Have you ever waited for a taxi during a rainstorm?
Imagine you don’t have an umbrella. You’re holding a suitcase. You plan out your strategy: Run to the back of the car, pop the trunk to throw in your bag, and open the left side door simultaneously. You design the perfect getaway. But then reality hits. You trip on the sidewalk. It takes a full minute for the driver to unlock the trunk. By the time you get in the car, you’re drenched. And the worst part? You could’ve avoided all of it with an umbrella. The lesson? Tools matter.
Sometimes, we have several tools and methods available to improve our workflow. But only one can meet our needs and do it well.
Loom and Vimeo often end up on the shortlist when it comes to video platforms for teams, sales prospecting, and essential communications.
How do you decide between the two?
Soon, you’ll know how each video platform works, their strengths and weaknesses, and which works best for you. Let’s dive in as we compare Loom and Vimeo.
What is Loom?
Loom allows professionals to record and share quick video messages with their team, customers, and others for maximum productivity.
The recording tool makes asynchronous communication (the ability to communicate without needing live meetings) possible.
Loom is built for high-quality collaboration as team members, customers, and partners work together. A professional can record a video, use AI to improve it, and send it quickly. After the viewer watches it, they can add feedback, notes, and other communication to move your projects forward.
What is Vimeo?
Vimeo is a platform to create, publish and share high-quality videos. It functions similarly to a social platform like YouTube, but with enhanced tools and features.
Vimeo offers great editing features, AI automation, and social clickable elements.
The platform is an excellent choice for creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses that want to communicate their brand message online.
While both Loom and Vimeo have great video options, the two platforms serve different purposes depending on your needs. The following section analyzes their key features.
Loom vs. Vimeo: Comparing video platforms
For some context, here is a summary of each video platform:
Loom: It’s designed for quick, concise, and asynchronous video messaging. It is ideal for teams that value efficiency and prefer conveying messages visually. It’s well-suited for teamwork in remote or distributed work settings. Loom also offers special features to support customer and prospect-facing communication.
Vimeo: It offers a broader spectrum of functionality for hosting and sharing high-quality content. It’s ideal for content creators, marketers, and businesses looking for a comprehensive video platform to showcase their products or services on social media and online.
1. Screen recording
Both Loom and Vimeo have screen recording capabilities. Users can record themselves and their screen while presenting.
Vimeo has post-publishing features like video trimming, transcripts, forms and cards embedded within the videos, and more.
With Loom, however, screen recording has more collaboration features and multiple advantages. For example, someone can record a reply with a quick click of a button for a fully asynchronous collaboration process.
Loom’s screen recording software is designed to be fast and easy so that you can send many video messages during your daily workflow.
2. Video editing and hosting
Loom and Vimeo offer trimming and editing features to make changes after hitting the record button. Both platforms can remove filler words with AI editing tools—but while Vimeo is a manual text-editing-based process, Loom’s filler removal is automatic, which is a big time saver.
Vimeo is a great option for video hosting to expand reach and provide accessible high-quality videos to a wide audience. Loom hosts your video messages as well, with control over how you want to distribute videos to the right people (like embedding on a site or sending to an individual).
3. Integrations
Loom offers many integrations for top apps like Zoom, Salesforce, Gmail, Slack, Zendesk, and more. Its videos are also easily added to all platforms that allow embeds, like Notion and Medium. In short, you can communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Vimeo also provides integrations with tools like Asana, Figma, and Zoom.
4. Customer support
Loom provides many resources through its help center and troubleshooting pages. The platform also assists users with in-app support.
In the image above, you can see how easy it is for a Loom user to get help as soon as they have a question.
Vimeo has a help center that offers self-learning resources. Users can also contact support through a contact form.
5. Pricing
Loom starts with a free plan. You can record 25 videos at a max of five minutes each. It includes core features like screen recording, unlimited transcripts, team workspace, and more. Users also have access to a trial of the paid tier—which is $12.50 monthly per user—to enjoy even more features and videos.
Vimeo also starts free. The starter package is $20 monthly, with higher-tier packages at $33 and $108. The free version only lets you make three videos (it’s enough to try the platform but difficult to test drive your workflow). It includes creation and editing tools, screen recording, and sharing features.
When comparing the free plan and paid options of each platform, Loom offers a much more scalable and budget-friendly solution.
When to use Loom
Loom is a communication tool to send efficient video messages to your team, customers, and partners. It equips users with powerful collaboration features to work on projects, provide feedback, and experience natural communication.
Loom helps eliminate and replace synchronous communication (live meetings) with asynchronous videos. Not only can users reduce the number of live meetings, but they can also make the meetings they do have more productive. When users send videos beforehand, it adds the necessary context to initiate immediate focus when they meet.
Teams can use Loom for the following use cases:
Quick and easy screen recordings
You can hit record through a Chrome extension or on the Loom app and present right away. Loom can record your screen and your face simultaneously as you speak. Then, you can share the recording as soon as you’re done.
Since it’s so fast and easy to send a Loom video, you’ll save time immediately. When someone asks a question, or you need to walk someone through a situation, instead of scheduling a call and meeting for 30 minutes or more, you can send a quick five-minute video as a response.
Collaborative video projects
Instead of waiting days for answers, you can kick off a collaborative process with Loom. You can send a video to explain a design, presentation, or whatever work you need to discuss. Users can use drawing tools and add call-to-action prompts. Viewers can add comments and respond to the video.
This speeds up collaborative projects and helps move everything down the pipeline.
Video tutorials
No one beats Loom at video tutorials. You simply hit record, and you can walk through an entire platform or presentation in minutes. You can clearly communicate how to use your product while showcasing its value.
Loom makes sharing just as easy with a quick link, embed, or invite.
When to use Vimeo
Vimeo is a great platform for high-resolution video creation and hosting. It’s also its own social network as users share videos, comment, and connect.
If you like to create quality footage and build out a page for visitors to see your videos, Vimeo is a great choice. The platform also has screen-sharing capabilities to easily communicate with fans, customers, and target audience members.
Video hosting
Vimeo has generous hosting plans for high-quality videos included in its packages (from 60 to 500 videos on paid plans).
No ads
Unlike platforms like YouTube, Vimeo doesn’t distract viewers with ads. They can enjoy your content the way you intended it to be seen.
Earn
Creators can earn income from videos. But unlike generating revenue from ads, video makers can do so through subscriptions and live events. This is a great option for the creator economy and those wanting to build a business out of their interests.
Social
Videos are discoverable and searchable, increasing your marketing reach to native Vimeo users.
Loom vs. Vimeo: How to choose your video platform
Loom and Vimeo have overlapping features as well as unique strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, the determining factor depends on your needs.
Vimeo might be the right tool for you if you want to host videos that reach a broad audience and convey effective, branded video marketing. However, if you want to increase productivity and sales through video messages and asynchronous communication, Loom is the best fit.
Loom’s focus is video messages. That means you get the best and latest features focused entirely on your virtual communication. Unlike Vimeo, which offers a broad range of solutions, Loom provides the best communication solution for asynchronous messages—and it shows. TrustRadius scores Loom an impressive 9.1 out of 10, compared to the 7.7 it awarded Vimeo.
With Loom’s free plan, you can start recording high-quality video today. You can experience the power of video messaging first-hand and experience real results without spending a cent. Record today and see how Loom could be the right fit for you.