Vimeo Free or Paid—Decide What’s Best for You

If you’ve been using video for employee training, event coverage, and so on. you’ll note that it’s becoming one of the most important mediums for sharing content.

With this influx of video content creation and dissemination, questions about video hosting and storing options arise.

The most common one, of course, is YouTube. It’s free and almost everybody knows how to use it. Despite its popularity, it does have a few drawbacks, especially when it comes to achieving business objectives.

YouTube is essentially designed to keep users watching videos for hours at a time. This means that other creators’ videos will be pushed to the viewer, distracting them from engaging with your content and ultimately converting. This isn’t great if your target audience is closer to the bottom of the funnel.

Read more: How to Utilize Videos for the Buyer’s Journey

Let’s take a look at another option: Vimeo.

Vimeo offers free hosting along with paid plans to suit various needs. Paid options include Starter, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.

The platform is great if you want to keep some of your video content behind a paywall or if you want domain-level privacy.

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*Below, we’ll take a look at Vimeo Starter, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise; their features, and how much support they offer.

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Vimeo Free Plan

Free | Single user/seat | 25 video limit

Vimeo Free is great if you just want to browse other people’s content and don’t tend to upload HD videos frequently. This plan has limited editing tools and lets you upload only two videos per month. There’s also a lifetime cap of 25 videos.

If you want to upload more, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan. Vimeo also reserves the right to remove inactive accounts.

Some templates also have the Vimeo watermark on them that you can’t remove. With all the limitations in place, this plan is not suitable for businesses.

Customer support for Free users

Vimeo Free plan users can expect the first response within three business days. Follow-up responses may take longer.

Vimeo Starter

$12 per seat per month (billed annually) | 200 seats available | 60 videos per seat per year

With Vimeo Starter, you get more perks. Some of the notable ones are:

password-protected videos;
detailed analytics;
video SEO;
auto-captioning and more.

As far as limitations are concerned, the glaring ones are:

the inability to add your branding to the video player;
an absence of custom CTAs and end-cards;
a lack of lead-capture forms;
limited video templates; and
a lack of marketing integrations.

Priority support for Starter users

With Vimeo Starter, you can expect to get answers to your initial queries within four hours. Follow-up responses may take longer.

Vimeo Standard

$35 per seat per month (billed annually) | 200 seats available | 120 videos per seat per year

Vimeo Standard allows you to upload/create 120 videos per seat per month and unlocks more features

Here are some of the notable ones:

Premium templates
Branded videos and the player
Custom CTAs and end-screens
Lead capture forms
Stock sound and footage

Priority support for Standard users

With a Standard subscription, you can expect to get a response to your initial query in about two hours.

Vimeo Advanced

$55 per seat per month (billed annually) | 200 seats available | 240 videos per seat per year

Vimeo Advanced takes it up a notch by giving you access to some more powerful features and greater collaboration capability.

This membership plan gives you access to:

marketing integration;
live Q&As, polls, and chats; and
webinars and virtual events.

You can also have up to 100 attendees register via the platform for one event.

Priority support for Advanced users

Advanced accounts get the first response in an hour. Additionally, chat support is available for live events.

Vimeo Enterprise

Custom plan | 200 seats available

If your business needs aren’t met with Vimeo Advanced, you could opt for the Enterprise plan.

For this, you’ll need to contact their sales support team to figure out what sort of package will work for you and the prices will vary accordingly.

The Enterprise plan gives you:

advanced marketing integration;
interactive videos;
custom permissions;
a dedicated account manager;
production services; and
training.

Priority support for Enterprise accounts

Enterprise users have 24/7 customer support access via the contact form, and live chat (for live stream issues).

Phone support is also available. First response for calls depends on your support package and the severity of the issue.

To compare plans in detail, click here.

A word of caution

If you opt for a paid membership but end up reverting back to the Free plan, you might lose your content.

We couldn’t verify whether Vimeo will restore your videos if you upgrade to a paid plan later.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say that Vimeo Free and Starter may be fine for an individual creator or hobbyist, but when it comes to seasoned professionals or even small businesses, you may need to upgrade to Standard, or Advanced.

Read more: Should Your Business Use Videohive to Make Videos?

*Information accurate at the time of publishing