 14-day free trial of its starter plan. Once the trial runs out, their free plan only includes one campaign, which you’ll have to build without access to the custom branding features. The free plan also lacks some of the integrations (Dropbox, Google Drive, and Salesforce) that make Vouch attractive to marketing teams.
Vocal Video: A Better Choice for Video Collection and Sharing
Compared to Vouch, Vocal Video has some clear advantages for both the people asking for testimonials and the people who record and send them. Even if you’ve never recorded or edited video before, you can get high-quality, high-converting testimonials from Vocal Video quickly and with very little effort.
Let’s look at the features that make it possible.
46 Industry-Specific Templates to Choose From
If you don’t want to create your Video Collector from scratch, Vocal Video gives you a choice of 46 templates. Vouch only gives you 20 templates, and more than half of those are designed for recruitment or internal communications rather than customer references and feedback.
Each of Vocal Video’s templates includes suggested questions to help respondents reflect on how you’ve helped them. The result is a testimonial that speaks to the needs of your wider audience and really makes a connection.
We also organize our templates by industry, which makes it easy to find one that reflects the way your customers use your product or service.
Proven Three-Step Email Process
Once you’ve built your collector, Vocal Video recommends using a three-touch email sequence to ask your customers to record their stories. You can adapt the sequence and example texts to your product, incentives, and the questions in your Video Collector.
- Pre-ask. Start by suggesting the idea of recording a testimonial and thanking your customer for their time. This first message should also explain how easy the process will be and how long it will take.
- Introduce. Here, you send the link to your collector, explain how it works, and introduce the questions. This is also the time to explain why you’re looking for testimonials in more depth and introduce any incentives you’re offering.
- Remind. The final step is to resend the link to customers who haven’t recorded their testimonials yet. Remind them how quick the process is and offer to answer any questions they have.
We’ve found that adding this structured request strategy to your email marketing increases the number of responses (and therefore videos) that our users receive. Whereas Vouch has a simple “auto remind” feature, which sends their customers a second prompt if they don’t record a video within two days, this email sequence gives you the time to persuade your respondents by making them feel confident and comfortable in using Vocal Video.
Videos Edited Automagically
When a customer submits a testimonial on Vocal Video, we automatically edit it together with question cards, text overlays, animations, motion graphics, your branding, and music. This means that every video lands in your library looking professional, polished, and ready to share without any additional work from you. The animations, transitions, fonts, and music are decided by the theme you choose in your default video settings. We call this automagic editing.
You can see these features in action in this review video from Gagan Sethi at Clari:
If you want to make any changes to the testimonial, our manual editing features also give you control over how the finished product looks and sounds, and they’re easy and intuitive to use. You’ll be able to:
- Change the font in the text overlays by selecting a new theme — Pro users can choose from four additional themes.
- Choose a new color scheme.
- Switch the order of the clips or insert more clips.
- Use slider tools to change the length of the video.
- Change the music, fade it out, and normalize the volume across multiple speakers.
- Edit the text for the closed captions and transcript to use the keywords in your SEO strategy (unlike Vouch, you can do this even with our free plan too).
- Crop the video to suit square, portrait, or landscape format.
- Rewrite the video title, description, and URL.
More Options for Video Embeds
One of the best features of Vocal Video is the variety of options for showing your website visitors the testimonials you collect. While Vouch lets you create video cards to embed in your website in one of eight ways, it’s limited to one video at a time.
Vocal Video gives you more control over how every video looks and more ways to display them. You can embed videos in your website just by copying and pasting the code that we generate for you. Every video card also includes the option to highlight an eye-catching quote from the transcript, which encourages people to watch.
You can show off your Vocal Video testimonials in a wall of love, slideshow, grid, or list gallery, or in a carousel.
You can also collect analytics from your embeds to help you plan your strategy for the future.
Kiosk Mode to Collect Testimonials at Events and Conferences
For Pro and Enterprise users, Kiosk Mode is another feature that gives Vocal Video an edge when it comes to versatility. Kiosk Mode lets you capture video testimonials one after another on the same mobile device or laptop. When one respondent has finished, they tap “done” and the screen returns to the first page of the Video Collector, ready for the next user.
Kiosk Mode is perfect for capturing the atmosphere of large events in highlight reels. These testimonials can have a completely different feel to videos created after the event, as you can see in these event promo videos from the American Lighting Association.
Find out how easy it is to collect and share high-quality video testimonials using Vocal Video. Sign up for a free account and start building your first Video Collector today.
6 More Vouch Alternatives for Collecting Testimonials
VideoPeel
VideoPeel captures user-generated content from desktop or mobile devices. Designed for everything from collecting reviews for e-commerce companies to interviews for recruiters, this platform has one of the longest lists of use cases around.
But although VideoPeel inspires its users with a long list of options, the customization features for these different video styles are quite limited. You can add a logo, disclaimer, or text overlay, but to trim shots, add music, or adjust the sound, you’d have to download the video to a separate editing platform and work on it there. Although Video Peel makes it easy for respondents to record a video, this extra step can complicate the process for the person collecting the testimonials.
Read more about VideoPeel and its alternatives.
VideoAsk
VideoAsk is a platform for “video conversations.” Instead of starting an email chain, you use asynchronous video to send messages back and forth. It’s well-suited for communicating with your sales leads or getting customer feedback because of the personalized feel of video messages. You might also find that you get more useful information from video survey responses than from written ones because the respondent has more space to explain the nuances of their opinion.
But as a way of gathering testimonials, VideoAsk is cumbersome because it isn’t real-time. Instead of seeing the questions written down, the respondent will have to take note of multiple questions from a video message or answer questions one at a time, potentially over hours or days. Compared to Vocal Video, collecting testimonials with VideoAsk is a slow process with a lot of potential for friction, which can impact the quality and usefulness of the testimonial you end up with.
Read an in-depth analysis of VideoAsk’s features.
StoryPrompt
StoryPrompt lets you create “prompts” for testimonial collection from scratch or with a template. Once you have a URL for your prompt, you can send it to your mailing list, leads, or social media profiles. You can turn the video responses you receive into highlight mixes to share. StoryPrompt also gives you the code to embed these mixes on your website.
Although testimonial collection is a feature of StoryPrompt, it also focuses on community-building features aimed at influencers or startups who want to monetize the following they’ve built around a brand. For example, its subscribers can create “spaces'' where they have asynchronous video chats and it also offers “campfires'' for live discussions. For a lot of businesses looking to gather user-generated content to boost their marketing strategy, these features are irrelevant.
Testimonial.io
Testimonial.io is good at collecting video and written testimonials to share with your audience. Once you receive enough content from your users, this platform makes it easy to embed a wall of love on your website.
But like many Vocal Video alternatives, Testimonial.io’s editing suite is pretty weak. Although this platform speeds up the process of collecting reviews, getting the videos ready for publication can take a lot of time, effort, and external software, which is not ideal if testimonials are only a small part of your marketing strategy.
The other drawback of Testimonial.io is that the customer will always have the option of sending a text rather than a video review. If your goal is to build a highlight reel, video carousel, or gallery for your site, it might take longer to gather enough material to populate it.
Check out a full rundown of how Testimonial.io compares to Vocal Video.
Bonjoro
Like VideoAsk, Bonjoro is a SaaS platform designed to send personalized messages to your sales funnel to boost conversion rates. It even integrates with a selection of sales and marketing platforms to make this easier. As well as video messaging, Bonjoro has a testimonials feature. Here, you generate a URL to take your customers to a recorder where they can leave either video or written testimonials.
Like Testimonial.io, Bonjoro is a good option if you want to add a wall of love to your website. But compared to Vocal Video’s gallery options for carousels, slideshows, video lists, and embedded video cards, you don’t have as many options for displaying the content your users share.
Boast.io
Boast.io is a place to collect and manage reviews and customer stories. It primarily uses forms to collect information, but respondents can also add video testimonials, and you can share these reviews to your website using a widget.
The downside of Boast.io is that you don’t get a lot of influence over what your customers say because you don’t set questions like you do on platforms like Vocal Video and Vouch. Boast.io is focused on reviews, rather than testimonials, so while it gives you a lot of useful information for improving your product, the videos and survey responses might not be quite as useful for your marketing department. What’s more, the videos you get from Boast.io are completely raw, with no branding, text overlay, or subtitles.
Read more about the benefits and drawbacks of Boast.io.
Collecting Professional-Looking Testimonials Is Easy with Vocal Video
Vouch gives you most of what you need to start collecting testimonials as part of your marketing strategy. But if you want maximum control over the way your videos look with minimum effort, Vocal Video’s editing and embedding features are far more versatile.
Vocal Video gives you all the tools you need to:
- Build and share a user-friendly Video Collector that gets authentic responses.
- Ask for testimonials in a way that makes your customers want to join in.
- Edit quickly and easily to create high-quality, ready-to-share videos.
- Add your videos to your website with plenty of options for testimonial galleries to share with your audience.
Find out how easy it is to collect and share high-quality video testimonials using Vocal Video. Sign up for a free account and start building your first Video Collector today.