TubeBuddy and VidIQ both are amazing YouTube SEO tools of 2021. Which one to go for and why? I’ll be doing a head-to-head comparison of both the flagship SEO tools enabling you to decide which best suits your needs. In this comparison article TubeBuddy vs VidIQ, we will help you in selecting the best tool.
If you are a content creator on YouTube, you are likely to search for a video marketing tool that helps you to grow your channel. You require this marketing tool to help you with a keyword, ranking, real-time suggestions, and things you need to grow in order to withstand huge competition.
With over 30 million content creators on YouTube, you want to organically grow your audience as 58% of viewers land to your video simply by YouTube search.
Background
Before taking a decision and making any investment it is necessary for some background check and understanding the tools for a better insight on which of these tools will suit your needs.
TubeBuddy
In December 2014, TubeBuddy was launched. Phil Stankovic Part of the family is the co-founder of TubeBuddy and was first responsible for the overall vision and direction of the company for 6 years. He now works on side projects and assists TubeBuddy where needed. Jim Stankovic is a co-founder and brother.
Jim is the man behind the original database and server to run TubeBuddy and also leads mobile development. Father Chuck and friend Eric also played important role in the foundation of the company.
They have been building tools for YouTube for more than 14 years but previously it was owned by Google.
Their mission is to make tools for the YouTuber community to be more productive and happier as they say being a YouTuber is tough.
VidIQ
VidIQ was founded much before in 2011 by Rob Sandie and Todd Troxell in Pennsylvania. Their main focus was not YouTube, rather on issues related to the distribution of websites but later their focus shifted to the Analytical aspect of YouTube. At Founders Den Demo Night in March 2013, VidIQ appeared. In June 2013, YouTube verified VidIQ after the website passed the YouTube certification program.
Key Features:
One of the primary focuses is to have a look at the attributes of the product to have an overall idea if it suits your need.
The blog will convey what are the attributes and functionalities TubeBuddy and VidIQ have to provide. Certainly, the product having more features is likely to grab more attention providing greater bang for the buck.
Let’s take a look at the features of TubeBuddy first.
TubeBuddy Features
TubeBuddy is on a mission to keep the YouTuber community happy and more productive.
You do not have to keep researching on the video titles and keywords anymore as TubeBuddy allows you to perform advanced keyword research better. You also do not want to spend a lot of time publishing the content and its power-packed tool allows you to do the same in half the time and there you go you have already published your video.
They help you with the most crucial part of optimizing the videos and content management where you have to manage the description, titles, and tags, making you rank higher on the YouTube result page.
TubeBuddy also enables you to test and tweak your videos after all you want improvement in getting those clicks. TubeBuddy has got all the tools to make the YouTube journey faster, smoother, and never-ending as they provide advanced analytics giving a better insight and scope for improvement thereon.
TubeBuddy’s features are namely Productivity, Bulk processing, Video SEO, Promotion, Data, and research comprising of the main group. Due to its noble capabilities what each tool does will not be possible to cover in the blog so a few important have been briefed.
Along with each option in the tool, TubeBuddy has mentioned how things are to be done and have provided the video on the same so you have an understanding of how to use the tool and get things done.
Productivity Tool– There is an array of options provided in this tool and to name a few we have a thumbnail generator, scheduled video update, scheduled publish, video topic planner, sunset videos, advanced video embed, card template, comment spotlight, emoji picker, etc.
Thumbnail Generator- The catchiest thumbnail is the first thing to spot on YouTube when the video pops up. Often times impressive thumbnail attracts viewers and likely to help make the video succeed or it fails to impress viewers to even click on the video. You can now get professionally built thumbnails for your video much easier with TubeBuddy which was not easy while using photoshop.
Scheduled Publish– You really are looking to automate the process to a certain extend TubeBuddy has got one such solution to do it. If you have an unlisted video or made videos beforehand to be published on a certain date, then the scheduled publish option comes into place for taking over the task making it hassle-free. Also, you can give early access to patrons before circulating all around then this is one best options.
Bulk Processing Tool-TubeBuddy’s bulk processing of cards removes the painful manual system of adding cards to your videos. The tool offers bulk copy cards, delete cards, edit cards, update cards.
TubeBuddy automates this process by giving an option of bulk copy cards, where you can copy cards from TubeBuddy and provide clean and consistent looks for some or all the videos. The same applies to bulk copy end screen, bulk finds, replace, append, and a few more.
Video Search Engine Optimization Tool – Before you upload a video, you want the best keyword or video title for the videos to appear at their best on the results page wherein you get a huge number of views.
Here you find some interesting options to optimize your video with the cool features of TubeBuddy. Interesting options under this section to help you research and optimize your keywords include keyword explorer, search explorer, and position, SEO studio, Instagram suggests, opportunity finder, tag list, tag ranking, tag sorter, and auto translator.
Keyword Explorer- You are probably looking for a catchy keyword to be added in the title as well as a plan to not copy the existing videos out there and still be a part of the trend, for this the keyword explorer comes to the picture.
Keyword explorer lets you explore a given keyword and it provides score analysis on certain criteria and also provides an overall score giving a value out of 100 to see how your keyword weighs on the scale. This also helps optimize keywords in turn getting results to rank you higher, get more views, better target people, and to keep your videos relevant for a long time.
Auto Translator- YouTube is a global community, and you want to make videos relevant to as many regions as possible. For which this option helps you increase global viewership by translating your title and description into other languages as well.
Search Rank Tracking– This option helps you locate your video ranking even your competitor’s ranking on both YouTube as well as Google of how well your defined keyword is performing. You can use the tool to track your video SEO efforts, you want to see where you stand among your competitors and to see the overall status of how the channel is performing.
Promotion Tool– You have a great channel with an excellent video, its thumbnail, title, tags, and description but the journey does not stop here as you have to market the video gaining furthermore audience and viewership. For promotional activity TubeBuddy offers the best time to publish, milestones, pick a winner, promotion materials, publish to Facebook, share tracker, share on Twitter and Vid2Vid promotion.
Best time to publish– This helps to identify when your audience is most active and then publish videos accordingly. This also gives you the best time to go live for the majority of the audience to be a part of it.
Promotion material: It allows you to use specialized links for promoting your new videos across other platforms. It also gives the benefit to add an email signature to your recent/ popular upload. You can also use the tool to embed your recent video onto your website.
Share Tracker– The tool gives you the freedom to share your content across various platforms and also to track it without having to visit the social media platforms. You do not remember which platform you have shared to, so you use a share tracker to locate your video shares on various platforms.
Data and research tools- If you are a brand or someone else onto promoting a thing then this tool from TubeBuddy is going to help you with enough data to help you see your performance. Some tools to mention here are Brand Alerts, channel access, channel backup, channel valuation, channelytics, click magnet, comment word cloud, competitor scorecard, demonetization audit, health report, retention analyzer, and search Insights.
Brand awareness– The option helps you know when a video is uploaded by someone about you or your product. You can monitor general sentiments about you or your product.
Channel Access- As you are growing you are likely to delegate your process and work in a team. This tool enables you to grant access to others like a creator getting access to your TubeBuddy to check the health reports of the channel. This also helps show clients of the channel growth and to display your license if needed.
Comment word cloud– Here you get a visual representation of your video of how the audience reviews it. You get to see positive or negative comments from the viewers. You also get to know what people are talking about and most interested in your channel or what they wish to see in the channel. Get an overall idea of how people think about your channel.
The simplest way of getting started and using TubeBuddy is by adding their free TubeBuddy web browser extension. It is available for browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
The company does offer TubeBuddy free limited to many features, but it is mainly to get started and get basic work done.
VidIQ Features
VidIQ is on a mission to help brands leverage strategy and tools to get better at video marketing initiatives and growing a wider and loyal audience. VidIQ overview is to maximize your video growth organically.
Creating great content is not enough, you are only halfway there to gain views and subscribers. You use VidIQ if you want your content to be suggested, ranked well, and discovered by the audience for which you need to know the best keywords to boost up the title, description, tags, and playlists and understand how your competitors are better.
VidIQ also provides you with 24/7 expert YouTube consultants in audit tools, this allows you to check what’s working with your content and what content is not working, and things you can be doing to shape it best. One of the most powerful tools out there for YouTubers to succeed.
The competitor tool in VidIQ helps you identify what the competitors are doing to stay up high with views and subscribers. In this competitive world, they enable you to peak out who are important people, whether they are big YouTubers focusing on your space or small competitors with amazing content, both trying to set trends in your segment.
VidIQ allows you to see how your content compares to other channels, videos, or playlists. To get real-time feedback you can compare your content to any other YouTube channel and video.
VidIQ also has got its own academy where they train you to be a champ in 30 days. They have solutions for individuals, brands, agencies, and MNC. VidIQ features are Scorecard, Keyword tools, Competitors, Trend Alerts, Compare views, Most viewed, Productivity tools, Thumbnail generator, Channel Audit, Real-time stats bar, Achievements.
Scorecard
In order to get you important statistics, this tool will surely help you out. It brings you information on your YouTube videos, loading faster with packed features giving you all feedback on your uploads.
YouTube analytics data is not easy to seek after but is made easier to see using VidIQ’s Scorecard. As said earlier it gives you a top look at how your video and your competitors are performing. You are shown what is to be fixed by showing color-coded key data points. An array of options provided in this tool are social engagement, SEO
Feedback, Video optimization checklist, controversial keywords, channel analytics, video tags, suggest video tags, channel tags, historical, tweets and trending.
Social engagement: As a YouTuber, you wish to share your content across social media to gain a wider audience. With this tool, it will show you how your video is performing across social platforms including Facebook and Reddit. Necessary feedback for YouTubers showing colored highlights and indicators of the engagement rate on socials.
SEO Feedback– Content creators have been looking at stats to check on the performance of their video but it majorly requires their understanding to assess the channel and its content to derive an assumption and estimate ways of improvement in moving forward.
But SEO Feedback option further analyses and makes it much easier to help us understand by giving an SEO score for elements that are broken down for a better explanation. For example, you can see how your tag is performing among the famous ones on YouTube.
Keyword tools– It is stated that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. The fact is crazy given that the platform is for watching videos. YouTube has the power to come up with the most relevant video on a search because this is the power of keywords, phrases, trending stuff, etc.
VidIQ’s suite of the tool helps this process to get insight into what people search so you create videos based on the audience interest. Various tools are Boost keyword research, search keyword tool, keyword inspector, inline keywords, keyword translator tool, tag auto-complete, keyword templates, and web suite SEO.
Search keyword tool– Since you always want to optimize your keyword for a better outreach among the audience as well as competitors you have the search keyword tool in place.
In this case, VidIQ will help get more views by providing keyword score, wherein you have search volume, competition score, and overall score all on a scale of 100 showing where you stand for a given keyword.
Keyword Inspector: This tool helps you understand the universe of the keyword surrounding a base keyword, also related and trending keywords. The keyword inspector tool will display search results, the VidIQ keyword score, all the videos related and the overtime interest of search topics which gives a meaning whether the given keyword is still in use, vogue, or recurring at some point example a festival say Christmas.
Competitors– This tool is all about staying in the game by keeping an eye on the competitors. The tool allows you to see the listed competitors and help you find out the uploads working for them and why.
Competition is where another individual is in the same niche as you trying to make better videos on the same topic, so having this exact information helps us in knowing what might work for you. You can get to winning by understanding content by the competitor and make a better decision by looking at high-view videos, views by hours meaning is it still popular, and subscriber growth is driven by premium content.
You can also add competitors’ channels to check them on views per hour. You simply have to add their channel using the competitor tool to compare with yours.
Trend Alerts– Many times you create a video based on the current audience’s taste or trending topic for which you need to know which keyword is performing or the number of views per hour competitor is getting on the content. The tool will alert you for trending content in your field, which you follow. Email alerts can be set for trending videos on any topic to give you a great direction to create much awesome content and be ahead in the game. You can set an alert for every 2 days, every week, or every month.
Productivity tools– If you wish to save time, then you should definitely use bulk copy/ edit cards and end screens options. With this option, you can bulk copy cards, bulk copy end screens, and bulk edit end screens. There is also a comment productivity tool wherein you do not have to go to each comment and manually reply, the tool makes it much faster by providing a comment template, you literally can answer many viewers in a few clicks. Also, the tool provides the option for bulk metadata where you can download all your metadata which comes in handy to backup your meta information, which can be opened in a spreadsheet.
Thumbnail generator– As said earlier the first impression of the video is decided by how attractive the thumbnail is for the video uploaded on YouTube, the better thumbnail is likely to attract the audience or it goes the opposite way even though the video content may be great.
Since you want to avoid viewers skipping your video you have a thumbnail generator option provided by VidIQ creating attractive custom thumbnail making it the most important part of YouTube. YouTube creates one for you but you never really wish to go with it because your content may seem poor. With VidIQ’s tool, you make an amazing thumbnail right from the browser which will increase your click-through rate.
Create and edit custom thumbnails with VidIQ- The editor allows you to make thumbnails by allowing you to add texts, shapes, customs images, and other attractive options to make thumbnails as attractive as possible. You just need to choose a frame from the video to add color, font, border for your text, and tons of other options. In the end, you can look at how your thumbnail looks across YouTube and other platforms too.
Channel Audit– It’s ideally the best situation to have someone for the journey till you do not master the roller coaster experience of YouTube. For this very reason, VidIQ has given you a very personal YouTube consultant available all the time.
Channel Audit has got 5 different tools to use from and as said earlier it has got you covered showing what content is performing and what is not and what needs attention making it the best video marketing tool.
The first tool by default shows how you are doing for the past 30 days. You have a section to hover and choose from the time frame to get this information.
Content double down on– This option displays views per hour, engagement rate, subscribers, competitor’s performance, the watch time, top viewers retention, top playlist, and traffic coming to YouTube via shared links on other platforms. Apart from that, you can see search terms for your video, end screen click rates, card click rates for our channel.
What’s not working on YouTube – Important section showing videos that did not perform well having the lowest watch time, low likes and views, and the painful part of losing subscribers. All this will assist you if you wish to create similar content or not.
What to fix to get your channel up to speed- This tool of channel audit highlights if your descriptions, tags, video titles are too short or long. It also brings out any missing cards, end screens, thumbnail, or playlist. The tool highlights showing a color, click on the red number and edit to fix it. You do this job in mere 15 seconds.
Real-time stats bar – You really can’t spend as much time looking over stats in YouTube analytics for each bit of your uploads. The tool VidIQ makes it more convenient to access the stats and data giving information you need. You will then know how far you are to start monetizing your channel and other high-level stats.
The graph provided with the tool can be hovered over to show real-time views in the last 1 hour, 2 days, 7 days.
The most important ranking factor of YouTube has to be watched closely which is to see minutes watched in the last 7 days and total subscribers count. The graph in the tool also shows how close you are to monetize your channel by checking if you are close to 4000 hours video watched. Ultimately you also can get insight for minute-by-minute view with the tool.
Pricing of TubeBuddy and VidIQ
TubeBuddy Pricing
TubeBuddy has multiple plans for its users. The first one is basic which is free of cost. The second one being pro at $9 per month. The third being star $19 per month. The last being legend at $49 per month. They also have an enterprise solution for someone managing more than 20 YouTube channels simultaneously. They also have 30 days money-back guarantee when you start with them.
VidIQ Pricing
VidIQ provides different packages and options to their user. The first one being basic to get started for free. The second being pro at $10 per month.
The third being boost at $49 per month. The last one being Boost+ wherein they provide personalized coaching for creators and agencies costing $499. They provide the option to cancel anytime.
TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: The Verdict
Here comes the most difficult part of this article, announcing the best YouTube SEO tools out of two of the most amazing tools out there.
Well for this comparison the winner is TubeBuddy for it has many commendable features such as video SEO, scheduled publishing, keyword searching tool, productivity tools, bulk processing tools and so much more.
However, if you want that extra helping hand to help manage your YouTube channel efficiently with ease, I would suggest you go for the combination of TubeBuddy’s Pro plan for US$9.99 and VidiQ’s Boost+ plan for US$499.
Well, we have reached the end of this article. However I have written this article is just to give you an insight on what these tools are capable of carrying out and their feature, the final decision, however, rests on your hands as to which of these tools suit you and your channel’s needs the best.
Don’t wait any longer and go to TubeBuddy and VidIQ’s websites now to avail of special discounts curated just for you!
