TubeBuddy & VidIQ Aren't What They Seem (Review)

first things first i am not an affiliate of either vidiq or tubebuddy very much on purpose you see every single video that i found on youtube of someone reviewing either one or the other or both of them compared competition was from someone who is looking to make money with their link for either of the tools and you know nate i just had to really give an extensive test and i wanted to give an honest unbiased review of these without having any sort of monetary incentive biasing my review one way or the other howdy howdy everyone nate here and before i say anything else i'm going to tell you exactly who should use these tools total beginners larger active channels with a lot of videos on their channel but not much in between you see both of these tools both tubebuddy and vidiq are set up as what i call youtube helper tools the goal is to help you understand your metrics and in all of their marketing they say get more views and more subscribers and grow your channel this video was a long time in the making guys because you know me i gave this a solid test so here's what i did i purchased the top individual tier of both tubebuddy and vid iq five months ago and started using them in my everyday normal experience on youtube when i was uploading videos when i was broadening youtube when i was planning videos every use case that i could think of i use them extensively one than the other than both at the same time and for each of them i went through every last feature and went through described the feature gave it a usefulness rating gave it a rating of what size of channel i think that might be targeted at as well as my individual thoughts on how useful that tool was and my experience with it so for this video rather than give a play-by-play comparison of both tools i'm going to give you what i consider the absolute strengths of both and the weaknesses of both as well as my specific recommendation for what you should do with both also i should say i am totally open to representatives from either one of these companies reaching out to me to clarify any points that i feel like i got wrong or to prove me irrevocably wrong if nate is totally off his rocker i don't think i am but i am open to it also i've never done this so early in the video before but if you wouldn't mind taking a moment to boop the like button on this video right now to appreciate yes the amount of research that went into this and also because you may or may not like what i'm about to say thank you guys okay first of all let's talk about what is great about both of these tools they are both very good at giving you access to data that is already available on youtube but making it easier to find whether that be channel lytics in the case of a tubebuddy or just a side-by-side comparison or search results a lot of different examples of like ratios so many things and both of these tools do very well at bringing it up and making it more easily more readily available the other thing i will say about both of these companies is from my interactions with them the creators the developers of both of these companies are great people and they're both have their top goal of helping you and i helping youtube creators to build their channels with that said let's get into the specific strengths of each of these tools and the specific weaknesses so first of all tubebuddy strengths bulk actions they by far have more capability for doing bulk processing on a channel whether that's descriptions cards end screens oh man comments filters so many things are built into tubebuddy that make bulk actions actually incredibly useful for a large channel tubebuddy also has a lot of specific use cases built into their tool they have a lot of things going on over there an example of a specific use case tool i would say is the comment contest winner they have the capability to choose a random commenter across your entire channel or within a specific video or you can even filter by specific keywords they have to say specific keywords it's a very specific use case but when it is used would be very useful and that was the case i saw across the board with tubebuddy they have a lot of that type of stuff going on tubebuddy also has a lot of very interesting things going on in the realms of adding additional functionality to what's already available on youtube for example a b testing retention analyzer and their click magnet tools they're all very interesting and could provide additional insights on a specific case by case basis for almost any channel okay and here's where we get into more of the weaknesses of tubebuddy the first part of their strength is it's a two-edged sword part of their strength is so many specific use cases it's also a weakness there's so much going on in the tool that i get the impression that when the developers are thinking of new features they look at their feedback and they say all right let's add that feature let's add that feature let's add that feature but the problem is after a while you get a random mod podge to just mix box of a whole bunch of features that don't really feel cohesive and the ui being as it is wasn't didn't feel the most intuitive to me so from my experience it was actually fairly difficult to find out first of all to find each feature and then also to find out how to use each feature the other thing i will say here is that the with this feature overload there were too many specific use cases so many things that i i look at that and i say okay if do i really want this massive toolbox of capability if i'm only going to use one of the tools and i will say more on that here in a moment but that was my impression of a lot of tubebuddy so many things going on it was confusing and especially if you're a brand new creator or if you just don't have use for all of those specific use cases it felt like more complexity than it needed to be the other thing i will say is that it feels outdated whether or not this is actually the case and the developers feel free to respond on this but it feels outdated the ui on desktop and on mobile their their app is it just feels janky like it feels like uh something that was developed 10 years ago and not up to date okay let's talk about vid iq now first of all the strengths the channel audit feature was actually pretty nice i found myself looking at it and saying hey it's actually really nice to see all of these features all in a single place and categorized by important metrics like click-through rate or average watch time midnight q also feels simpler and more easy to use overall as in blah blah blah bin iq also feels more simple and easy to use overall their video analytics on competitors was more in-depth and extensive it feels like and again this is perception on my part but it feels like it's updated more often and the app uh the mobile app is definitely cleaner also for vidiq their response to emails as a paid customer at least has been very it's been phenomenal they've always responded very quickly i had a few issues with it with the tool the functionality that wasn't working they always responded very quickly and we're very polite and professional except for one email there's one email that they didn't respond to but more on that later now let's talk about the weaknesses of vid iq first of all their video boost feature the video optimize feature was not that useful from my experience and i'll explain a bit more in depth on why that was the case here in a moment but for that to be a central tenet of a paid tier you you know on this tier you get this many video boosts on this tier you get this many boosts and then for that feature to not even be that useful or actually do that much for my video was kind of a big red flag for me another issue with vidiq was their daily video ideas feature i realized it's a beta feature but just take it from me it was completely useless at this point is the idea was to suggest video ideas or or topics or or titles for videos but it just came across as a weird mod podge of words that just would not make a good video title at all and the other weakness with vidiq versus tubebuddy is it does cost more in comparison okay let's talk about a few of the problems with both tools okay first thing features that are built into the tools keep getting added to regular youtube to the backend to youtube studio and here is the funny thing about this these tools in a lot of cases are cutting edge and they will test or implement a feature before youtube adds it because youtube's bigger it you know takes more time to turn the ship right so to speak but the funny thing is with this going on each of these tools both tubebuddy and vidiq need to up their game to stay ahead on additional features because what happens when youtube adds a feature for example retention graphs or best time to publish both of these tools have those and yet youtube has them so there's absolutely no need to have them in the tools themselves and to pay for something that is free on youtube that the issue is youtube keeps adding these things so from a user standpoint why would i keep paying next big issue and this is one of the absolute biggest issues i have with youtube helper tools in general not even on specifically on these tools that we're talking about is the insane focus on video tags a core capability a core tenant of every youtube helper tool that i've experienced is optimizing your tags and the big issue here is that tags do almost nothing for the optimization of your video and search results and across youtube tags are almost absolutely nothing in the success of your channel well nate how where do you come up with this hypothesis literally on the upload page for a video i and i will quote this to you tags can be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled otherwise tags play a minimal role in helping viewers find your video another place i'll show you right now if i go to my channel and i go to some of the most successful videos on my channel the tags that each of these tools would tell me were necessary to optimize to get the success on those videos were simply not present some people are going to be like whoa whoa whoa nate them's flattened words tags are actually very important i suffice it to say here from all of my experience and the only success across the channels that i run including this one the other channels that i manage i have never put a large focus on tags i didn't use the tools to optimize the tags and yet the videos are still successful so bringing it back with the case of vidiq for example one of their core things being boost this video and a lot of that focus being suggesting tags and saying these are the exact tags and here's how you'll show up in search rankings based on these tags it just simply does not matter to the degree that the tools make it seem the other thing i will say is a problem with both of these was that the mobile apps left me lacking they felt like they should be able to do more and i realized this may be partially because they simply don't have access to the the editing capability that is in youtube itself in the youtube studio app but in many cases i felt like i was being given advice or things that i should be doing with my videos but couldn't do it within the app which took away half or more of the usefulness of the app to me also if you're using the same tool to decide how to title your videos make sure you got your your your tags in your title and your description if you're using the same tools as everybody else to decide what your videos should be about or what the title should be your videos are going to start ending up looking like every other video out there or in some cases not even making sense at all you know what i just realized i've had my rgb light plugged in this entire time i was charging it before recording and it's still plugged in so now it is unplugged so now i don't have the dangly cord back here okay with all of that aside let's talk about really who would want to use each of these tools and when the first thing i'll say is for absolute beginners if you have no idea how to use youtube it might make sense to pick one of these tools and add it to your repertoire of tools just just put it on your channel because what they do well is giving you a nice checklist of things that you might not have considered hey how did you add tags did you add an end screen did you pay attention to xyd these certain details they are both very good at giving you a sense of how to upload how to produce videos and a few key things that do help your videos perform better both tools also provide a framework and give you access to analytics that are is more convenient and keeps it more top of mind so you are paying attention to more of the numbers my big cautionary thing for total beginners here though is it does lead to it could lead to an obsession over things that don't push the needle very much they're the 10 or less that don't do a lot of the results on your channel and i even found myself saying oh no should i be adding these tags oh it's saying i should be adding all these tags or my seo score is only 10 out of 50. oh no what's going on and in a lot of cases from my own experience across the multiple channels that i run a lot of those things didn't matter as much as the tools make them seem so if you are a total beginner and you're considering which one to get vidiq gets my vote on this one and the free tier works just fine for this the other group that i would recommend these tools for is larger active youtube channels and what i mean by active is you're publishing regularly you have a lot of videos on your channel and you would benefit from tools to help you minimize the amount of time it's taking for you to manage your channel bulk tools are incredibly handy things like updating your description or finding and replacing sections of text in your description or even bulk updating cards and end screens can be really handy if you have hundreds of videos on your channel my concern here is that it could be a problem if it's used too much and in a non-personal way i'll give the example of end screens i often use end screens as a way to lead people to another video on my channel because i know there's a specific next question they'll have and there's a specific next place that would be very helpful to someone watching that specific video that i'm producing so if i'm bulk putting end screens in it's very impersonal in those cases the other case i will say here is with canned responses both of these tools have the ability to do canned comment responses where you can do something like a formula of hey hey channel name thanks so much for your comment and it adds a level of you know personability but what i will say here is in most cases when i am responding to a comment it is me wanting to give a organic real natural response to that comment and as i often do many of you have noticed in the first hour after publishing a video i'm there active and i am actually it's actually me responding to every single comment and it wouldn't come across the same if it was a bunch of canned responses if you're at the point where you have a large large channel and you're hiring people to respond to comments then i could see that being useful the other big benefit for larger more active channels is trend awareness and vidiq does very well at this their most viewed tool and their subscriber analysis tool are pretty handy the thing here and this kind of goes without saying is that most of these tools that i just described are on the paid tiers and are on the highest individual paid tier for both of these tools however even with the higher price point my vote here still goes to vidiq for almost every single feature across every benefit for the larger active channels now speaking to what i said at the very beginning of this video the large gap in between the absolute beginner and the larger active channel i still stand with that in most cases 90 of cases a channel does not need either one of these tools or any youtube helper tool that i have tested so far and the main reason for that is that in most cases for most channels from my exposure to hundreds of channels your channels and the people that i've consulted in my own program in most cases the cost of using the tool on a paid tier does not outweigh the benefit and for the free tiers on both of these tools most cases it just adds complexity that doesn't need to be there now i will say the one place where i would say a recommendation if you're if you're in that gap between a brand new channel or a very large active channel is if there is a specific capability built into one of these tools that is worth the cost to you then yes it makes sense to get those so as of recording i am still not an affiliate of either one of these tools either vid iq or tubebuddy that's not to say i won't ever in the future what i will say is that vidiq did reach out to me let me read their email to you they said hi nate great stuff on channel makers would love to set up a time if you were open to it upgrade account on the house walk you through a few new things and we have going live this month that's really awesome i was i was frankly i felt flattered that was awesome so i responded with this howdy rob you're not the rob wilson are you you know rob wilson vidiq funny you should ask i'm actually preparing a video reviewing vidiq versus tubebuddy as we speak anything you want to make sure i say no guarantee i'll say any of it but i appreciate you reaching out at this point i want to give 100 unbiased review of the tool so i'll be waiting however based on my research i'm open to talking later because that is the honest truth and rob responded with this oh wait he didn't respond that was three weeks ago what's up with that vidiq okay i'm still waiting on that i'll see we'll see we'll see you guys you see when it comes right down to it a lot of the game is understanding the analytics on your channel and which ones actually matter the most and which ones actually push the needle to success and growth and more views and more subscribers on your channel and so for that i made this video for you guys if you have not yet watched it it is pretty ninja i go right into the back end of my channel and what has been making it so successful what's working what's not and specifically three metrics that i think are more important than almost any other metrics on youtube so go watch that next and nate out

Channel: Channel Makers

Views: 85,529

Keywords:

Id: 0-vSrg0PfQ4

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021