Tubebuddy is a software aimed at assisting YouTubers in their content creation journey. It functions like a work-assistant or teacher that helps automate and streamline the publishing process. But it isn’t the only software in this niche – there are several more created for the same process.
You see, while Tubebuddy has its pros, it isn’t the perfect match for every creator. The best way to gauge its fit for your needs is by evaluating the cost-to-benefit ratio of the platform, weighing its pros and cons, and making comparisons. This approach allows you to confidently subscribe after assessing its value through a reliable rating methodolog
Read on as we explore an honest review on how to use tubebuddy, its strengths and weaknesses, and rate it against the pillars of real good software.
What is Tubebuddy?
After signing in with my Google account, I was prompted to download the Tubebuddy extension and sign in with YouTube. This bit helps merge Tubebuddy and your channel. Afterwards, you’re greeted with onboarding material and prompted to link a YouTube channel.
After linking your channels, you’re redirected back to the page and given an overview of your channel’s analytics.
The sort of analytics that’ll be available to your channel depends on the pricing plan you subscribe to. I opted for the Pro plan because as a fairly new YouTube creator, it offered me the best features and price. This also means that your unique content needs should decide the Tubebuddy plan for you.
Here, check out my overview on Tubebuddy pricing plans below:
Tubebuddy Review on Pricing Plans
Is Tubebuddy free? -Tubebuddy does offer a free plan, but its more extensive packages are priced like this:
$0
Free Plan
- Tag suggestions
- Video topic planners
- Best practice checks
$4.50($3.60 on Discount)
Pro
Everything is the Free plan, plus
- A limited title generator to help with title creation
- Analytics spanning across search insights, videolytics and channelytics
- A keyword explorer and tag sorter to help you rank for the most important tags
- SEO studio feature to help optimize your video to show up in search and related
- A thumbnail generator and analyzer to enhance your productivity during creation
Custom
Tubebuddy Legend
Everything in the Pro plan, plus
- Click magnet and demonetization double-check
- A/B testing and Vid4Vid promotion
- Unlimited access to all AI features
- Bulk features like Find, Replace, and Append and Bulk Delete Comments
- The ability to export comments
- Channel valuation and a more flexible backup than Pro
Custom
Tubebuddy Enterprise
Basically, you fill the Tubebuddy team in with unique information about your team. Then, they create a bespoke plan to fit around your requirements – complete with its own pricing.
Here are some features you can expect from Tubebuddy’s Enterprise plan:
- 1:1 training sessions
- Channel reviews
- White glove onboarding with custom plans
- Advanced AI analytics
- Real-time coaching from YouTube professionals
- Quarterly strategy sessions from the Pros
- 24/7 premium customer support
Brutal Tubebuddy Review: Pros and Cons
Like virtually every software, Tubebuddy has its ugly bits. This doesn’t mean that Tubebuddy is a flop, it just means there are areas that could be better. Since you’re already considering Tubebuddy, this pro and con section can be a real eye-opener.
Pros
The pointer feature is an SEO must-have:
Among the SEO tools is a pointer feature that helps you determine the difficulty of your keywords. For instance, if you wanted to rank “boba tea” in a video, the feature would indicate whether it is easy, medium, or difficult to rank.
The topic planner is perfect for new creators
Getting into YouTube can be tricky when you have random video ideas. The video planner helps generate a tailored tag list for your video, a click magnet, and the best time to publish. So, it is a great tool to plan and enhance your productivity during content creation.
Value for money:
Compared to software in its class, tubebuddy price is on the lower end. The cheapest tires range from $18-24, but Tubebuddy costs $4.50 per month. Plus, the extensive features are a great value for its money.
Cons
No analytics for smaller creators:
While the Pro and Legend plans are extensive, the free version does need a hand from developers. There are no analytics available whatsoever.
The sign-in looks sketchy:
When signing up for Tubebuddy, you don’t see the regular registration form. Instead, you see two checkboxes confirming that you’ve read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, and an option to sign in with Google. Many users appreciate the form simply because there are more sign-in requirements.
One account for one channel:
One downside of Tubebuddy is how it only permits a user to have one account for a channel. It can be quite frustrating, especially when you consider that many creators own multiple channels.
TubeBuddy Review: Rating Details
Ease of Use
Navigating through Tubebuddy’s website is straightforward due to its intuitive interface, making it accessible even for those who are not tech-savvy. However, the arrangement of items on the left column might sometimes cause a bit of confusion when trying to return to previous sections. Despite this, the site maintains a user-friendly approach, facilitating a smooth browsing experience for beginners.
Productivity
Tubebuddy shines in its productivity tools section, offering a range of features that streamline the content creation and management process. Noteworthy tools include quick menus, a topic planner, thumbnail generator, and comment filters, which significantly enhance efficiency. Additionally, the software offers ready-made materials and an automated upload checklist, further speeding up the workflow and reducing delays.
Channelytic
Tubebuddy’s channelytics feature provides a straightforward method to monitor the results of your marketing efforts, presenting data and analytics through simple pie charts. This section allows you to pinpoint areas that require improvement or a strategy overhaul, offering insights based on both recent and all-time statistics. It serves as a valuable tool for refining your content strategy over time.
Backups and Exports
Backing up your progress is a breeze with Tubebuddy, thanks to its integration with Google accounts. Users have the flexibility to back up their entire channel or only recent videos, safeguarding their content against potential loss. This feature is particularly beneficial for creators with substantial content, offering a reliable way to preserve their work.
User Support
Tubebuddy offers robust user support, featuring a plethora of articles to guide users at every step. While the platform encourages self-help through its extensive knowledge base, it also facilitates direct contact with customer support for more complex issues. This dual approach ensures that users receive the necessary assistance to navigate any challenges they encounter.
Creator Community
The creator community on Tubebuddy stands out as a vibrant and interactive space where creators of various experience levels can share their insights and experiences with the tool. The forum fosters active discussions, allowing users to seek advice, receive updates, and even propose new features. Moreover, Tubebuddy incentivizes participation through a reward system, enhancing the community experience.
Health Report
The health report feature serves as a diagnostic tool for your channel, offering detailed insights into performance metrics such as traffic sources and viewer engagement. This section is vital for optimizing content to reach the desired audience, providing a comprehensive overview of your channel’s current state. Utilize this feature to identify areas that need strengthening and to fine-tune your content strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
Unfortunately, the SEO feature falls short, with many essential tools locked behind the Legend plan. This limitation hampers optimization efforts, forcing beginners to undertake SEO research independently. The restricted access to SEO tools contradicts the comprehensive offerings in other sections, making the Pro plan less appealing for newcomers seeking an all-inclusive solution.
Promotional Material
Tubebuddy excels in the promotional material section, offering a centralized location for your channel’s crucial links. This feature facilitates automated processes, such as loading the latest video upon a viewer’s visit, enhancing the user experience. Additionally, it provides quick access to essential areas like channel and thumbnail control, streamlining the workflow further.
Tubebuddy Review: Rating Details
After subscribing and linking my channel, it didn’t take me long to navigate the entire website due to its simple interface. Items and features are easily found on the left column of the screen, although it may be confusing to circle back due to the items’ arrangements. Regardless, beginners and people who aren’t very tech savvy won’t find much issues browsing their way around the site.
Productivity
The productivity tools page was one of the most impressive features of Tubebuddy simply due to its extensive nature. Some of the most helpful were the quick menus, topic planner, thumbnail generator, and comment filters. These are the areas that’ll normally take some time during the creation and management efforts, so streamlining and sorting them out like this helps reduce delays and quicken your productivity.
There are also templates for cards, end screen and annotations to help you build on ready made materials instead of creating from scratch. Plus, the upload checklist brings the channel’s journal online by automating the entire process in one software.
Channelytics
In the channelytics category, Tubebuddy offers a simple way to oversee the progress of your collective marketing efforts. It features a simple pie chart to demonstrate data and analytics of how everything, from productivity to SEO, is converting.
From here, you’ll know the exact areas to circle back to when improving or even revamping your content creation strategy. You’ll also have the option to check the analytics from the last 30 days, asides from all-time statistics.
Backups and Exports
The export and backup features are pretty easy to work with. Since the account is already linked directly to Google account, you don’t do any more sign-ins before you can back your progress up. I had the option to either back the entire entire channel up or only do the videos since my last backup, to which I chose the former.
Creators with bigger channels and weeks/months of work would benefit from the entire channel backup feature since it helps them save a “copy” of the channel in case of incidents of loss.
User Support
Tubebuddy has a pretty extensive feature to aid creators handle hitches by themselves. There, I found several articles tailored to guide me on each step of my journey, including a section to “Grow Your Channel”. Unlike some software, this area doesn’t negate the need for live human support, so Tubebuddy make accommodations for you reach customer support for extensive issues, inquiries, and complaints
Creator Community
Tubebuddy’s community forum is by far one of the most impressive I’ve seen in the niche. It is an interactive space where thousands of creators (at different levels of experience) share their experience with Tubebuddy. There’s a forum for nearly every question about Tubebuddy and sections for comments and interactive user-to-user discussions. You can ask questions, get live updates and announcements, and even suggest new features and modifications.
Tubebuddy also has a system that keeps conversations going by rewarding active users on the forum. Winners get a range of offers, including a free Tubebuddy review.
Health Report
Tubebuddy’s health report section is basically the feature that analyzes the condition of your channel. There you see an in depth analysis of your performance, traffic sources, views, and engagement. This area is particularly important because it helps you break down the audience who consumes your content, how it performs with them, and how they engage with it.
The health report provides you with useful material for optimizing your content to reach your target demographic. And, you have an eagle’s eye view of how the channel is faring too. Think if it like a regular medical report of how your channel is doing, and use it to know what areas of your content strategy need reinforcement.
Search Engine Optimization
Way too much of the SEO feature was hidden from me because I wasn’t using the Legend plan. I found this area rather frustrating because it contradicts the extensive productivity tools feature. The Health Report does a good job of showing your channel’s weak areas, but without SEO tools, there isn’t much optimization to be done (at least an automated form)
Once I upgraded to the Legend plan it was a completely different ball game. They keyword dash board give a whole new meaning to Search Engine Optimization. That said, if you are a beginner and do not want to spend $$ on the Legend plan you will find your productivity is significantly stunted. I fear that beginner creators are led back to the blackboard to do SEO research on our own. In itself, this negates the marketing of the Pro plan as “beginner-friendly”
Promotional Material
Tubebuddy’s “Promo Materials” feature is where your channel’s most important links are. So, by inputting those links, Tubebuddy is able to automate processes such as whether your latest video loads when viewers find your channel. There, you can also embed links that control your channel and thumbnail, allowing you quick access to these areas while you work.
Tubebuddy vs Rivals
Dacast
Dacast is a video streaming software that allows businesses to stream popular and in-demand videos. Like YouTube, Dacast lets you earn money as viewers subscribe to your content.
There are 4 subscription plans, including Starter, Event, Scale, and Custom. For Starter and Event, Vimeo charges an annual plan because it doesn’t offer monthly payments for those tiers. Scale costs $250 per month, and Starter and Event cost $468 and $750 per year.
Dacast’s plans are undeniably on the pricey side, so it isn’t very ideal for beginners and new creators. Small businesses and big brands have a better shot at utilizing the software without searing their purse.
Dacast Overall Rating
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing platform that can double as an editing suite and a means of monetization. Unlike other software in this niche, vimeo focuses heavily on video editing and sharing – making it perfect for content creators of all levels.
It features Starter ($20 per/mo), Standard ($33 per/mo), Advanced ($108 per/mo), and Enterprise. Unlike Tubebuddy, Vimeo targets freelancers among their user base, but at $20 per seat, it is slightly more expensive than Tubebuddy.
Vimeo Overall Rating
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a cloud-based video solution geared at small business and large enterprises. Like Tubebuddy, it offers content distribution features like content recommendations, playback options, and SEO.
The pricing plans are definitely on the heavy side, but that is because their users are mainly business. Otherwise, Dailymotion’s features are perfect for adding a professional touch to your content.
Dailymotion Overall Rating
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