If you’re taking your first step into professional AI video creation, our deep-dive Pictory review will help steer you toward the right course!
Why should you trust our insights? We’ve spent over 500 hours rigorously evaluating software tools in this space. Using the same review system we applied when we dove deep into Cutout Pro’s capabilities, we’ll highlight the pros and cons of Pictory, rate it on its most essential metrics, and spotlight some of its most notable features.
We’ll also offer some viable alternatives if you decide the tool isn’t the perfect fit for you. But, hold on: What is Pictory AI, exactly? It’s an important question!
Releasing its first prototype in 2019, Pictory AI has advanced extraordinarily in performance and feature set in the short time since.
The ultimate, overriding goal of the app is to convert longform enterprise content like blog posts, articles, and white papers into short, engaging video content by using AI technology.
Pictory Review and Overview
So, how does Pictory accomplish its main mission? A few ways!
At its core, Pictory delivers its promises to video creators (both individual and as part of business teams) through a handful of key feature sets:
- Text-to-video creation. After inputting a simple text script, the program outputs a fully-formed, professional-grade video project on the other end. This blew our minds as, we think that this level of personalization can significantly enhance user engagement and improve conversion rates.
- Blog and social media integration. Blog posts can be converted into videos, and then seamlessly shared on social media in bite-sized clips. The cool thing about this is not only did where we able to to diversify out content but also extend their reach. A Win Win!
- Automatic transcription and captioning. Accessibility is made much easier with AI-assisted transcripts and closed captioning for your videos. In addition to making our videos accessible to a broader audience. we found that our test videos had higher retention rates and increased user interaction.
What Are Pictory’s Pricing Plans?
Before we get to our full Pictory review, it’s crucial that we cover the available price tiers offered by the company.
Let’s break down the app’s current pricing plans:
Plan
Standard
$23/month
Features
- Maximum of 30 videos per month
- Text-to-video projects up to 10 minutes long
- 5,000 available music tracks
- 34 AI voice options
Premium
$47/month
Features
- Maximum of 60 videos per month
- Text-to-video projects up to 20 minutes long
- 10 million Getty stock videos
- 60 AI voice options
Teams
$119/month
Features
- Up to 3 users
- Maximum of 90 videos per month
- 15,000 available music tracks
- Collaboration features
Pros and Cons of Pictory
We’re almost ready to get into the ratings!
But, to start our Pictory review off on the right note, let’s take a minute to outline the most consequential strengths and weaknesses of the app:
Pros
User-friendliness
Any way you look at it, Pictory is at the top of its game when it comes to intuitive, friendly UI design.
Affordability
With its competitive pricing and free trial options, this is one of the more affordable AI video apps on the market.
Feature variety
Pictory displays a breadth and range of features as uncommon as it is refreshing!
Cons
Slow rendering speed
Certain videos, and especially longer projects, can take ages to finish rendering.
Poor language accessibility
Foreign language support has been noticeably overlooked in Pictory.
Inconsistent AI voice quality
While the voice quality is often quite impressive, sometimes it sounds as robotic as you might expect.
Pictory Review: Summary Table for Key Features
Range of Features
Pictory offers a robust set of features, including automatic text-to-voice and stock media support, that enhance video automation. However, it falls short in folder navigation and inconsistent AI voice quality.
Customization and User Choice
Pictory excels in customization, allowing users to adjust brand colors, fonts, and even include custom slogans. Yet, it could offer more options for transitions and additional AI voice choices.
User-Friendliness
Pictory’s interface is exceptionally user-friendly, making it easy to navigate and find features. The automation tech handles advanced editing seamlessly, leaving no room for complaints.
Affordability and Trial Availability
Pictory is competitively priced and offers a free trial across all plans, making it risk-free to test. This sets it apart from competitors in terms of value for money.
Performance and Rendering
Pictory runs smoothly for the most part, but struggles with slow rendering speeds for longer videos. This isn’t a dealbreaker but is a notable drawback.
Accessibility
The app scores high on accessibility with features like automatic transcription and captioning. However, it lacks in language support, making it less appealing to non-English speakers.
AI Features and Quality
Pictory’s AI capabilities are generally strong, especially in automatic video generation and highlight creation. The text-to-speech feature, while accurate, could be improved for more natural-sounding voices.
Deep Dive Pictory Key Feature Review
Now that we have our main preliminary steps out of the way, it’s time to kick off our Pictory review in full!
For our rating, we’ll assess the app on a set of key categories, and use those scores to generate a final rating for the entire program.
Let’s get started!
Range of Features
For the most part, Pictory includes a comprehensive list of features that we found particularly useful for a video automation workflow.
Most notably, there was automatic text-to-voice generation, support for stock music tracks and video clips, a variety of AI voice choices, and video highlight generation. Other, more minor, features that we saw as refreshing were the social media support and closed captioning.
However, we were disappointed at the barebones folder navigation features, as well as the sometimes spotty AI voice results.
Customization and User Choice
Pictory definitely takes customization into account, and often offers impressive results!
One essential area of customization that we took special note of was branding. In this regard, Pictory is quite flexible. We were able to adjust settings like brand colors and fonts, upload business logos and use them for watermarks, and include custom slogans and catchphrases in the video script.
That said, we would have liked to see some more options to tweak transitions, and it’d be nice to have more AI voices to choose from.
User-Friendliness
Without a doubt, Pictory is extraordinarily easy to use. Right when we launched the app, we were immediately focused on the highly simple, and almost reflexively intuitive layout and interface design.
There was virtually no feature or setting that was even the slightest bit difficult to find, and advanced editing was taken care of by the automation tech.
No complaints on this metric!
Affordability and Trial Availability
Another area of complete approval from us: Pictory is quite reasonably priced and you’ll find few tools with the same features that offer a more competitive price tag.
But, what really puts the app over the edge for us is the free trial option. Every plan, from the least-featured Standard tier to the more expensive Teams plan, offers a trial option. This trial availability makes it stunningly easy to test out the app and see if it’s a good fit, without having to pay for anything ahead of time.
Performance and Rendering
While Pictory generally runs quite smoothly, this is where we ran into our first major issue: Rendering.
It’s a slightly less worrisome bug for shorter videos, but once we got into the lengthier projects, the slower rendering speed ended up quite the headache. We don’t see this roadblock being a dealbreaker for anyone, but it’s still a significant drawback!
Accessibility
In some ways, Pictory is an extremely accessible program; in others, it falls a bit short!
To start with the positive side, we noticed that the automatic transcription generation and video captioning help make the app highly accessible to anyone using the app, including the hearing-impaired.
On the other hand, our view is that the lack of language support and options makes the tool substantially less attractive to non-English speakers.
AI Features and Quality
By most metrics, Pictory is quite advanced when it comes to modern AI technology. Automatic video generation is smooth and rarely falls victim to bugs, and the AI-generated video highlights are remarkably sophisticated.
An area where the app can improve on this measure is text-to-speech. While the words are almost always accurate, to our dismay they often sounded a bit inhuman coming through the AI voices. At certain points, it was like nails on a chalkboard!
Of course, this feature will likely improve as more innovations continue to be made with artificial intelligence.
Pictory’s Top Features
Our Pictory review would be more than a little incomplete if we didn’t talk about the most significant and compelling features packaged with the app!
Here, let’s discuss the essential advantages Pictory displays:
Embracing the Future: AI Tools
AI is the heart and soul of Pictory, and arguably its biggest selling point. So, what does Pictory AI look like in practice?
The primary way the app’s AI generates video is by converting content between mediums.
For example, we were able to copy the text from an example blog post, turned it into a quick video script, and ran it through the software to generate a compelling, pleasant-to-watch short-form video within minutes (complete with a business template, AI-generated voiceover, and soothing background music.)
It’s the same for video essays, in-depth articles, white papers, research projects, and much more!
Bolstering Brands with Customization
Crafting a unique brand identity is crucial for businesses hoping to create worthwhile video content.
Fortunately, Pictory helps do just that! Customization options within the tool that can help distinguish brands include color scheme variety, typeface support, and uploadable company logos.
Likewise, we noticed additional customization features for audio, with the choice to upload audio files or even create custom voiceover narration.
Musical Wonders for Audiophiles
If anyone is concerned about the musical and audio selections in Pictory, we can put those fears to rest!
Even the most affordable Standard tier offers 5,000 music tracks to choose from, with the Teams plan boasting a library of over 15,000 tracks. We tried out tracks ranging from calming, soft keyboard pieces to drum-pounding, heart-pumping techno and rock songs.
Of course, it’s entirely possible to simply upload custom tracks, but we felt the built-in selection pushed the app’s audio support to a higher level.
Elevate Any Project: Millions of Stock Videos
While we’re talking about pre-built stock assets, we would be remiss not to point out Pictory’s extensive video library.
Packaged inside the tool we were almost overwhelmed by the staggering 10 million Getty video clips (though this was for the Premium plan we were subscribed to.) These videos really covered the whole gamut of topics, but generally, we thought they were very high-quality and worth including in professional projects.
For an app focused on speedy video production, this can be a game-changer in videos that are getting close to the deadline!
Headache-Free Automatic Captioning
Accessibility is less of an option and more of a requirement with modern video tech, and Pictory certainly takes this shift into account.
Using the app’s automatic captioning tools, we found that it’s possible to almost instantly create closed captioning for even lengthy, narration-heavy projects. Generally, the captions were impressive and we marveled at the AI’s ability to decipher even hard-to-hear words and phrases.
In that same vein, the program is also able to create short summaries for videos and store those summaries in a cloud-based system, opening up the door to providing “key points” to those who can’t otherwise access the video.
Video Highlights for Busy Viewers
Speaking of video summaries, Pictory also integrates automatic highlight generation!
In effect, this means that we could generate short, action-packed clips of longer video projects and share them on social media platforms.
For brands trying to create as much engagement as possible (and who isn’t?), this can expand a target audience to unseen levels.
After testing out a few video options, it was immediately clear to us that this feature is most useful for longer videos that wouldn’t make for good social media promotions. It wasn’t really that helpful for a 3-minute test video we put together of roller coaster footage!
Writers Rejoice: Quick and Easy Text Editing
While videos are a visual media, text plays a crucial role in many, if not most, video-based projects.
And, with Pictory, working with text becomes much more straightforward!
Whether it’s automatically generating scripts, extracting summaries of key points from narration and dialogue, or quick text highlighting and word searches, the app has its bases covered.
Clicking through the transcription tab, we thought the highlight percentage slide was a super clever way of generating text highlights. If we wanted to focus only on the most significant text, we could set the slider to a lower number like 5 or 10%. On the other hand, we could go all the way up to 50% and beyond for shorter videos where there isn’t as much to highlight.
Main Pictory Alternatives
No doubt, the AI video production field is an ever-growing market.
Here are a few Pictory alternative challengers that might give the company a little cause for concern!
Fliki
In the world of video automation apps, Fliki distinguishes itself from competitors like Pictory with its lower price, analytics features, and API availability.
However, Pictory edges out Fliki on metrics such as brand customization, file format support, and social media integration.
Movio
Movio has some definite advantages that make it stand out compared to alternatives like Pictory, including highly customizable avatars, choice of AI voices, and visual gestures and animations.
Downsides to the app are its complexity and steeper learning curve, especially compared to Pictory’s extremely intuitive UI.
Lumen5
Areas where Lumen5 excels over Pictory include 24/7 customer support services, a higher number of videos per month, and less obtrusive watermark (only a problem for free plans!)
That said, Pictory triumphs over Lumen5 when it comes to video resolution, a lower price tag, and uploadable audio files.
Support and Community Resources
Support resources are of essential importance to maintain community health for any software product, and especially technologically advanced projects like the app Pictory AI.
With that in mind, let’s look at the community and support resources provided by the company!
Video Marketing Masterclasses
One incredibly helpful educational option Pictory we tracked down was video marketing “masterclasses”, found within the website’s Academy portal.
Video podcasts and tutorials we checked out included explanations on how to repurpose video content as part of a marketing strategy (which included tips we found phenomenally useful, such as discussion on live shows and how they can improve brand access), introductions to personal branding through video projects, and presentations on AI uses for platforms like LinkedIn.
Official Company Blog
Another excellent resource Pictory uses that we appreciated from an engagement perspective is the company’s blog.
Pictory actively updates its blog with posts regarding a range of topics, from beginner-oriented introductions to marketing, all the way to reflections on the most common content marketing mistakes.
One particularly fascinating blog post we read through gave a deep-dive look at the cost and labor saving benefits of automatic video generation, and we’re confident that small and upcoming businesses would find these tips incredibly fruitful.
Final Verdict
As far as video automation goes, Pictory has many strengths to rely on. Most vitally, the easy-to-use layout and interface, generous free trial offer, and widely-spanning range of features make it a stand-out app by any account.
To its detriment, however, the app renders videos slowly, doesn’t offer much in the way of language accessibility, and could use some work on its AI-generated voiceovers.
Taking this all into account, we’re going to conclude our Pictory review by rating the software 4.1/5.
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