Best Video Hosting Sites: The Top 11 Sites in 2023

Jamie Juviler
Jamie Juviler

Published:

People are watching almost twice as many videos as they were in 2018. To make the most of this trend, businesses use video hosting sites to get their video content online.

two people lying on a bed watching a video on a video hosting site

According to HubSpot research, 66% of those surveyed watched a video to learn about a product. But video isn't just a way to advertise products. Video marketing can also help a business engage visitors, connect teams to leads and customers, and build brand identity.

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There’s a lot of value, but there’s also a tradeoff to video. Besides everything that goes into creating online videos, you need to figure out where to host them. You might choose to upload them to your web host. But this usually isn’t the best idea.

This guide will show you how video hosting can boost your business and website. Then, we’ll recommend 11 of the best paid and free video hosting sites. So, keep reading, or jump to the section you’re looking for:

Why You Need Video Hosting

When you watch a video on a business’s website, chances are that video isn’t stored on that specific website’s server. Instead, it’s more likely embedded on the page and stored with a video hosting service.

These services allow users to upload their videos to a specialized video server, then view these videos on the host’s website or embed them on a different website.

So, why would a business choose not to host their videos on their own servers? The main reason is that videos are large — thousands of times larger than the average image on a page.

All servers have limits on how much data they can store and how quickly they can transfer this data. This means that storing even a single video on your web server can cause poor site performance, poor streaming quality and playback, and exceeded storage limits that might get you booted from your hosting plan. It’s much simpler and safer to put your videos on a dedicated video hosting site.

All video hosting sites solve the problem of giving your videos a home on the web. But there’s a diverse range of providers in this space, and the best host for you will depend on your budget, needs, and how you use video on your site.

Some video hosts are oriented toward distribution and virality. Others focus on using video to fuel your marketing efforts and include more in-depth analytics and lead capture tools.

Whatever service you’re looking for, we’ve brought together a video hosting sites list with the best services for your online video content.

Best Video Hosting Sites

1. HubSpot

Best For: Small businesses

Best video hosting sites: HubSpot

Videos are a powerful channel not just for informational or marketing purposes, but for every customer-facing aspect of your business.

That’s why the all-in-one HubSpot platform weaves video throughout the entire system. It seamlessly blends into your workflow inside HubSpot CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub.

HubSpot offers an all-in-one video platform. Ultimately, switching between tools, figuring out integrations, and subscribing to additional services is time and money better spent elsewhere. With HubSpot, you get your videos, along with everything else, in one place.

For marketers, HubSpot allows you to upload videos to your portal. Then it's easy to place them on pages, blog posts, and social media channels to draw in users and keep them on your website.

For your sales team, HubSpot lets you record personalized one-on-one videos to send to prospects and give them through your sales funnel. And Service Hub users can use video for tutorials and responses to tickets.

Pricing: Video hosting is available starting on the Professional tiers for Marketing Hub ($800 per month), Sales Hub ($450 per month), and Service Hub ($450 per month). You can also purchase the Professional Growth Suite, which gives you access to all three Hubs.

Video features are only available in premium editions of Marketing, Sales, Service, and CMS Hub.

Pros

  • Easy to add video without logins or copying embed codes
  • Built-in lead generation
  • Powerful customization options
  • In-CRM recording for video throughout your customer journey
  • Video email
  • Simple setup

Cons

  • Features are most useful with full use of the HubSpot platform
  • For premium customers only

Video Analytics

Powerful in-depth reporting gives you insight into video performance.

HubSpot video analytics include metrics like:

  • View count
  • Engagement
  • Play rate
  • Watch time
  • Social shares
  • Clicks and click-through rates
  • Conversions
  • Video retention
  • View events in contact timelines

Explore the performance of all your videos with detailed reporting to see what content resonates most with your audience.

2. SproutVideo

Best For: Companies with long sales funnels

Top video hosting sites: SproutVideo

SproutVideo is another business-oriented video hosting service. It contains various tools for marketing teams to track engagement and grow their customer base. With it, you can embed ad-free videos onto your website with a customizable player. You can toggle videos to include social sharing buttons, lead capture forms, and CTAs as well. They also offer live streaming features. Unlike some other choices here, you can also build playlists for tutorial series and online courses.

Pricing: SproutVideo has four plans: Seed ($10 per month), Sprout ($35 per month), Tree ($75 per month), and Forest ($295 per month).

Pros

  • Quick and helpful customer support
  • Strong video playback performance
  • Great security tools, like log-in protection
  • Good for capturing in-video leads
  • Advanced analytics
  • User permissions
  • Custom playlists

Cons

  • Extensive features can impact ease-of-use
  • Playback caching can be slow
  • No built-in audience

Video Analytics

Once the platform captures your video viewing data you can view and present it with SproutVideo’s robust analytics. For example, you can segment viewers by country, domain, and individual. Share your analytics with your team with built-in collaboration features. SproutVideo also makes it simple to keep everything in order with an audit log of activity.

Video hosting sites analytics: SproutVideo

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Analytics data on this platform includes:

  • Impressions
  • Plays
  • Popular videos and downloads

It also offers video engagement metrics. These help your team analyze:

  • Who is watching each video
  • How long they're watching
  • Whether your audience is skipping or rewatching parts of your videos

HubSpot customers: You can sync your videos from SproutVideo to HubSpot.

3. Hippo Video

Best For: Mid-sized and large businesses

Best video hosting sites: Hippo Video

Hippo Video is a tool for businesses to use video in their marketing, sales, and services processes. Unlike Wistia and SproutVideo, Hippo Video divides its product into separate services for marketing, sales, services, and internal communications. If you want to use video for one of these specific goals, Hippo Video is a great choice.

It's a cloud-based tool that also offers personalization and workflow features. These features can help larger businesses use video more effectively.

The marketing tool provides features you’d expect from such a tool, like

in-video forms, CTAs, and CRM integrations. It also gives customers an easy way to record their own video testimonials for your product.

On the sales side, you get video playlists to walk leads through your buyer’s journey and a built-in teleprompter to help you record pitches.

Finally, Hippo Video’s customer service product lets users submit video tickets and you can respond with videos of your own. You can also post video tutorials to shorten your queue.

Pricing: Hippo Video offers a variety of plans for sales, marketing, support, and team communication teams. There are three tiers for the Marketing product: Starter ($23 per month), Pro ($49 per month), and Growth ($99 per month).

Pros

  • Easy recording options, including screen recording
  • Direct sharing to social media
  • Personalization features for audience targeting at scale
  • Wide range of integrations

Cons

  • Steeper learning curve for some platform features
  • The large menu of features can be confusing
  • Some limitations with editing

Video Analytics

Hippo Video offers detailed viewership analytics and metrics to track your conversions.

Video hosting sites analytics: Hippo Video

Analytics data on this platform includes:

  • Demographic reports
  • Video watch rates
  • Video views
  • Retention rates

You can also use conversion or department-specific data to measure the impact of video on your strategies. For example, you can track CTA clicks, social shares, and timeline actions with this video hosting site.

HubSpot customers: You can add forms to gated videos, qualify leads, and automate actions with the HubSpot and Hippo Video integration.

4. Streamable

Best For: Creators and video professionals

streamable video hosting

Video is the fastest-growing type of content today. But creators and video professionals don’t often need robust marketing features to make their content great. Sometimes they just need a simple tool for storing, sharing, and embedding their videos. This is exactly what Streamable does.

Streamable is a fast and simple video hosting service. It makes it easy to upload, organize, and share HD and 4K videos with full control over their privacy and playback (no ads, no suggested content).

Pricing: Streamable has four pricing tiers: Accountless (no email required), Free ($0), Basic ($9.99 per month), Pro ($14.99 per month), and Business ($39 per month). Each plan is offered with both monthly and annual options.

Every Streamable plan includes an unlimited number of video uploads (size and length limits apply to the Accountless and Free plans).

Pros

  • Beautiful video quality
  • Extremely easy to use
  • Powerful privacy options
  • Customizable embed player
  • Affordable pricing
  • Reliable and 3.5x faster uploads

Cons

  • No live streaming or recording
  • No built-in audience
  • Light on analytics

Video Analytics

Simple analytics give you data on video views.

Streamable video analytics include metrics like:

  • View count
  • Live viewers

5. Brightcove

Best For: Enterprise businesses

Top video hosting sites: Brightcove

You might not have heard of Brightcove, but this enterprise video hosting service is a force. This is the video hosting site behind major brands like Johnson & Johnson, AMC, and Ford. Brightcove offers creative, customizable ways to add video to your enterprise-level marketing and content.

Among Brightcove’s offerings is its flagship product, Video Cloud. This video publishing platform promises high-quality, high-performance video streams that are reliable, customizable, and secure. Brightcove also has solutions for video marketing. Features for this platform include social publishing, live streams, and integrations with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot. These capabilities help enterprises offer an impressive video experience.

Pricing: Contact sales. Smaller businesses and those just getting started with video may not be able to justify Brightcove’s pricing and can get results with other hosting sites on this list. But this is a great choice for enterprises looking to step up their video game.

Pros

  • Live event streaming
  • Customizable video players
  • Easy to use for all skill levels
  • Great customer support
  • Powerful ad features and performance tracking
  • Video engagement and monetization features
  • Advanced integrations

Cons

  • Requires coding for setup
  • Can be difficult for small teams to manage
  • Can be complex to use because of features scope

Video Analytics

Brightcove offers comprehensive analytics. Its custom-built tools let users track videos close to real-time, with reporting for engagement and performance. It also lets users schedule reports for consistent analytics management.

Video hosting sites analytics: Brightcove and HubSpot

HubSpot customers: Use the Brightcove integration for data flow from your videos directly to your Contact Properties.

6. Spotlightr

Best For: Teachers and coaches

Best video hosting sites: Spotlightr

This video hosting site was known as vooPlayer, but it rebranded in 2020. This all-in-one platform includes a range of video marketing tools. Their tools address typical issues that small businesses face with video marketing. Their features give businesses a chance to add security and customization to their videos. This platform also offers features like automations and embedding to meet specific business needs.

Their platform also lets you use marketing tools and integrations to market your brand to website visitors and leads.

Pricing: Spotlightr offers four plans: Spark ($7 per month), Aurora ($16 per month), Polaris ($40 per month), and Supernova $125 per month).

Pros

  • Excellent customer service
  • Easy to use
  • Simple to scale
  • Customizable branding
  • Embedded video player customization
  • Lead capture and pay-per-view gates

Cons

  • Steep learning curve
  • Limited customization
  • Platform-specific vocabulary can be frustrating
  • The large menu of options can be confusing

Video Analytics

Spotlightr offers both advanced video analytics and heatmaps.

Video hosting sites analytics: Spotlightr

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Its tools give users a chance to look at detailed or high-level data for analytics including:

  • Average watched
  • Total loads
  • Unique loads
  • Plays
  • Play rate
  • Completion rate

Free Video Hosting Sites

This list includes both free platforms that use ads on their platforms and freemium video hosting sites that offer different features depending on your pricing tier.

7. YouTube

Best For: Content creators

Free video hosting sites: YouTube

The brand "YouTube" is synonymous with online video for many. YouTube’s omnipresence makes it a go-to for many online businesses that produce and distribute videos.

It’s completely free to use, no matter how many videos you upload or how many times they’re viewed. Any business can create a channel for its brand, grow its subscriber base, and work to get exposure to YouTube’s massive user base.

Businesses can also become YouTube partners. This means that, once verified, you can monetize your videos, upload videos over 15 minutes long, and get access to analytics and a video editor.

But this doesn’t mean that YouTube is your best choice. The biggest drawback of YouTube is its ads. In exchange for free hosting, YouTube will put ads before and during your videos. This can distract from your content. It can also interrupt your users’ browsing flow, especially if they’re watching an embedded video on your website.

YouTube is great for content creators looking to establish a presence online. Still, those looking to use video for informational content, lead capture, and tutorials should consider premium options.

Pricing: YouTube is free.

Pros

  • Video captions
  • Translation button for different languages
  • Features like pop-up comments and playlists
  • Standard player
  • Easy navigation
  • Built-in audience

Cons

  • Unrelated brand videos
  • Limited brand control
  • Basic embedding features
  • Competition
  • Distracting ads and other features

Video Analytics

YouTube offers useful analytics to figure out how well your videos are performing for your target audience. It also has analytics to measure your posts and your channel's performance. This article is an in-depth look into YouTube analytics.

Video hosting sites analytics: YouTube

Note: HubSpot's YouTube integration makes it easy to compare your YouTube videos against other channels to track your video marketing strategy.

8. Dailymotion

Best For: Content creators

Top video hosting sites: Dailymotion

Dailymotion is another option you might have heard of. This video hosting service is like YouTube. It allows you to upload as many videos as you want for free, and there are no bandwidth limits to your content. Dailymotion is accessible to anyone, and it’s easy to sign up and get started. But video lengths are capped at 60 minutes, and uploads are limited to two hours per day.

As a content source, Dailymotion is news-oriented and divides its content into News, Sports, Entertainment, and Music. Consider the platform if your business fits any of these categories.

Creators can use Dailymotion to distribute and monetize content with its partnership program. You’re probably not going to see the level of growth you would on YouTube, but for some, it’s worth the extra time.

Also note that, as a free service, Dailymotion plays ads before, after, and during your videos, including embedded videos.

Pricing: Dailymotion is free.

Pros

  • Great customer service
  • Player customization options
  • Live streaming
  • Privacy and password-protection
  • Less competition

Cons

  • Smaller audience reach
  • Sometimes slow to load videos
  • File size limits
  • Distracting ads

Video Analytics

Dailymotion offers a reporting API and Google Analytics integration to collect video analytics. This data can include real-time video insights.

Video hosting sites analytics: Dailymotion

Their analytics tools also give users a chance to filter and segment audience data.

9. Wistia

Best For: Data-driven businesses

Free video hosting sites: Wistia

Organizations that need a tool to support high-quality video marketing campaigns should consider Wistia. Wistia serves as both a video host and a marketing tool for businesses.

Instead of posting your videos on a public page, you upload your videos privately to Wistia, then place them on your web pages using an embed code. The video player is sleek, completely customizable, and ad-free.

Wistia also packs the tools marketers need to run successful campaigns. You can place CTAs and forms inside your videos and integrate Wistia with your CRM software to keep everything in one place. This way, your videos themselves become another opportunity to capture leads.

Pricing: Wistia offers four pricing tiers: Free, Plus ($19 per month), Pro ($79 per month), and Advanced ($319 per month).

When used well, Wistia is great for ROI with increases in video-based conversions. Those interested can sample the Wistia free plan, which allows up to ten videos total.

Pros

  • Powerful video SEO
  • In-video forms and hyperlinks
  • Professional customizable player
  • Custom branding
  • Video security features
  • Flexible video dimensions
  • Lead capture

Cons

  • Charges per video
  • No built-in audience
  • The large menu of options can be confusing

Video Analytics

Once live, Wistia will track visitor engagement with your videos. The platform presents insights with premium visualizations, including viewer-based tracking and heatmaps.

Engagement graphs and viewer-based tracking gives you a clear picture of audience engagement.

Video hosting sites analytics: Wistia

HubSpot customers: Use the Wistia integration to see video engagement on every contact record. You can also segment and score leads with video-specific data.

10. Vimeo

Best For: Creative professionals

Top video hosting sites: Vimeo

Vimeo is a video streaming service directed at creative professionals and businesses. Despite bringing in far less traffic than YouTube, Vimeo has garnered a reputation for hosting higher-quality content overall. It's also known to create a great experience for viewers and marketers alike.

There aren’t any ads or recommendations after your clips, videos look great and load quickly. You can also customize embeds to match the look of your website.

All this makes Vimeo a great step between YouTube and more businesses-dedicated platforms. What you lose in virality, you make up for in the quality of your presentation.

Need more help deciding? See our YouTube-Vimeo comparison.

Pricing: Vimeo sells on four tiers: Starter ($9 per seat per month), Standard ($25 per seat per month), and Advanced ($65 per seat per month). There’s also the free plan and an enterprise solution.

If you’re interested in trying out Vimeo, sign up for the free plan. It lets you add two videos per month, up to 25 total. It also includes unlimited screen and webcam recordings, and some other basic features.

Vimeo’s paid plans add more benefits like:

  • Increased storage
  • Customization for your video player
  • A video editor
  • Collaboration tools for team-based projects
  • Private videos
  • In-video CTAs and other lead gen tools
  • Google Analytics integration

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • High video quality
  • Monetization and privacy features
  • Attractive embed player

Cons

  • Storage limits
  • Longer buffering times
  • Limited support

Video Analytics

Analytics allow you to access in-depth insights about your videos and your Vimeo account. All members can track video performance. Paid plan members also get access to advanced user analytics and functionality.

Video hosting sites analytics: Vimeo

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Note: Users can sync their video leads with HubSpot mailing lists with the Vimeo integration.

11. Vidyard

Best For: B2B organizations

Free video hosting sites: Vidyard

Need something a bit more powerful for your scale-up or enterprise? Vidyard might just have you covered. This solution provides ad-free video hosting and marketing features to fuel your growth at scale.

While there is a single-user plan, the higher-tier plans are where Vidyard shines. You’ll get a fully customized video player that you can enhance with your own branding, in-video CTAs, and opt-in forms. This feature-rich platform also includes the ability to gate your videos and grant access through email requests.

Pricing: Vidyard offers two paid plans: Pro ($19 per month), Teams ($300 per month), and Business ($145 per person per month). There’s also a free plan with limited functionality.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • Designed for sales and marketing videos
  • Lead and account scoring
  • Sales alerts for video views
  • Shareable links for video files
  • YouTube sync
  • Lead capture

Cons

  • App search can be slow
  • Video embed limits
  • Length limits vary by plan

Video Analytics

Vidyard analytics make it easy to track video performance for your team. The platform measures engagement and other standard video metrics. At the same time, Vidyard's analytics can also track how your team is using video, with dashboards that visualize your data.

Video hosting sites analytics: Vidyard and HubSpot

These metrics can lead directly to improved ROI with video marketing. For example, you can use video data to connect this data to your customer journey. This is especially effective if it's integrated with a CRM like HubSpot. This article has details on how the two platforms work together.

Make the Most of This Video Hosting Sites List

While video file sizes are an inconvenience, they’re unavoidable. After going to the effort of producing high-quality videos for your brand, the last thing you want is to wrestle with your video hosting and publishing tools.

Luckily, there are enough dedicated video hosting solutions available that at least one can meet your needs. These tools aren’t just for hosting, they can offer analytics, lead gen, and other perks to make your video content management easier. As video becomes a cornerstone of your online strategy, so too should your video hosting.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Discover videos, templates, tips, and other resources dedicated to helping you  launch an effective video marketing strategy. 

Topics: Web Hosting

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