Zight Review – Instant Video Screen Recording & Sharing

Screen recordings has been a much-desired feature, right from the early days of digital video.

In the absence of a function to save a video, one is always on the lookout for a way to record a video playing on the screen. Click To Tweet

But as much as we are constantly looking for great screen recorders, we are yet to fully understand the true importance of having an efficient method to record on-screen videos; it goes way beyond just recording a video that’s playing on your screen.

CloudApp is a software solution that does a great job of covering every single aspect of screen recordings with ease of use- be it online streaming videos, or video and conference calls, easily update your knowledge base and so forth.

But before we dive into what Zight can do and how well it can serve individuals and businesses with diverse and elaborate requirements, let’s first elaborate on how the concept of instant video screen recording is a boon for a range of uses.

•   For every second of a video you record, you save 7 seconds of writing an email to transmit the same message. Not only do you save your own time, but videos are much easier to consume than text messages.
•     Your collaborators or customers can watch the videos recorded by you at a time of their convenience, without you and them having to be online at the same time for a chat session over a website chatbot.
•     Personalization is the new default. As we move towards the age where customers or internal teams of an organization are getting more and more tech-savvy, the need to provide personalized experiences is also emerging. The robotic way of communicating with your collaborators is no longer being appreciated because customers want to feel like talking to a real person. And nothing comes quite close to that feeling than being able to communicate over a video channel.

The 3 benefits mentioned above in the CloudApp review blog only give you a high level view of what you can achieve as an organization aiming to grab the attention of its end consumers or enhancing collaboration between teams.

The tools being talked about below help you dive deep into what instant video recording software solutions can achieve.

Let’s begin with arguably the most hotly pursued video recording tool – Zight review that goes beyond being one, and really spreads its limbs across to a lot of other very handy Zight features.

CloudApp Review

Copyright 2020 CloudApp. All rights reserved. Zight is an end-to-end video recording software that ticks all the boxes and offers ease of use.

This solution does a variety of tasks; you can record a video on your screen, take a screenshot, using Zight screenshots to create GIF animations, store everything on the cloud, etc.

Let’s take a detailed look at the various features that Zight provides:

Screen Capture

As a super easy to use software solution, Zight makes it an effortless exercise to record your screen, irrespective of whether it’s playing a movie or broadcasting a session over webcam, to your personal cloud.

You are provided a simple shortcut that is super easy to spot, and it keeps the entire process of capturing and sharing visuals clean and fuss-free. There is top-notch clarity in the video and voice data you store.

And because it gets integrated with your personal cloud, you do not have to worry about overloading your laptop’s hard disk with videos, also ensuring super easy accessibility.

Thus, no back and forth emails or a call, or sharing screens. In addition, when you capture your screen, a link gets automatically copied to your clipboard, so you can share screenshots link right away.

Having read about the potential, it is much easier to deduct that CloudApp’s screen captures feature can make communication between teams of an enterprise easy and visually aided.

You can make your messages highly engaging using the captured video or GIF, driving collaboration between colleagues. You can easily share feedback and collaborate using the shareable video snippets.

The video captured is in HD, and you can take a screenshot out of the video and annotate them. The user-friendliness of the sharing feature is illustrated by the fact that you do not have to switch between different windows; you can simply share the link copied automatically.

The Zight toolbar also enables you to drag and drop a piece of content to your chosen document or any email client.

Annotations

What turns out to be a highly resourceful and easy to use feature, Annotations can help you to make notes directly on top of the images or draw a line to highlight something, add your comments or instructions and basically add more context to your animations and pictures.

So you can happily bid goodbye to the days of writing out the explanation of an image or creating a lengthy document to explain the entire message of an image in a textual form.

CloudApp’s image annotation feature can be used to markup image files and GIF animations, just so you can add more intelligibility to them.

This adds clarity to the message being conveyed through the image. It further helps in enhanced collaboration with coworkers and ease of use.

What’s more, you can even blur out areas in a GIF or screen captures that you have taken. The visual contextualization works really when and that’s what Annotations enable you to do.

And whether you are using Zight Mac or Windows, you have a very easy to understand interface with CloudApp’s Annotations.

Screen Recorder

This may sound like the capture screen feature, but there is a whole new dimension to this capability that Zight provides.

What it essentially means is that you can perform certain actions on your screen, like explaining a concept through text or diagrams, or following a set of instructions, and all your activity on the screen gets recorded through the Screen recordings feature.

This feature serves a great purpose as it lets you communicate your ideas and opinions to your colleagues in a form that is instantly graspable.

It cannot be denied that the marketplace is full of tools that provide such features, but at the same time, once you use CloudApp’s Screen Recorder, it will become abundantly clear to you that nothing comes quite close to being this user-friendly, faster and easy to share.

You do not need an easy to use third-party platform to upload and share the recording. As soon as you finish your video, the link that gets copied to your clipboard can be password protected as well.

The HD and webcam features of Zight can also be put to use here as they lead to enhanced productivity.

GIF Creation

When you have a complex piece of information in a video form, you find it easier to grasp it and is a time saver.

But when this concept is taken even further – that complex piece of information converted to a video form that plays in a loop – there is no way you are going to miss any detail or tidbit of the message that it is trying to explain.

The bits of information that command maximum attention is transformed into a highly usable and understandable format using the GIF Creation feature of CloudApp.

If you have a question that asks for a long and unwieldy answer, just create a GIF instead of wasting your time writing and forming complex sentences to explain a complex problem.

Webcam Record

Whether it is a personal message or a piece of communication meant for business purposes, you can really enhance the effectiveness and communicability of a message by adding a personal touch to it.

And that’s exactly what the Webcam Record feature of Zight promises and, it is safe to say, delivers as well.

When you are personalizing the business communications that are meant to send your message across to your gamut customers, you want that message to seem like coming from a real person and not a robot.

With Webcam Record, your name gets a face, thus adding that human touch to even a sales message and as a result nudging the prospective customer to become a paying customer.

Again, this feature also frees you of the compulsion to write down messages or answers to complex queries and instead introduces a visual platform wherein you get face to face with your colleagues and customers through high definition digital video channel.

Upload and share files

As touched upon in points above, users love Zight as it makes seamless to share or upload videos and offers ease of use.

But another priceless feature that it provides is that you can upload files. Zight can be used to upload small and large files to the cloud, regardless of their format and type, and make them accessible by simply turning them into links that can be shared with your collaborators.

These links are secured by password protection. This way, you make sure that your data is not scattered in all directions.

Integrations

The recent advancements in software solutions, be them of the likes of screen recorders or the marketing automation tools, has meant that operations like team-wise marketing and advertising efforts have been enabled for greater efficiency and heightened capabilities.

But what truly takes these capabilities beyond what a software application can do is integrations with other highly powerful software solutions.

Zight provides the freedom to integrate with a range of software applications and services so that you are not restricted or left thinking that “there should have been more” that you could do.

And it is not just for the namesake, Zight does integrate with a huge suite of applications, across the different areas like marketing, sales, development, design, support, and productivity.

You can integrate Zight with Drift to give a boost to your sales marketing and customer support services whiich is easy to use.

For improved project management and productivity, there are various integrations available, such as Trello, Slack, Google products, and more to help your customer support team.

Developers can also make use of very useful integrations with platforms like GitHub, Jira Software, GitLab, social media and Basecamp.

Integration with Zoho CRM lets your sales marketing team and customer support employees stay on top of your customer’s or prospect’s minds by keeping the channels of communication on and very much alive.

WordPress and Sketch integration gives a lot of room to your social media designers to expand their horizons and yet keep things organized and on track.

For your customer support team, Zight integrations have options abound. Keeping in mind the diversity of tools that your customer support team may prefer, Zight offers integrations with a huge line of popular platforms, namely Intercom, ZohoDesk, Kayako, Freshdesk, Olark, Medium, etc to help your customer support team.

Other features

In addition to the well-rounded set of features highlighted in the above sections, Zight offers additional dynamic features that add to the security of your content, led it authenticity, help in easy visual search and let you deep dive into insights and data.

You can control the privacy of a piece of content you created and set an expiry date for the content or password, or simply block the access.

Your website’s pages that you share can be branded with your logo, or you can even customize the URLs in sync with your brand name.

Zight also provides the ability to capture screenshots and use analytics in order to gain in-depth insight into how your content is being consumed by the collaborators and customers alike.

It notifies customer support teams in real time whenever your content gets viewed, thus enabling you to accurately track user behavior and alter your content in accordance with that.

Another powerful feature that takes the resourcefulness of Zight to another level is its easy to use machine learning capabilities. Using this capability, it can perform searches for text, color, objects, etc. within images.

Zight Pricing

Like any other popular tool in the tech domain, there are several Zight pricing packages, and yes, there is a free package too.

Free: The free package is most ideal for individual users who want to use limited features of the tool and on a small scale. It enables individual users to create GIF of 15 seconds, annotate screenshots, and create and share annotated screenshots.

You can upload 100 per file sharing with this package that also gives you the bandwidth of 1 GB per link per day. The total storage you get with this plan is 2 GB.

Pro: The Pro plan comes at the price of $9 per month and can be used by individuals with relatively bigger requirements or even very small scale businesses who are just starting out.

With this plan, users can avail unlimited recording, create GIFs and more importantly, customize the sharing options, something which you don’t get with the free plan.

The bandwidth you get with this plan is 2 GB per link per day while the file upload size allowed is 1 GB per file. The total storage you get with this plan is 1 TB.

Team: As the name suggests, the Team package is aimed at those who want to use Zight in a team arrangement. At a total cost of $16, a team of 2 users can use this package that lets you upload up to 2 GB work of content. You can have GIF files of 1 min, and the maximum file upload size is 2 GB per file. The bandwidth with this plan is 4 GB per link per day.

Business: This plan really takes the stakes higher with its flurry of impressive features. The business plans are for those who want to set up a team of 10 members and use the Zight tool.

The file upload size you get with this plan is 6 GB per file. What really makes the heads turn is the bandwidth one gets with this plan, which is no less than 40 GB per link per day. Further adding to the allure of the Business plan is its unlimited storage.

Looking at the features elaborated upon, it becomes evidently clear that you cannot ignore CloudApp. Even for those individuals who look dispassionately towards the screen recording tools or are hardly familiar with tools like this, Zight is a real deal.

Having said that, there is also enough competition out there. And this gives rise to a myriad of alternatives of CloudApp. Let’s introduce you to 3 of the very best alternatives to CloudApp

Zight Alternatives

•     Loom

Loom does a good job of personalizing your work communication through its intelligently built features with ease of use.

It is another tool that relieves you of the need to communicate a message across through long lines of text, neither do you have to get online to chat using a text chatbot, rather you make the whole experience very human by showing your face to the person on the other side and in the process, keeping the conversation as real as is possible over a virtual platform.

•     Droplr

With Droplr, you can cast your screen recording over a network shared with your collaborators in order to show complex processes for discussion purposes.

You can seamlessly transfer or share the files using links that can be customized for more clarity. What takes the usability of this time saver tool several notches higher is that you can even use it to report bugs through a visual interface with ease of use.

•     Vidyard

As the Vidyard’s website promises, it does help you generate and close more deals, thanks to presenting you in front of the customer through a very interactive video platform.

This helps a great deal in winning the confidence of the customer, and this is the reason by the fastest growing businesses are putting their money on Vidyard.

•     Snagit

Among the most known names from all the tools mentioned here, Snagit, also known to many as a Techsmith solution, is used by 30 million professionals worldwide, which gives you a good idea of how popular and how resourceful this tool probably is.

Snagit provides a myriad of easy to use features, right from screen capture and recorder that has a built-in ability to edit, screen capture and share images and trim down the recorded videos.

It can also record videos and edit them and has a very easy interface that facilitates drag and drop. You can also screen capture meeting sessions, lectures and much more.

The scale of Snagit is very much similar to that of CloudApp’s.

To get a better grasp over Snagit’s features, and to understand which of these two highly powerful solutions may be more suited to your requirements, let’s walk you through a detailed comparison.

Zight vs. Snagit

There is considerable overlap between the features that Zight provides with those that Snagit has to offer.

Zight provides the facility to capture videos and images, while Snagit offers the same screen capture feature, which works on Mac as well as Windows.

You can use Snagit to draw different shapes on your screenshots or write text over them, while Zight also provides a smooth feature to annotate your screenshots.

With Snagit, you can add special effects to the videos you capture, while with CloudApp, you can go further to draw animations on top of your captures. Snagit can also be used to trim videos to a desirably reduced size.

CloudApp’s visual search feature lends great usability to the tool, and so does the drag-and-drop interface.

Zight provides the snipping tool that can further help you to cut out the areas you don’t need while Snagit can also resize and combine different images.

The respective Zight pricing structures and Snagit are quite different from one another.

As highlighted earlier, Zight offers 4 plans, starting from a free plan, on up to a business plan that is priced according to the specific needs of the enterprise that signs up for it.

As for Snagit, it’s the cheapest plan starts from $25, and based on for how many licenses you want it for, the price goes up.

The licenses are based on individual use, business use, education, and government and non-profit use.

Zight vs. Loom

Loom, as highlighted earlier, proves to be a crucial tool to have in your arsenal to take screenshots. To get the information across within your team or outside it, Loom offers a range of amazing video editing features.

When compared to CloudApp, there isn’t much to pick from. Both tools have inventive features for screen capturing and image and video editing.

Zight provides a dedicated screen for recording screen; the interface is more intuitive than that of Loom with ease of use.

The annotation feature of Zight is also more useful than similar features in Loom. As for the uploading and sharing features, Zight makes the entire exercise more optimised for speed and ease of use.

Zight vs droplr

Droplr is an app to easily take a screenshot . It helps users to quickly share and save snapshots and screen sessions on the cloud.

Texts and colors are required to annotate and take annotated screenshots and provide useful detail. Droplr can also be conveniently combined with a range of apps including Gmail, Google Docs, Adobe Photoshop, etc.

The app is mostly used to keep snapshots and screen recordings from being overwhelmed on your computer software.

Features:

• Full Page Screenshot 
• Annotation 
• Share annotated screenshots
• Blurring Tool
• Cloud-Based Storage 
• Multi-Platform 

Benefits:

Droplr allows the exchange of pictures and everything at all. This computer software with built-in screenshot annotation on the Mac lets you upload and display it simply. This helps you to type text notes and share links in the solution.

Droplr can be used very quickly. All the characteristics of the App live in the menu bar and accessed with a key.

To see a list of recent declines, press the menu bar icon.  Moreover, GIFs can be captured, screenshot and the screen and files easily uploaded.

The latest feature lately is self-destruction. It means that the archives you post are gone in a day or a week when you like them.

Therefore this uninstall option is easier than deleting manually. For eg, you can give your W9 a connection to make sure it vanishes whether you want it.

Droplr has also revamped and overhauled its iOS app recently. It also has a real-time drive, an iOS 8 exchange extension, and self-destructive targets from the desktop edition.

The best thing about Droplr is its outstanding, minimal, and highly useful nature. Only press the icon in the Mac menu bar to list and count on your new connections. It would be fantastic, though if the app could have a way to display all drops without hitting the website.

In short, Droplr is a concentrated program, rendering files and other content easy to transfer. The seller retains and upgrades the product as it is compliant with each platform’s new OS.

Pricing:

Droplr pricing begins at $5.99 a month for each account and comes with 7-days free trial. A single schedule is given by Droplr:

• $5.99 a pro month for each user.

In addition to this, Droplr provides a personalized plan on request.

Zight vs dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud-hosted network intended to improve efficiency for all forms of apps. This solution is one of the world’s best known and most popular sharing and storage solutions.

Dropbox does not limit the number of files that you wish your team to share. This solution can be used to store and exchange files with anyone in over 500 million consumers around the world.

Features:

• Document scanning
• Cloud storage
• Mobile offline orders
• OCR
• Smart sync

Benefits:

Dropbox is stored in the cloud, which requires no specific setup or timely installation. You just need to update and build an account on your favorite device.

Dropbox’s best thing is to build a group around your shared file. Teams can update files as a group, collaborate and review changes at low or at no cost. If you have synced a local disc, you can also access files offline.

Dropbox backups images that roll from your monitor or smart device automatically. It stores save and helps to locate both albums and pictures chronologically, anytime you like.

There is no constraint on how and what kind of computers can use Dropbox. It currently allows the interchange of smartphones and tablets from all operating systems.

Pricing:

• Free trial Yes
• Basic free
• Plus $11.99/month
• Professional $19.99/month

Zight vs Vidyard

Vidyard is an online business platform, which hosts video materials and studies and looks at their performance when hitting the intended target audience and eventually transforms them into highly efficient and effective marketing tool which convert viewers to customers.

The marketing and advertising side of products is automated by Vidyard, which optimizes every marketing process.

The framework provides a robust CRM toolkit, which helps users, among others to efficient customer support management and knowledge base, to track patterns and improvements in customer behavior, and to build effective customer marketing and advertising retention strategies.

By incorporating exposure, power, and optimization components into and fusing into a whole kit, Vidyard avoids obstacles that normally come with video marketing.

Features:

• Delivery: On-Demand Streaming, Progressive
• Analytics, Engagement, Geolocation
• Content Management: Audio, Images, Video
• APIs
• CMS
• Batch Upload
• CDN services
• Flash Player
• H.264
• Comments
• Mobile – Streaming
• Multiple Encoding Rates
• Content Moderation
• Encoding Profiles
• HTML5
• Full Screen
• Multiple Users
• Secure Hosting
• Multiple Players
• Video Uploader
• Video SEO
• Take Screenshots in HD
• Video Download
• Player Templates
• Playlists
• Meta Data: Keywords, Tags
• Multiple Accounts
• Video Collaboration
• UGC customer Support
• Thumbnail Management
• Player Customization
• Popout Call to Action
• Streaming
• Syndication

Benefits:

You have a powerful video marketing tool with Vidyard which helps you to do:

• Upload, stream, and use Youtube to a custom domain branded player.
• Measure the quality of videos by running A/B split tests to see which pictures yield more clicks.
• Choose your player from 10 player skins picked.
• Enjoy full web browser, media players & operating systems accessibility, including Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, iPad, iPhone, Ios, etc.
• Using your videos to turn the audience to clients, incorporate different Call to Action (CTA) techniques.
• Allow your viewers to access the video content directory by adding a customized playlist.
• Calculate your videos’ scope, examine their efficiency, and view your viewers’ statistics using Zight integrated CRM instruments.
• Take complete care of the footage, select who can view it, start it, and choose which place to embed it.

Pricing:

The monthly Vidyard price begins at $19.00. Five separate proposals for Vidyard:

• $19.00 a month for Pro (Marketing).
• $19.00 a month pro (sales).
• Sales of $80.00 a month for the beginning.
• Advertising start-ups for $150.00 a month.
• $850.00 a month plus (marketing).

Free Plan with minimal functionality is accessible from Vidyard. They also sell their product an Enterprise Package.

Cloud app vs Vimeo.

Vimeo Build is the content creation tool for video sharing, hosting, and. Users can stream several content-different videos.

Account owners can also post and share videos that can be promoted with a wider variety of modifications. The reason Vimeo has a holistic customization strategy is that its creators are filmmakers looking for unique streaming needs.

Users may use the app to save high-resolution videos and other content that is viewed without advertiser interference.

The customizable function also helps uploaders to select whose geographical areas access to their content is possible.

Due to Vimeo’s unique niche ambitions on its website, amateurs and professional artists gain as well. Users may use the forum to communicate with the group and to gain input on their activities.

Features:

• Live Streaming
• Collaboration
• Distribution and Marketing
• Hosting and Management
• Video Player
• Privacy
• Analytics
• Monetization

Benefits:

Vimeo’s key advantages are storage and administration, post-production, communication, and marketing.

Storage and Management

Vimeo helps people to share screenshots with other Cloud sharing sites and computer software. Videos up to 4K Ultra HD can be supported to enhance user experience. Users can make improvements to their videos in bulk with the video control options.

Post-production and Collaboration

With Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, Vimeo can be combined to make it flexible. Users can use minimum effort to import, launch, and export files from the applications.

Vimeo is also permitted for cooperation with other users. In their profiles, users can add up to ten people to collaborate on a private project.

Communication between workers is also seamless as Vimeo’s response and timeline notes and other remarks are in real-time.

Marketing and Monetization

Vimeo can promote content using a range of marketing and advertising features, including lead production, call-to-action, and domain and geo-restrictions, ease of use, applicable to uploaded material.

Users can use Google Analytics for content insights and customized dashboards. Statistics and information from video interaction can also be found on the site, making it easier to monitor user content output.

Pricing:

• Free trial Yes
• Plus $7/month
• Pro $20/month
• Business $50/month
• Premium $75/month

An overview of Zight and its features:

Factors	Comments
What do We like?	Plenty of shortcut keys to perform the basic actions. Wide range of integrations. The free plan is generous. Enables quick and easy sharing.
What we don’t like?	When you filter the files and other data it takes some time and makes the process slow.
Value for Money	Yes, it is worth the investment.
Customer Support	Chat support and email. Slightly slow response.
Who should use it?	Businesses, agencies, professionals want a tool for sharing information through screen recordings, webcam recordings, gifs, and more.
Zight Alternatives	Loom, Droplr, and Vidyard
Our Score	4.5/5

Conclusion

The concept of Instant video recording for the means of data sharing is settling into the minds of business decision makers and marketers, especially thanks to the impressive site of tools that have made their way to the market.

And if you are a business that is contemplating to choose a tool that suits your requirements the best, CloudApp with its diverse set of capabilities and pricing plans appears most eligible.

Questions related to Cloud app: