Online Animation Makers: 7 Tools You Must Know (in 2024)

What's the best online animation software in 2024?

There's a handful of online animation makers out there who all claim to be the best.

But:

Naturally, that can’t be true.

I’ve animated in online tools for more than 10 years, and last week, I took the time to test out each one - to give you an honest, non-sponsored, expert review of each animation software.

In the process of creating this video, I watched other reviewers on YouTube, plowed through G2 and capterra, and..

I’m way more critical about these animation tools.

I’ve sold 100s of videos in my own animation agency, and spent 1000s of hours animating for clients and for my own courses.

And I can tell you right now, half of these tools are not worth their salt.

If you read this review to the end, you’ll get a complete overview of the landscape, but you can also use the chapters to skip to the tool you’re most interested in.

Let’s jump into the review!

How I score
CreateStudio
Animaker
Biteable
Powtoon
Toonly/Doodly
VideoScribe
Vyond
Conclusion

▶️ Watch review as video (YouTube)

 

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⭐️ Scoring

I’ve scored each tool on a scale from 1 to 10 on three parameters I consider most important: Style, Usability and Price.

• Style is about the look and feel of the characters, backgrounds, actions, etc. What does it taste like? Does it look professional?
• Usability is about how intuitive it is to work with, and what features are there. It takes time to animate, so is it easy to learn, maybe even fun to use?
• Price is about the relation between the value of the tool considering the first two factors vs. what they want you to pay for it - monthly, yearly, or as a one-time purchase.

So, each tool gets a score on each of the 3 parameters, and the calculated average corresponds to a tier, which is my final verdict of the animation maker.

CreateStudio Review

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The first tool on our list looks amazing.

I’ve seen these 3D-styled ads for years, but hesitated to test it because there’s no free trial.

But if they can actually enable me to easily create Pixar-style 3D videos, I’m ready to pay and that’s what I did.

 

Style

When it comes to style, CreateStudio is unique in the sense that they go for 3D instead of 2D, like most other animation makers.

Their characters look pretty great, and much like that dude in their marketing video.

Do they look like Pixar characters? Maybe a bit like Woody from ToyStory, but I think the style comes closer to PawPatrol.

The backgrounds, or scene templates that are inside CreateStudio are aesthetically pleasing, with nice textures, light and shadow, colors and depth. HUGE plus.

Just note that these are mostly fixed images, so you can’t make any changes to how these look.

If this was a real 3D program, you could change every pixel of every asset, but these are premade, non-customizable images - sometimes with a customizable prop or two.

There are other styles than 3D inside CreateStudio, but they are less interesting to me, because it’s the 3D look that’s unique for this tool.

Because of this good-looking, consistent 3D style, nice characters, and beautifully designed environments, I give CreateStudio’s style an 8.

 

Usability

3D is hard to create from scratch, so it’s an appealing selling point to have simplified this and made it accessible for everyone. But how intuitive is it really?

Let’s start with the good stuff:

When it comes to usability, CreateStudio’s downloadable desktop app feels really solid and well-built.

Note that there’s no online version of CreateStudio, it needs to be downloaded.

It works somewhat as an offline app, but you need internet to download assets that you want to put in a scene.

The interface looks similar to professional applications, with a canvas, a library panel, and a timeline at the bottom.

You can make small changes to the interface, but I think it’s laid out really well by default.

The Group logic in the Timeline took me some time to get used to.

You double-click to see the elements of each scene, then go back to the main timeline.

I’m used to video timelines with a standard stacked layout, where all elements are visible and stacked on top of each other.

So this got me confused at first, and I still don’t like it.

As you’ll see with the other tools, everyone tries to rethink the timeline and make it beginner-friendly, but most of them fail in their attempt to simplify.

We’ll get back to that.

I love the Instant Preview feature, with 0 wait time when you want to see what you’ve made so far.

For many of the online tools, there’s a tiny load time with every preview, and since you preview hundreds of times per video project, this time adds up and matters when you’re about to decide what tool to go with.

CreateStudio surprises with a fully stacked library of stock video, stock music, and sound effects.

This is pretty standard for most tools, but CreateStudio’s library feels curated, high quality, stuff you can actually use.

(Not just happy ukele, clap tap, explainer music.)

Some reviewers praise the new inbuilt TTS, text to speech, engine but the Google voices I have access to are pretty thin, compared to where the technology is at.

I assume the other option produces a better result, but I didn’t pay enough. Or maybe CreateStudio didn’t pay enough, because I know Google offers better text-to-speech than this.

When people are new to animation, they love to use scene transitions all the time, and CreateStudio lets you scratch this itch with a bunch of super high-end “alpha” transitions.

I’m normally against the use of transitions for no reason, but these are beautiful enough to slab on between every two scenes.

A place where CreateStudio’s usability stands out is its “in studio” character creator - you design your characters right then and there.

No need to leave this view and go to a dedicated character creator, as with many other tools. Extra points for an uninterrupted workflow.

I also picked up the keyboard shortcuts pretty easily, which are essential for a good workflow.

If you ever worked with any standard editing tool, where you can copy-paste, move things around with the arrow keys and shift, you’ll quickly learn that these also apply in CreateStudio.

Lip-sync is a feature that is almost required for animation makers - the ability to connect a recorded voice-over to one of the characters, so it looks like they say the the words.

CreateStudio makes this super easy, probably the simplest approach to lip-sync I’ve seen.

Works really well, also with the the way the mouth is synced to the voice. Looks realistic.

One unique feature is that you can combine multiple actions, with smooth transitions between each one.

The price you pay for this is a quite limited library of actions. But the transition between each one is seamless. Looks very pro.

A feature CreateStudio has copied from for example FinalCutPro is the use of Keyframes when you want an object to move - for example for the Walk action.

For beginners, this logic might not seem super intuitive, but if you’re used to FCX, you’ll quickly pick it up.

So, as you can hear, CreateStudio has a lot of good things going for them.

Now, let’s move on to what I don’t like so much:

To be fair, CreateStudio is not alone in committing this crime, but I think the gating of features is wrong.

All these tools have different plans or tiers that unlock new stuff, but I think the lines are drawn in a harsh way with CreateStudio.

Unless you have the All Access Plan, you can only use a fraction of the beautifully designed 3D scenes we came here for.

We watched the video with that guy at the laptop in his wooden office, and now we want to create something similar.

And while that specific scene is unlocked with my Standard plan, most of the scene designs require all access.

And still, if you have access, just remember: Most of the backgrounds are static images, with no ability to make any changes to individual elements.

What I thought were scene templates, were just video clips - super impressive and very well made, but nothing you can change about them.

So the idea of making your own videos with CreateStudio, is more about stringing together their template scenes in a unique sequence.

A lot of good things going on, but a few shortcomings give CreateStudio a Usability score of 6.

 

Price

Lastly, we need to address pricing - how much does this cost?

If you want to pay monthly, their plans are either $27, $37, or $47 a month. And if you pay yearly, it’s 99, 149 and 199 dollars.

I actually only paid $83 for lifetime access - the offer was $67 and then 25% VAT on top, because.. Denmark.

For that price I got CreateStudio Pro, with something called Commercial License. I guess it translates into the Standard Plan.

But, as you’ll also learn if you read all the way to the end, most lifetime deals are just step one in a stream of prompts to make you pay more, because you only got access to the most stripped-down version they have to offer.

That was also the case with CreateStudio:

Lifetime access for $67 → then prompted to pay $97 more for Premium, which is funny enough also not one of the plans listed under Pricing, so who knows what you get. And then a last prompt to pay for some video hosting solution - I said no to all of it.

I probably should have taken the $67 + $97 for Premium, if that would have given me lifetime access to what I assume translates to Platinum, because that would have unlocked the beautiful scene designs I can here for.

Here's the link to where I found the lifetime deal.

To conclude, CreateStudio is a unique, and pretty solid tool, and those lifetime deals are incredible value for money, so I’ll give them a score of 9 for the relation between what you get and what you pay.

This gives CreateStudio an average score of 7,6 which translates to a B-tier animation software.

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Now, let’s move on from this 3D animation maker, to a SUPER popular 2D animation software.

 

Animaker Review

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Animaker’s got 20 million users!

(But I’m not going to be one of them anytime soon.)

If you consider Animaker as your animation tool of choice, you want to keep reading.

Of course it’s not all bad - let’s begin with what’s working:

 

Style

Animaker’s animation style is calm, clean and friendly. Their characters look great - not too cartoonish, subtle details, quite professional, but still with some warmth.

Their animated actions are super smooth, with what looks like a higher framerate than what I’m used to. Very pleasant for the eyes.

They’ve also designed a bunch of good-looking backgrounds for those characters to live in - good colors, good depth, and good overall aesthetics.

If it’s possible to talk about geographically rooted design language, I’d say these designs are rooted in an Asian aesthetic. I visited an animation agency in Thailand, and this was what their videos looked like.

There’s no right or wrong, just personal preference, and I land somewhere in the middle with Animaker, and give their style a 6.

 

Usability

Animaker’s usability is a chapter of its own. Good things to mention are the intuitive character creator which is more customizable than any other I’ve seen.

Lots of styles, and lots of things to change, so you’ll probably be able to design a character that looks much like yourself, which is often the goal.

I also like how Actions in Animaker are coupled, so if you want a character to work on a computer, you just choose that action.

In most other tools, you’d have to first find an action of sitting down, typing and then combine that with a chair, a desk, and a computer, and try to make all those elements fit.

Like in CreateStudio, the price we pay for this is a very limited amount of actions. This means you’ll often have a hard time finding an action that fits with your story or message.

And this is the point in my test of Animaker where I started to get frustrated.

It was close to impossible for me to figure out the logics behind Action+ and SmartMove.

Having worked with animation for a decade, it killed me to struggle so hard with the basics.

I’m sure there is nothing but good intentions behind Animakers wish to simplify and make video creation easy for beginners. But for anyone used to more standard interfaces, like keyframes or motion paths for movement, and a standard layered timeline, this will take time to unlearn, then learn Animaker's clunky logic.

With multiple tools in today’s test, we see attempts at “fixing” the Timeline.

There’s a quote that goes “Don’t fix what ain’t broken”, and that’s how I feel about Animakers approach; they’ve split the Timeline into a Scene timeline and an overall timeline.

And then a small hidden “Camera timeline”.

If each one was an ingenious simplification, I’d applaud it, but I felt equally lost in all three. Could I watch tutorials and learn it? For sure. Is it intuitive? Not at all.

With this in mind, I’ll repeat myself from my full animaker review, and say that the tool seems to be best suited for stringing together a series of scene templates that aren’t changed much.

Custom scenes with custom animations appear to be a real headache to get right, so if I were to use Animaker in the future, I’d get good at finding and tweaking templates, or putting characters on top of backgrounds.

But:

Turns out, this is hard too: There’s no search function for finding scenes and templates.

So you kinda have to memorize what scenarios are there, and then find yourself boxed into those.

To top that off, the entire software build feels shaky and buggy, with stuff that got lost that I had to redo, elements not showing, and constant micro load time.

Sometimes, it crashes completely, and you lose your work.

So, I have to give Animaker a usability score of 4.

 

Price

Trying to stay positive here, the pricing is actually decent, compared to other animation makers.

To make something useful with Animaker, I would need the Starter plan at $300/year, which is $25/month.

Being a low-quality tool with a low price, Animaker lands in the middle and gets a Pricing score of 5.

But to be honest, I wouldn’t use Animaker if it was free.

I don’t understand the popularity of this tool.

To me, it seems like a thin shell of a product, elevated by an enormous marketing effort. I can only see this tool impress if you’ve never touched video production before, and even then, I’d recommend starting somewhere else.

Both the production process and the resulting video are below average, when seen in the light of modern-day platforms that excel in their delightful user experiences and incredible outputs.

Is what Animaker makes truly engaging? Is it a powerful tool in relation to current technological developments? I simply don’t get the hype.

The average of Animaker’s 3 scores is 5, which makes Animaker a D-tier animation software.

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So, if you’re serious about making professional videos, you might consider the next tool instead:

Biteable Review

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I tried an early version of Biteable years ago, so I was skeptical when revisiting their online video maker. But after a few hours, my skepticism was replaced by optimism.

 

Style

First thing they really have going for them is their variety and quality of Styles: 2D, 3D, sketched, powerpointish, a LOT to choose from.

But this wouldn’t have been such a plus if all these styles were bad, but they’re not.

Bitable has the highly popular “workplace flat faceless” style that I think is professional and aesthetically appealing.

Right now, I’m into these simple styles with a few maximized props, and I would be totally fine with sharing these videos externally with my network, on YouTube or on Linkedin.

And that’s a question you can ask yourself about any of these premade animation Style:

• Would I put my name on this?
• Would I share a video made in this style with my network?

If the answer is no, move on to another style, or tool.

Biteable’s styles taste great, they’re aesthetically pleasing, modern, strict, simple, and they pass the “would I share this with my network” test.

As you can hear, we’re in the upper range - I’ll give Biteable the highest Style score given so far in this review, a 9.

 

Usability

A few quick highlights of the Usability of Biteable are

1. Super easy voice-over generation
2. Ingenious way you apply your own brand
3. Huge template library
4. Responsive, quick user interface with minimal load times
5. Bulk edit colors and texts (huge timesaver)
6. The stock music included is tasteful, useful
7. The tool autosaves all the time, feels nice and safe
8. And last but not least, the collaborative features for teams who make videos together.

You can share assets, comment on videos, and even invite someone to deliver a recording, for example, an expert or the CEO of your company, then you edit that recording into a video.

That’s all very good indeed, but no tool is perfect, so let’s take a look at the stuff I don’t like about Biteable:

As with its animation maker cousins, this is a “template first” interface.

What do I mean by that?

Well, if you want to make scenes, or entire videos from scratch, using your own original ideas and designs, expect a clunky and tedious process.

I assume 90% of Bitables customers are video novices who DON’T want to build stuff from scratch, but I would, and I struggled.

What’s up with the fact that you can’t search for assets?

Imagine I was a dog trainer and I needed to find a dog to use in my video. I’d probably choose a style I like, then want to search for dog props within that style. Not possible.

Maybe this is because the selection within each style is so limited.

You don’t need search when you can scroll through everything in a few seconds. But still; I’d love a universal search bar where I’d type “dog” and I’d see all dog-related assets in all styles, so I know what I have to work with.

You can go to Script Mode and Scenes to search for scene templates, but also not much to choose from there - for dog lovers.

Looking at the assets, Biteable is probably less for dog trainers or anything else quite specific like that - and more for general topics like business, team updates, product promotions, surface-level stuff like that, where a generic selection of props and actions will carry that message just fine, in combination with a voice-over.

Another Usability issue I had with Biteable was the amount of “mouse work”. You’ll find yourself clicking an awful lot because the amount of keyboard shortcuts is limited.

(Not important when you just get started, but down the line, when you work on your 20th video, it’ll really start to annoy you.)

When you build a video, you preview a LOT to see what it looks like by now, what animations play when, etc.

I’m used to the shortcut “command P”, but this doesn’t work in Biteable.

I read the help article on previewing a video, and it became pretty obvious there’s no keyboard shortcut, you just have to click, click, click.

I missed an expanded Timeline, but I learned that it’s not really necessary, because you see the animations of each asset in a separate view.

By now, you know what I think of attempts to “simplify” the standard stacked Timeline.

And if I can get really nerdy with Usability, the fact that secondary mouse clicks, meaning right clicks, open platform-specific menus in some cases, and browser-specific menus in others.

That earns Biteable another minus.

Lastly, we need to address what all these animations makers attempted to implement in 2023, AI.

AI just HAD to be implemented SOMEHOW, SOMEWHERE.

Biteable does it better than average, because the AI video creation WORKS, but it is still more of a gimmick than something useful out of the box.

I tried to promote an imaginative product:

It works as a project kickstarter, and that’s probably also the point.

With a lot of useful, solid, pleasant-to-use features, and a couple of drawbacks, Bitable’s Usability score lands on a 7.

 

Price

When it comes to Price, Biteable makes things simple and offers 2 “sign up yourself” plans, and the standard “contact us” option for big companies.

Prices change now and then, and they have changed since I took my first notes for this review.

Revisiting their pricing page now, the prices have gone up to $99 or $588 for Pro, and $199 or $1188 for Premium.

One time I logged in, a pop-up offered me Premium for $29 per month (link to deal).

So Biteable is probably a tool with some degree of flexible pricing.

It’s often a good tip to try to delete your account and see what happens. Sometimes, you get offered a huge discount.

(Not with Biteable though, I tried.)

You get a 7-day free trial before you have to choose a plan, and I’d say Pro is great for solocreators, and Premium is great for teams.

I would go for the Yearly Pro plan at $588, and that’s amazing value for money with Biteable.

On Price, Bitable gets an 8.

To conclude, Biteable is great for simple explainers, animated slideshows, and similar simple formats - for anyone new to video, who wants a better-than-basic tool with high-end templates and that’s easy to learn - and who probably uses these videos for internal communications.

The 3 scores result in an average of 8, and that makes Bitable an A-tier animation maker.

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Next up is a tool I’ve praised for its character creator, but what about the platform as a whole?

Powtoon Review

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When you log in, it's clear to see we're dealing with a template-first animation maker - much like the others.

 

Style

Once you get past the jungle of templates and into the actual video creator, you can work in 4 overall styles with variations within each one.

Depending on what you choose the libraries change, and filter out most irrelevant assets. Nice.

And I like what I consider Powtoons primary style - the one they call Animation Look.

A clean and simple aesthetic, and super smooth character actions.

I’m less of a fan of the other styles;

The Video style is what I’d call an animated slideshow with pretty okay templates.

The Whiteboard style is quite bad.

And the Cartoon style library looks alright, but inconsistent and some the substyles slightly overused and outdated (if you've work with explainers for 10 years).

If Powtoon was my tool, I’d clean up the styles, get rid of what’s legacy, and showcase a stringent, clean primary style, which would be the Animation Look.

But with all the clutter that I have to take into account, I give Powtoon a Style score of 6.

 

Usability

Powtoon does well in a number of Usability areas:

The timeline is, once again, a simplified, one-layer design, similar to Animaker, but it’s way easier to use.

So even though I don’t like the overall idea, the execution is not bad at all.

Powtoon gets a huge star in my book for their INSTANT preview - oh lord, have I spent years of my life, accumulated, waiting for online animation tools to load.

A basic feature of any animation tool is to be able to make stuff move from one location to another. Some use keyframes, some use motion paths, and Powtoon nails this with their “A to B” feature.

Intuitive, thank you.

Powtoon has two modes; Edit and Create.

It’s a fun idea, where you’re supposed to only make small changes to templates when you’re in Edit.

And then you get full control of everything in Create mode.

Not a biggy, but they get half a point for this simplification attempt.

But the biggest thing Powtoon has going for them is the character builder. One of the best I’ve used, with a relatively unique ability to put logos on clothes, and just a breeze to create custom characters.

They’ve gated this feature behind the Business Plan at $125 a month, but it’s there and it’s good.

On to the not-so-great things that need to be said about the Usability of Powtoon:

I keep talking about a tool’s “feel”, and what’s that about? It’s the little things that make you enjoy working inside a platform - or that make you dread it. Sometimes not easy to put a finger on, like load times, micro glitches, stuff like that, but it contributes to an overall.. feel - like if it was a tangible product, like a t-shirt, it has a feel that tells you something about its quality.

Powtoons feel is not the best - it feels a little cheap like there’s no love in the code that makes up its foundation, with too many small bugs and glitches that worry me and would make me question whether I should invest my time and money with these guys.

Like renting a house that looks great, has all the right features, but feels 2% unsteady.

Another annoying thing is the lack of filters. This makes it hard to stay consistent with one style.

And there’s just too much in the libraries to get that feeling of overview, knowing which drawer to look in for that specific thing.

On top of the chaos and confusion, so much is labeled Pro, so you have to upgrade to that plan to use these assets.

Fair enough that you need to pay for a tool, but I don’t like this way of gating props - and features!

A simple feature like Camera Movement is gated and requires the Business plan.

Camera Movement is essential in making your videos look more dynamic, less static - and in reusing one scene design in multiple ways.

I wouldn’t say this basic animation feature is business-specific, so why make it exclusive to the Business plan?

It also annoyed me that what you see on the canvas is dictated by where the timeline scrubber is. So, things are just gone, and you have no idea why..

.. until you move the scrubber and there it is.

To round off this batch of bad UI, there’s no real way to work with voiceovers inside Powtoon. This is all you get:

I teach my animation students to let the voice-over lead the way, and that the voice-over is master, and the animations are servants. So, the voice-over is super foundational for an animated video, and that’s why I’m shocked by the lack of user interface around this.

My best guess is that Powtoon primarily wants to be a tool for voiceless videos - where you use onscreen texts to give context to the animations instead of a spoken voice-over.

I believe that’s a weaker format, but if the alternative is to not make video at all, I’m all for it.

Based on these pros and cons, I land on a Usability score of 6.

 

Price

The Price for Powtoon is $480 per year if you want the professional plan. It’s ridiculously priced at $190 per month, so you would obviously rather pay $480 for a full year.

The useless Lite plan is $50/month or $180/year. And the Business plan, where you get access to Camera Movement, the Character Builder, and Text to Speech, is $1500/year or $125/month, which makes no sense: the price per month for Business is cheaper than the Professional plan. Maybe because it’s annual only.

The grade for Powtoons pricing is given both for this mess of a price ladder, and for the relation between what the tool offers and it’s cost. We land on a 3.

 

In conclusion, I’ll try to see the positive and say that if you’re fine with Powtoon's bloated styles, and you learn the clunky interface, you can make fine little videos. It’s an animation tool best suited for really simple template-based videos without voice-over. But I think it lacks focus.

Strip away 50% of the features, and 90% of the styles, make what’s left 10 times stronger, and you’d have a pretty cool animation maker. I’m not trying to deliberately trash these tools, but in comparison to what’s promised vs. delivered, held up against what the competition looks like, I simply can’t fathom how Powtoon scores a 4.4 on G2 and 4.5 on Capterra.

The average of how I scored Powtoon is 5, which makes Powtoon a D-tier animation maker.

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Let’s move on to the next, extremely affordable, highly promoted animation platform when looking at the ad pressure on Facebook and YouTube.

Toonly / Doodly Review

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If you are on the lookout for an animation tool you might have stumbled upon this $67-lifetime deal, which seems too good to be true.

And unfortunately, it IS too good to be true.

Let’s do a quick rundown of these two tools, Toonly and Doodly, made by the same company, Voomly.

 

Style

Toonly is the cartoon-styled tool.

And Doodly is a whiteboard-animation doodle-style tool.

I made a full Toonly vs. Vyond comparison a few years ago, and Toonly hasn’t changed much since then, so in this video, I’ll focus on the stronger tool, Doodly.

Doodly’s style is classic whiteboard animation, and as always with Style, you gotta decide whether their aesthetic fits with your brand. I think it’s nicely simple and actually looks somewhat hand-drawn - in a good way.

There’s a bit of a Disney feel to some of the characters, but many of the props are very basic, almost icon looking.

For what it is, it looks fine. And there's good consistency across the libraries.

I’ll give Doodly a 6 for their style.

 

Usability

When it comes to Usability, know that Doodly is a desktop app just like CreateStudio. You have to download and use it as a separate application - not an online tool your browser can handle.

It’s not the greatest interface ever made, but it comes closer to standard video editing tools I’ve used.

The best part about Doodly is that it’s a focused piece of software; it does whiteboard video, and that’s it.

One way this focus shows is in the quality and precision of the animated drawing paths.

Some tools do this very harshly, but Doodly makes it look like the assets are actually drawn by the animated hand.

The worst part about Doodly is the limited libraries that are limited in order to make you buy a higher plan.

The push to upgrade is omnipresent, and this rarely does anything good for the experience of creating with the tool.

On that note, you should know that ClickFunnels recently bought Doodly.

ClickFunnels is a major marketing platform known for their funnel-builder, often recognized by their use of red blinking buttons, pop-ups, countdowns, and other stressors to make you buy stuff quickly.

When a marketing platform buys a whiteboard animation tool, I worry that the tool becomes more about making money than making videos, so I’d be reluctant to invest time and money in Doodly right now.

But hey; they tool works fine without being a true delight to work with.

For Doodly’s current animation maker, I give them a Usability score of 5.

 

Price

Doodly is extremely affordable; just $67 for lifetime access, right? Well, yes and no. If you buy this deal, you DO get access. But very limited access.

You will have to pay more and more in the future, to unlock features and libraries needed to make your content.

If you don’t get that lifetime offer and enter Doodly through the front door, so to say, there’s a 14-day free trial followed by a $49/month price tag.

That’s a bit hefty for what you get, which isn’t everything. Then you have to pay $79/month for the Enterprise plan, which gives you more characters, more props and more templates. Of course there’s an annual payment plan where you save 17%.

With the way they price this, I think Doodly smells more like a lead generator and money-maker for ClickFunnels than an honest animation tool.

Even if I view Doodly in isolation, their pricing is relatively high. So Doodly gets a 4 for Pricing, and lands on an average of 5; a D-tier animation platform.

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If you want a better whiteboard animation tool, consider Doodly’s cousin:

 

VideoScribe Review

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I’ve reviewed these guys a couple of times through the years, and also compared VideoScribe with Vyond, and they keep getting better - little by little.

Let's dive into what they do better now than before, and where they still have some distance to go.

 

Style

I love their primary whiteboard style with that thick stroke, and a few shadows to add some depth.

It’s easy to mix up their styles to create an amateur-looking video, but if you manage to stick to one, it’s a good one.

On this note, I’d love a style filter, to be able to filter out everything but the style you choose for your video.

If VideoScribe did full-color customization of their props, instead of partial, they would get a big plus for that because it would allow you to use your brand colors on all props.

But it’s not a deal breaker; I like the primary style, it looks professional, and I give VideoScribe a Style score of 7 for that.

 

Usability

Big news in the VideoScribe camp; they now offer a browser-based version of their tool.

Works great!

I also tell myself that they’ve improved their animated paths for letters and graphics - a critique point in earlier reviews.

I love the diversity of hands you can choose as the one that draws all assets; different skin colors, right or left-handed, different pens.

Nice!

And a Usability feature I truly, deeply appreciate is the keyboard shortcut for previewing a video.

Thank you, VideoScribe.

Now, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows - of course, I have a few things I don’t love:

Their Timeline - yes, again with the Timelines - is not great.

Points for the effort, but they haven’t succeeded in building a functioning timeline. It’s actually quite bad. Worst thing about it is the lack of a scrubber that shows you, where you are in the video.

They used to only have the Blocks view, and I think they should stick to that for now.

If they could somehow work in what Synthesia does to time the animations to the voice-over, using triggers in the text or voice-over.

So, you insert triggers into the text or transcribed voice-over, and then link those triggers to elements on the canvas - so they appear at the right moment.

I think that would work really well in VideoScribe. 

With the above in mind, I'm gonna give VideScribe a Usability score of 6. 

 

Price

The price of VideoScribe is shown in my local currency, but converted to USD it’s $59/month or $255/year.

This is good value for money, and I have to give VideoScribe a strong 7 on Price for the annual deal.

 

In conclusion, VideoScribe is a focused whiteboard tool with a great primary style, a somewhat usable interface you can learn to navigate after struggling a bit, and with a pricing that makes it quite accessible and useful for solo creators or small businesses.

The average of my three scores is 6.6, and that makes VideoScribe a decent C-tier animation tool.

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Now, we’ve been through a bunch of lukewarm tools, but this last one is definitely a recommend - and a personal favorite.

 

Vyond Review

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Full disclosure, I’ve used Vyond for more than 10 years, so I might be biased in my ability to see what’s good and bad.

With that said, the reason why I’ve USED Vyond for so long is that I honestly find it the most versatile, easy-to-use animation maker.

Let’s stick to the structure and start with its Styles.

 

Style

Vyond has 3 primary styles, and each one has adequately populated libraries with props, backgrounds, and characters in that style.

The contemporary style is my favorite. It’s the newest style in Vyond, and I guess that it was created as a reaction to the increasing number of enterprise customers who demanded a more professional, grown-up, non-cartoonish style.

It’s a so-called flat style, with few details, no shadows, little depth.

It’s 100% color-customizable, so you can change the color of everything to match your brand colors.

Next style is called Business Friendly, although it’s probably not AS business-friendly as Contemporary. But that’s the name, and the style is a bit more playful, bigger heads, more focus on facial expressions, emotions, and a great style for storytelling, scenario-based learning, conversations, stuff like that.

This style has the largest library of template scenes, props, backgrounds, and actions.

And new ones are constantly released.

I like the fact that you can go industry-specific, and find asset categories that fit with what you work with.

Last style is the Whiteboard style, - similar to Doodly and VideoScribe. But I like Vyond’s whiteboard style better because of its simpler, thicker stroke, and for the fact that it’s 100% consistent across all assets, so you can’t mix up whiteboard styles.

Other tools try to add in the whiteboard style and fail a little bit because it FEELS like a half-baked addon.

But Vyond’s build feels more like the third leg of a stool - an equally sturdy product that could have made it as its own tool.

For the aesthetics, the number of assets, and the consistency within each style, I give Vyond a score of 9.

The styles are great, but it’s the usability of Vyond that sets it apart from a tool like Biteable, which has equally great styles and also scored a 9.

 

Usability

A golden feature that makes Vyond stand out from the rest of the animation makers is the timeline. I’m trying not to be too much of a fan-boy here, but I honestly think they’ve nailed it.

The timeline is scene specific, so you only see what’s relevant right now. It’s stacked, like in any other standard video editor - no group views, or alternative timeline views. And only animated assets are shown, not all assets in the scene. This simplifies things in a great way.

I also like that Vyond is panel based, so you only see relevant libraries and features when it’s relevant.

At all other times, it’s closed down for a cleaner, more pleasant work environment.

The user interface is designed to cater for both the “template people” and the “design from scratch” users - no multiple views, just basic features that make both avenues easy to follow.

Of all the tools I’ve tested, Vyond has one of the most solid builds - very rarely do I experience bugs, and they fixed one point of critique I’ve had for years; that the interface slowed down when making longer videos.

Doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

Like Powtoon, Vyond uses a beginner-friendly logic instead of the more advanced concept of key-framing - getting stuff to move from one place to another. Powtoon called it “A to B”, Vyond calls it Motion Paths, and it’s very intuitive to work with.

The character creator is on par with some of the best, like Powtoon’s, but it’s available on all plans, not just the $125/month one. Different styles, body types, and big, expanding libraries of assets for every body part.

The text-to-speech feature in Vyond is rich in the sense that multiple qualities of voices are available, and many voices support different voice styles.

And the voice clip can easily be assigned to a character, to make the mouth move to the words.

Last positive on Usability is the features around collaboration and sharing, where you can share projects and assets across multiple users who work inside the same company.

Great for teams of creators, and for letting subject matter experts review videos in the making.

I did dig out some negative things about the Usability of Vyond, but these are smaller things:

• like the need for a decent internet connection to make the platform run smoothly
• that the promise of making videos in minutes isn’t really true because it does take time to create something good in Vyond
• and that many of the latest features feel more like gimmicks than anything truly useful.

Just compare this background removal feature to what a dedicated tool can do.

And the AI stuff, like generating your own assets, doesn’t really work well enough to make it into a video.

But these are new add-ons and aren’t disturbing enough to take away from the fundamental build of the platform.

In that light, and compared to any other animation maker I’ve used, I have to give Vyond a Usability score of 10.

 

Price

Vyond has gotten a lot of heat for their Pricing. The Internet thinks it’s expensive.

My impression is that most of these voices come from hobbyists and freelancers when Vyond addresses a more corporate market with bigger budgets.

Doesn’t change the fact that Vyond does cost more, though.

The plans are called essential, premium and professional, and they’ll cost you $49, $89, and $179 a month, or $299, $649, and $1099 a year.

You’ll probably do fine with Premium Yearly at $649, which is 54 dollars per month.

The Essential plan is close to useless because Vyond slabs a big watermark on all your exports - even though you pay $49 per month.

That’s harsh. So you HAVE to get Premium or Professional, where the biggest difference I see is the ability to bulk edit, and import your own fonts on the Professional plan.

If you want to sell videos, there’s a fee of $99 every time you do that.

Other tools have plans that give you commercial rights or reseller rights, but with Vyond that’s a fee for every video you sell.

This puts a big brake on agencies who want to build a business using Vyond - like I did years ago.

With a relatively high price point, a useless lowest plan, and the lack of reseller rights on higher plans, I give Vyond a Price score of 5.

In conclusion, Vyond scores high because of their styles, an interface that’s quick and pleasant to work with, a solid built that rarely breaks or annoys, and because it lets you animate both as a beginner and an experienced user within the same tool - the range of what you can create and how you create it is wide.

The average of Vyond’s three scores is 8, which makes Vyond an A-tier animation maker.

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🤔 Conclusion

Biteable and Vyond made it to the A-tier, and CreateStudio came right after with a B-tier score. These 3 animation makers are the ones I can recommend for professional use.

VideoScribe landed on the C-tier, which is a passing score, but not a personal recommendation.

Powtoon, Animaker, and Doodly fail, with their D-tier - despite their praise from other reviewers and high scores on major review platforms.

They have a diluted focus in their props and template scenes, a sub-par visual style, and a general interface feel that makes it impossible for me to imagine daily professional use of these animation makers.

But this is what I think, as a professional animator and software reviewer.

If you want to try any of the tools yourself, I’ve made a page with direct links to trials and links to the places where I found deals.

👉🏻 Free trials and deals on all animation makers

Let me know your experiences in the comments below the video version of this review, and subscribe to the YouTube channel for more tool reviews in the future.

Thanks for reading.

If you want to see more examples from each tool, watch the video review on YouTube.