VIDEO CONTENT IS KING
Table of Contents
- Narrowing Down Your Online Video Creator Options
- The Comparison: FlexClip vs wave.video
- Overview
- Features
- Video Templates
- Stock Library Assets, Images, Videos, Music, and Graphics
- Media Uploads and Organization
- AI-Generated Captions and Subtitles
- Animations, Fades, Timing, and Transitions
- Image Editing
- Audio Recording
- Font Options and Font Animations
- Custom Brand Identity Profiles
- Resizing for Various Social Media Platforms
- Collaboration, Sharing, Publishing, and Hosting
- Help and Documentation
- Flexibility and User-Experience
- Pricing
- The Final Verdict
- In closing and Important Disclosure
- Wrapping Up
Which tool is best for video creation?
The right high-quality video creator should
simplify and enhance your online, social media, and video marketing presence.
Here we compare two video creation software apps:
FlexClip and wave.video.
Narrowing Down Your Online Video Creator Options
There are countless online video maker software programs, with editing and features ranging from rudimentary to highly advanced.
Two straightforward video editors to try are FlexClip and wave.video.
Both FlexClip and wave.video are video editors suitable for beginners and experienced users alike.
Here we will review and contrast FlexClip vs wave.video, and explore the features, pricing, and user experiences between the two.
While we won’t cover all aspects of these two video editing tools, we will highlight key features that we feel are important. Then you can choose the right video creator tool to create engaging video content.
The Comparison: FlexClip vs wave.video
Fat Cat Design has been a subscriber of wave.video since 2019, and a subscriber of FlexClip since 2022.
Overview
- FlexClip and Wave.video are feature-rich video creation programs for producing professional-quality videos.
- Both can be used to create videos for online and social media channels, use cases, and industries.
- Both are adaptable for beginners or experienced users alike.
- Both are web-based programs best used in the Chrome browser.
- Neither FlexClip nor wave.video currently offer a mobile application.
- FlexClip and wave.video each include a free plan, along with several paid options with more advanced editing tools.
- Wave.video claims an advantage over FlexClip to be its Thumbnail Maker and Video Hosting features, which allow users to create and store a complete video package in one hub.
- FlexClip boasts its advantage over wave.video by including more templates, a richer library of stock media resources, and a better user experience.
Features
Video Templates
- Both FlexClip and wave.video include an array of equivalent-quality video templates.
- Users can also opt to launch a new video project using a blank template.
- wave.video offers over 1,000 video templates.
- FlexClip offers over 5,000 templates.
The winner
-
- FlexClip
- With a more extensive library of video templates, FlexClip gets the edge.
Stock Library Assets, Images, Videos, Music, and Graphics
- FlexClip and wave.video offer extensive libraries of stock videos, images, photos, and royalty free music.
- Users can also upload their own media and music and store them in the app’s library.
- Creators can organize content into folders and subfolders, streamlining search and filtering efforts.
The winner
- Tie
- FlexClip and wave.video have vast media libraries with high quality images, photos, videos, audio, and royalty-free music tracks.
- It should be noted that Fat Cat Design uploaded a wave.video project and received a potential music copyright infringement, even though said music track was included in the wave.video stock audio library. Fat Cat Design disputed the infringement, and YouTube quickly cleared the infringement.
- FlexClip and wave.video have vast media libraries with high quality images, photos, videos, audio, and royalty-free music tracks.
Media Uploads and Organization
- All user-uploaded media can be organized into custom folders and sub-folders for easy access.
- wave.video allows tagging of media elements as “favorites,” making assets easier to organize, search, filter, and locate.
The winner
- wave.video
- Wave.video gets the edge by allowing users to designate media assets as favorites, facilitating media and asset organization.
AI-Generated Captions and Subtitles
- Both FlexClip and Wave.video offer AI-powered, auto-generated captions and subtitles.
- This feature is important. Not only does it make the video more accessible to the hearing-impaired who rely on visual accompanying text or captions, but is also useful when social media viewers browse on mute.
The winner
- Tie
- Both FlexClip and wave.video include similar methods of easily adding subtitles and captions.
Animations, Fades, Timing, and Transitions
- FlexClip and wave.video incorporate the ability to add transitions, animations, and video effects to enhance the viewer’s experience and create engaging video content.
- Audio tracks can be adjusted, allowing the user to fade music in or out, and manipulate the volume for each scene as well as the entire timeline.
- Transitions and fade effects can be applied to backgrounds and/or images – with a wave.video caveat.
- Unfortunately, wave.video prevents the ability to combine a background image or video with a separate/dedicated image overlaid onto the background in the same clip.
- This means the user cannot apply an image over a background, preventing the ability to implement separate animation or fade effects for multiple layers, other than text, in the same clip.
The winner
- FlexClip
- FlexClip wins for its ability to “layer” images or other media over a background for dedicated animations for each element.
Image Editing
- FlexClip and wave.video both allow the user to edit images and graphics directly inside the app.
- Features include a background remover (which is surprisingly effective), color correction, filters, and more.
The winner
- Tie
- Both FlexClip and wave.video provide extensive and flexible options for image editing, color correction, and filters.
Audio Recording
- FlexClip and wave.video are equipped to record and integrate voiceovers directly in the editor.
The winner
- Tie
- Both FlexClip and wave.video have similar audio recording features.
Font Options and Font Animations
- Both FlexClip and wave.video include a plethora of fonts and typefaces, text editing features, and custom font uploads.
- wave.video offers 300+ text animations and styles.
- FlexClip offers over 1,000 text animations and styles.
The winner
-
- FlexClip
- With more text animation features, FlexClip wins over wave.video.
- FlexClip
Custom Brand Identity Profiles
- wave.video allows for the creation of multiple brand identities or company/client profiles, which can be applied per project.
- For each brand identity, users can upload logos, assets, fonts, and brand colors, and save them as dedicated brands.
- When the user launches a project, any specific brand identity can be applied, incorporating specific logo, colors, and fonts.
- This eliminates the need to redefine brand assets for each project, and ensures consistency throughout each client’s design or use-case without recreating the wheel each time.
- This feature is currently lacking in FlexClip.
The winner
- Tie
- Why?
- While wave.video includes the ability to create custom brand identities, wave.video’s brand integration feature is convoluted and difficult to implement.
- Fat Cat Design found the process of creating and applying various identities to individual projects in wave.video to be tricky and frustrating, rendering the feature ineffective.
- Why?
Resizing for Various Social Media Platforms
- Both FlexClip and wave.video provide pre-set dimensions for popular social media channels and uses, such as Youtube videos, or Facebook or Instagram posts, stories, and reels.
- Both include the ability to copy, resize, and re-use any existing video for new projects or alternate social channels.
- wave.video goes a step further by allowing the user to set custom dimensions beyond the standard social media sizes, whereas FlexClip does not.
The winner
- wave.video
- wave.video is more flexible with its ability to create video projects using custom dimensions, a feature currently lacking in FlexClip.
Collaboration, Sharing, Publishing, and Hosting
- FlexClip and wave.video allow collaboration with other designers, contributors, or viewers.
- Users can also share videos via hyperlink, download for manual distribution, or publish video content directly to social media channels, all from the dashboard.
- wave.video incorporates a video hosting and sharing platform for video embedding replete with landing pages similar to your own unique and dedicated YouTube channel. Videos hosted on wave.video’s server can also be embedded on websites and social media, and its hosting platform serves as a video landing page that can be white-labeled with your custom branding.
The winner
- wave.video
- wave.video’s cloud-based, custom video hosting is an attractive feature worth considering for those seeking a more comprehensive and flexible video publication tool.
Help and Documentation
- Both FlexClip and wave.video provide video tutorials and articles to simplify the user’s learning curve, along with friendly and responsive technical support.
The winner
- Tie
- Video creators and users won’t be disappointed with the support resources for either application.
Flexibility and User-Experience
Flexibility
- Both tools offer the ability to cater to numerous video creation needs, such as promotional videos, educational content, social media posts, and more.
The winner
- Tie
- Both FlexClip and wave.video are equipped with an abundance of versatile and useful features and elements for creating high-quality videos.
User Experience
- Both platforms prioritize user-friendliness and simplicity for novice video creators and advanced designers alike.
- However, Fat Cat Design found wave.video’s timeline, layers, and select features awkward and less user-friendly than FlexClip’s.
The winner
- FlexClip
- FlexClip provides a higher-quality and more straightforward user experience.
Pricing
- Both programs offer free plans along with several paid options.
- FlexClip offers a basic free pricing tier as follows:
- 480p SD downloads
- 1 stock video per project
- 1 stock audio per project
- Maximum 12 projects
- Video length up to 10 minutes
- Auto subtitles 5 mins/month
- 3 background removal credits/month
- For added features and benefits, FlexClip paid plans start at $5.99 per month.
- Wave.video also provides a free pricing tier of their service as follows:
- Basic Video Editor
- 15 minutes with watermark
- Thumbnail maker
- Stock library of 2M assets & templates
- For added features and benefits, wave.video’s paid plans start at $16 per month.
- FlexClip offers a basic free pricing tier as follows:
The winner
- FlexClip
- FlexClip’s free pricing tier appears to be more generous than wave.video’s.
The Final Verdict
Both FlexClip and wave.video are popular video creation tools offering extensive features. Design found both to have benefits as well as quirky challenges.
Without further ado, here’s our final verdict on the better of the two:
The ultimate winner
- FlexClip
- Despite its slight challenges and minor lack of features, Fat Cat Design found FlexClip to present a much easier and user-friendly experience from start to finish.
- We also found any FlexClip downsides to be minor compared to the weaknesses of wave.video.
- While wave.video is a potentially powerful video content creation tool, we found that it came with significant challenges.
Read on for some examples.
What led us to our conclusion?
- While wave.video can be a potent video creation application, it comes with difficulties. For example:
- Cannot combine background with images
- It’s not possible in wave.video to combine an image or images along with a background in the same clip, whereas this is easily done in FlexClip.
- Let’s say you want a video clip with a background image or video, and then an image or visual asset overlaid on the same clip.
- wave.video prohibits the ability to do so. This makes for a frustrating experience requiring a multi-step and less-than-desirable workaround.
- In order to create a wave.video clip replete with a background image along with a separate overlaid image, Fat Cat Design has to create a single image composite in a separate app (such as Canva or Photoshop) composed of a background with images, creating essentially a flat image.
- We then have to tediously duplicate and resize the flat image for each social media dimension.
- We then have to export each as flat png or jpg files, and finally import said flat files into wave.video to use as the stand-alone background.
- Not only is this time-consuming and laborious, but it negates the ability to adjust the overlaid image with animation separately from the background.
- Certainly, the user can animate the flat image as a whole, but that’s not ideal.
- On the contrary, FlexClip allows the user to layer images and video (and other elements) within the same clip with ease, and animate each separately at will.
- Adding text is non-intuitive
- Fat Cat Design found adding text elements to wave.video clips to be frustrating and non-intuitive.
- For example, when text is added to a clip in wave.video, the text is not visible unless the user enables various text layers.
- However, these text layers are not obvious; so adding text is flumoxing as it is “invisible” on the clip.
- Once text layers are enabled and the text is visible, the wave.video text editing experience continues to be disappointing and arduous.
- Furthermore, while wave.video offers a variety of text editing and customization options, the integration is far from straightforward.
- On the contrary, FlexClip’s text and font editing integrations are smooth and streamlined.
- Custom brand creation proves to be ineffectual
- It’s highly useful to have the ability to create multiple brand identities with specific colors, fonts, and assets for different clients or use-cases.
- However, wave.video’s custom brand feature is so difficult to implement that Fat Cat Design found it to be pointless.
- Publishing and exporting videos can be complicated
- wave.video’s publish and export features require a bit of getting used to, and are not nearly as uncomplicated as FlexClip’s.
- Cannot combine background with images
In closing and Important Disclosure
Given the degree of frustration Fat Cat Design has encountered with wave.video, we are compelled to anoint FlexClip as the winner.
- FlexClip’s ease of use, effortless interface, simplified dashboard, and flexibility present a more streamlined, time-saving, and enjoyable video creation experience.
- Regarding any features lacking in FlexClip, its developers and support personnel have reassured Fat Cat Design they are continuing to improve the app for even more flexibility and user-friendliness.
Important Disclosure
Fat Cat Design reached out to both FlexClip and wave.video to allow each to provide a thorough review of this article prior to publication in order to ensure accuracy of content, which we felt was only fair.
FlexClip provided two minor adjustments.
wave.video failed to respond.
Wrapping Up
Identifying and choosing your optimum tool for video creation can appear to be a daunting and time-consuming task. With countless options, it’s easy to become mired in overwhelm. Yet it’s an important exercise to undertake so you can effectively engage viewers and customers online.
Again, as with any software, the best choice for your needs will ultimately depend on your specific requirements and preferences.