Vyond

Pros

There are several things I love about Vyond. First and foremost, I love the variety of animated stock characters you can choose from, and even better, the ability to create your own custom characters. I also love the flexibility that Vyond provides for voice overs. You can record and edit voice overs right in the app or you can use a variety of computer generated voices to read your voice over copy. The choices include a variety of male and female enhanced voices that are stunningly close to human voices. I also love that, whether I choose a human or a computer-generated voice, I can set Vyond to automatically lip sync the voice over with an on-screen character.

Cons

Two things come to mind here. First, while Vyond has an impressive set of templates in each of the three animation styles it offers, too often I needed to start a new scene from scratch because there was not a suitable template available. I know this issue will improve with time as they are always adding new templates and visual elements to the library.
The other thing that bothered me was the inability to string together more that one character animation. For example, you could not have a character give a thumbs up quickly followed by clapping their hands. It would also be nice if you could limit how many times an animation repeats itself in a scene.

Pros

Easy to use; nice tool to make high quality video

Cons

A learning curve if you want to do some fancier transitions, but it is possible and you can save and reusue the set up in later videos

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Vyond

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Vyond

Pros

This software has a lot of templates that can help you create videos quickly without starting from scratch. It seems to be well-suited for beginners to create very simple videos.

Cons

Let's start by talking about the bugs. Several times a day I encounter "video cannot be played" errors when trying to preview the changes I make while editing. Also several times I've been kicked out and told I need to log in again while in the middle of editing a video I had been working on for over an hour. When this happens, I lose all the progress I've made since my last save, which tends to be significant. I contacted customer support who told me "this is fairly common" and I needed to clear my cache, clear my cookies, AND restart my PC. I asked if they could extend my subscription or offer any form of compensation to make up for the lost time. They said they "can't" do anything of the sort.

So aside from the software bugs and poor customer service, let's dive into the problems with the features. At first glance, it almost seems like they have too many props, character action animations, and so forth. But once you begin to create videos with any level of detail or natural actions, you'll notice just how frustratingly limited it really is.

Say you want to create a scene where a character walks through a door. You'll find just two door props that have an open and close animation, but no static props of a matching door staying open. Nor will you find a wall prop to go with that door. Want your character to order a drink in a bar? There's no animation for walking while holding a drink. I've run into dozens of similar limitations of things that should be commonplace.

Pros

The animated characters and choice of scenes.

Cons

There is a 1000 word limit on a text box for narration. This means you have to split scenes sometimes.

Pros

Some aspects of it are pretty easy to use -- if you design for the tool, it's easy to use; if you design for what you want and then try to use the tool to realize your design, it can be quite a bit trickier. I like that there's a decent built-in library of characters and actions and that the characters will appear to speak according to the audio. I did find it much easier to use, and more powerful, than our prior tool, VideoScribe (but it's also more than six times as expensive). My internal customers have been very happy with what I and others were able to create in Vyond and the whiteboard style videos were especially easy to create and publish. I also really like that Vyond has been enhancing their product...there was something that I was really wishing they had (motion pathing) when I was creating my videos last year and I've seen announcements that they've added that functionality since then. (I haven't used Vyond since the end of last year, since I've had other projects to deal with.)

Cons

The biggest con is probably the cost...it's expensive for this kind of product. I also dislike that it's subscription based...I prefer apps that you purchase up front (maybe paying a bit extra for a maintenance contract to allow for upgrades). In terms of functionality, one problem is that you can't make a single video file with more than ~100 scenes (if you're using one of the non-whiteboard styles) or you'll start having problems with previewing it. You have to break it into two separate videos (which isn't easy) and then knit the published mp4 files together to make it back into one video. Given this, the product should include a little video splitter/joiner utility (instead of directing folks to use a piece of freeware, which my company won't allow us to do). I also have a laundry list of improvements that Vyond could make to their product to make it even better....for example, it desperately need visibility toggles - can't get it to stop selecting stuff I don't want when working with other stuff that's near it and it also really needs to give the user some way to see layers - can't easily move things to the right layer when there are a ton of objects in the scene. There are also no views of characters from the back -- you can sometimes "fake" this, but it's not easy with all characters/character positions. There's also no way to lock an object in position (like the bookshelves I put on the wall in the scene). I have a bunch of other suggestions, but you get the gist.