The Best Video Hosting Sites for Your Marketing Videos

Your new brand film is finished, and it looks awesome. Cake all round, please.

Your production company should now be handing over an array of finished files. There might be different versions for social media, web-friendly exports, perhaps subtitled or international versions and, of course, the big fat master file that you’ll probably download once and then be slightly terrified of accidentally deleting. But there’s one final decision to make. You have aspirations for your shiny new hero film to take pride of place on the website. Great. But where does the video itself actually live? Or, to use the more technical term, where will it be hosted?

You could stick it on YouTube and call it a day. And, in plenty of cases, that’s absolutely the right answer. But there are dozens of video hosting sites to choose from, ranging from familiar names such as YouTube and Vimeo to dedicated marketing platforms like Wistia and highly specialised enterprise systems.

The video hosting platform you choose can affect how your film looks on your website, how quickly and reliably it plays, what you learn about the people watching it, whether viewers can discover it organically, how securely you can share it and even what happens after somebody presses play.

So, which video hosting site is the best?

Annoyingly, there’s no single winner. For most marketing teams, it comes down to what you actually want the finished film to achieve. YouTube is difficult to beat for reach and discovery. Vimeo and FrameRate give you much more control over presentation. SproutVideo is particularly strong where privacy matters, while Wistia can turn video viewing into genuinely useful marketing data.

We’ve worked with all of these platforms, and plenty more besides, so we’ve put together this guide as a practical starting point for choosing where your finished film should live.

Cake eaten? Good. Let’s get into it.

What is video hosting?

Before we start comparing platforms, a quick explanation of what we’re actually talking about.

At its simplest, video hosting means storing your video on a service that can deliver it to people online. But a proper video hosting platform does considerably more than find somewhere on the internet to keep your MP4.

When you upload your finished master, the platform will normally process and encode it into different resolutions and formats. When somebody presses play, it can then serve an appropriate version depending on their device, screen and internet connection. It also provides the player, deals with the bandwidth and gives you the code needed to embed that player on your website.

More sophisticated video hosting sites pile additional features on top, including analytics, captions, privacy controls, lead capture, custom branding and integrations with your wider marketing stack.

In other words, you’re not really paying someone to look after a video file. You’re paying them to make sure it reaches your audience properly.

What platforms are best for hosting video?

It depends entirely on what you need your film to do, but for most marketing teams we’d narrow the field down fairly quickly.

That’s the cheat sheet. Now let’s get into what you’re actually getting from each of them.

YouTube: Best for reach and discoverability

Let’s start with the obvious one.

YouTube is slightly different from almost every other video hosting site in this guide because it isn’t really just a video host. It’s a distribution platform in its own right.

Upload a public film to YouTube and it can appear in YouTube search, recommendations and Google search results. People can subscribe to your channel, share the film and discover it without ever having heard of your company before.

Oh, and it’s free. That’s quite a compelling feature.

If you’ve commissioned an explainer, documentary, customer story, interview, thought-leadership series or another piece of genuinely useful content, YouTube gives that investment a chance to find an audience beyond the people already visiting your website.

YouTube also takes care of the boring technical stuff for you. Upload a high-quality master and it’ll create the different versions required for different devices and connections, then handle all the bandwidth when people watch it.

So why wouldn’t you use YouTube for everything?

Control, mainly. Embed a YouTube film on your beautifully designed new homepage and it’s still a YouTube player. You’re inviting a third-party consumer platform into an environment you’ve otherwise spent considerable time controlling.

YouTube’s wider purpose is also to keep people watching YouTube. Your purpose might be to make them read about your product, book a demo or get in touch. Those two objectives aren’t always perfectly aligned.

Its analytics are excellent for understanding content performance. You can see views, watch time, audience retention, traffic sources, geography and plenty more through YouTube Studio.

What YouTube isn’t primarily designed to tell your marketing team is that a particular prospect watched 92% of your customer story after arriving through last week’s email campaign. We’ll get to a platform that’s rather interested in that shortly.

Our verdict: YouTube is difficult to beat when you want people to find your video. We’d rarely ignore it completely for useful public-facing content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be the player embedded on your website.

Vimeo: Best all-round professional video hosting

If YouTube is the obvious answer to “where can we publish this?”, Vimeo is probably the obvious answer to “where can we host this nicely?” For many marketing teams, that’s enough.

Vimeo gives you a clean, ad-free player with much greater control over how your video appears when embedded into your website. Depending on your plan, you can customise the player, control where videos can be embedded, manage privacy and access engagement analytics.

The important difference is philosophical. You’re not really uploading your film to Vimeo because you hope millions of people will stumble across it on Vimeo. You’re using Vimeo to deliver the film beautifully somewhere else.

Where does Vimeo make sense?

Imagine you’ve commissioned a 90-second hero film for your new website.

You’re driving people to that page through search, paid advertising, PR, social media or existing marketing activity. Once they arrive, you want them to watch the film without adverts, recommendations or unnecessary distractions. That’s Vimeo’s sweet spot.

Its analytics also let you get beyond simple play counts and look at things such as watch time, retention and completion, which is useful when you’re trying to work out whether people are actually watching the beautiful film you’ve just spent all that money making.

Our verdict: If you want a polished, professional website embed without turning video hosting into another major technology project, Vimeo remains a very sensible default.

SproutVideo: Best for privacy and control

SproutVideo is where things start getting a little more serious.

It offers the polished, ad-free hosting you’d expect from a professional video hosting platform, but puts much greater emphasis on controlling who can actually watch your content.

Depending on your plan, those controls can include password protection, domain restrictions, viewer login protection, dynamic watermarks, IP restrictions and geographic restrictions.

That might sound excessive if all you’re doing is putting your latest brand film on the homepage. In other situations, it’s exactly what you need.

Perhaps your usage rights only cover particular territories. Maybe you’re creating films for distributors, partners or employees rather than the general public. You might have investor communications, training material or pre-launch product content that absolutely shouldn’t appear publicly.

“We’ll just make the YouTube link unlisted” suddenly starts looking a little flimsy.

There’s marketing functionality too

SproutVideo isn’t simply a digital Fort Knox for your corporate films.

It also offers engagement heatmaps, individual viewer tracking, lead capture, in-player calls to action and integrations with wider marketing tools. That puts it somewhere between Vimeo’s straightforward professional hosting and the much more marketing-led approach of Wistia.

Our verdict: Look seriously at SproutVideo when privacy, access control or secure distribution matter. For ordinary public-facing website films it may be more than you need, but for controlled content those extra tools can quickly become very useful.

Wistia: Best for marketers who want to know who’s watching

This is where the conversation changes. Wistia isn’t really interested in video simply being something pretty that sits on your website. It treats somebody pressing play as a marketing interaction.

That makes it particularly interesting when your film sits inside a lead-generation campaign, product page or measurable customer journey.

Wistia can tell you how people engage with individual videos, including how much they watched, where they stopped and which sections they returned to. Depending on your setup, that information can also be connected to individual identified viewers.

Why would you want to know that?

Let’s say you’ve produced three customer case-study films.

Prospect A lands on your website, presses play and leaves eight seconds later.

Prospect B watches 95% of one case study, then watches another one all the way through.

Google Analytics might tell you that both people visited the website. Wistia can help expose the fact that one of them appears considerably more interested in what you’re selling.

Connect that information into platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo or Pardot and video engagement can potentially contribute to lead scoring and follow-up activity.

Suddenly your film isn’t just a nice thing sitting halfway down a web page. It’s generating useful intent data. There’s an obvious caveat.

If nobody is ever going to look at that information, don’t pay extra for it.

More analytics do not magically create better marketing. Wistia becomes valuable when your team has a plan for using what it tells you.

Our verdict: Wistia is one of the most interesting video hosting sites for marketing teams using video actively within their funnel. If your only requirement is “make this play on our homepage”, you’re probably paying for capabilities you’ll never touch.

FrameRate: Best for creative presentation

FrameRate is probably the name on this list you’re least likely to have encountered. It’s also a rather interesting one.

Where Wistia keeps asking what your viewer did after pressing play, FrameRate is much more interested in making sure the thing they pressed play on looks lovely.

That makes it particularly appealing for design-led organisations, agencies, architects, production companies and other businesses where the quality of the work itself is part of what they’re selling.

Its paid plans offer extensive player customisation, including colours, gradients, logos, control-bar appearance and control over precisely which playback options are visible. Videos can autoplay, loop and operate as background video, while presets allow you to maintain a consistent presentation across different films.

You can also restrict embeds to particular domains, so a video can be authorised to play on your website without being freely embedded elsewhere.

Why choose it over Vimeo?

For most marketers, Vimeo is undoubtedly the more familiar name. However, for those the industry, there’s been a bit of frustration over the performance of the platform of late. Vimeo has pivoted away from a creative showcase platform to more of a private hosting site, which is exactly what we’re talking about. However, there are reports of clunky navigation and functionality as well as eye-watering price hikes. FrameRate was created to fill the vacuum left in the creative world by Vimeo’s change of direction. 

Our verdict: FrameRate is worth putting on the shortlist if you’ve invested heavily in beautiful films and want the player surrounding them to feel equally considered.

What other video hosting sites are there besides YouTube?

Quite a few, as you’ve probably gathered by now.

But the important point is that most video hosting sites, besides YouTube, aren’t trying to be another YouTube.

YouTube is both a hosting platform and a destination. People actively visit it looking for something to watch.

Vimeo, SproutVideo, Wistia and FrameRate are much more useful to think of as services that deliver video somewhere else, usually your website, landing page, customer portal or digital product.

So if your priority is public discovery, YouTube may still be the obvious choice. If you already have the audience and want to give them a better experience when they reach you, that’s when the alternatives become considerably more interesting.

Muvi Flex and Brightcove: When video hosting becomes infrastructure

And then there’s another level entirely.

Large organisations eventually reach a point where they’re no longer asking where to host their latest brand film. They’re managing hundreds or thousands of videos across different teams, territories, websites, applications and audiences.

That’s the territory occupied by enterprise video hosting platforms such as Muvi Flex and Brightcove.

The conversation here starts involving things such as APIs, SDKs, DRM protection, adaptive streaming, geographic restrictions, dynamic watermarking, multiple applications and large-scale global distribution.

If none of those terms currently feature in meetings with your IT department, you can probably keep scrolling.

For multinational organisations operating video at significant scale, however, that infrastructure can become essential.

Our verdict: Look at Muvi Flex and Brightcove when you’re managing a video operation rather than simply a collection of marketing films. At this level, expect marketing, IT, security and procurement to all have opinions. Lucky you.

What about hosting video directly on your own website?

There is another option. You can skip a dedicated video hosting site entirely. If you’re already paying for website hosting, you can technically upload an MP4 to your own server and play it directly through an HTML5 video player.

For lightweight applications, that can make perfect sense. A short, silent background loop sitting behind the header of your homepage, for example, doesn’t necessarily need its own sophisticated video platform.

For your big fat 4K brand-film master? Please don’t.

A dedicated video hosting platform isn’t simply storing that enormous file. It’s handling encoding, bandwidth and the delivery of appropriate versions for different devices and connection speeds. Start serving substantial video files directly and those responsibilities increasingly become yours.

For substantial films that people are actively sitting down to watch, we’d generally favour a dedicated video host. For lightweight website video assets where complete control is useful, direct hosting can still be perfectly appropriate.

A few things to sort out before you press publish

Whichever video hosting platform you choose, there are a few decidedly unglamorous things worth sorting out before your shiny new film goes live.

Captions

Make sure they’re there. Captions make your film accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and useful to anybody watching somewhere they can’t, or simply don’t want to, turn the sound on.

The Thumbnail

This is the image people see before pressing play, so don’t let the platform choose whichever random frame happened to be underneath its digital finger.

You’ve just spent thousands making a film. Spend another five minutes choosing the picture advertising it.

Page Performance

A properly hosted video can still sit on a horribly slow web page.

Poster images, tracking scripts, consent tools, fonts, animations and other third-party widgets all contribute to loading performance. Test the finished page on a phone and an ordinary mobile connection, not just the suspiciously quick internet connection in your office.

What happens next?

Perhaps most importantly, decide what you’d like somebody to do after watching.

Book a demo? Get in touch? Watch another film? Read the accompanying case study? Explore the product?

Your lovely new video shouldn’t become a dead end in the middle of the customer journey.

Which video hosting site is the best?

If you’ve made it this far hoping we’d eventually crown one winner, we’re about to disappoint you.

There simply isn’t a single best video hosting site for every marketing team.

For public distribution and organic reach, we’d choose YouTube.

For a professional embedding options, we’d probably start with Vimeo.

For privacy and controlled distribution, we’d look seriously at SproutVideo.

For marketing campaigns where viewer behaviour feeds into lead generation, Wistia becomes considerably more valuable.

For creative portfolios and presentation-led websites, FrameRate is an interesting alternative.

And once the conversation involves thousands of videos, multiple applications, DRM, APIs and global distribution, it’s probably time to start talking to Muvi Flex or Brightcove.

But honestly, the answer can be more than one.

Your film can live publicly on YouTube, beautifully on your website and measurably inside your marketing funnel at the same time.

So rather than asking, “Where do we upload all our videos?”, there’s a better question to ask when that lovely new master file lands in your inbox:

What does this video need to do, and which video hosting site gives it the best chance of doing it?

Now you can have another bit of cake.