blog post

The 8 Best Interactive Video Software Brands

Kimiloluwa
December 14, 2023

Introduction

Interactive video is an insanely powerful marketing tool available to brands. But there’s still a lot of confusion around what this technology is, how it works, and how it can make a difference.

We all know that video drives way more engagement than non-video content. But make that video interactive, and engagement shoots through the roof. This is true in marketing and educational contexts: HubSpot finds that 47% of marketers say interactive content is a top performer in both lead generation and audience engagement.

If you’re ready to take your video efforts to the next level with interactive video software, you’ll need the right tools to make it happen.

Check out these eight interactive video software brands to find the one that’s right for you.

1. Gander

Gander is a powerful interactive video software platform that empowers brands to quickly and easily place video content onto websites, product pages, and more — with no technical training required. 

Because of how simple Gander makes it to place interactive video content just about anywhere, it’s at the top of this list of interactive video software brands.

Gander can create interactive videos, including quizzes, interactive calls to action (CTAs), marketing intake forms, and shoppable videos. All of these can be created with minimal effort and no development skills, thanks to Gander’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

There’s also virtually no impact on page speed since Gander handles the video hosting, taking that burden off your list of things to worry about. 

The result is an interactive video tool that delivers an elevated viewing experience that can drive sales, boost viewer engagement and retention, and humanize your brand.

Brands can use Gander to boost engagement on landing pages, product pages, social media advertising and posts, and anywhere else that interactive video and UGC help a brand move forward.

Key Features

  • Dynamic shoppable videos and product videos
  • Interactive video content helps you engage audiences at scale
  • Virtually no effect on page speed / load speed
  • Offers the most control over how and where your videos show up relative to other software brands on the market
  • Detailed data and analytics to understand how to optimize metrics
  • Video-forward landing pages
  • Harnesses user-generated content (UGC) for social proof (or you can work with Gander’s network to create more)

Main Industry

Gander is perfect for any brand looking to elevate their eCommerce store with engaging product videos, interactive shoppable videos, and UGC. It’s a must if you’re looking to maximize the success of your video SEO eCommerce strategy.

Also, because Gander is such a natural way to connect products to real-world experiences, it’s the first choice of many health and beauty brands, as well as any other physical retail product that could benefit from video demonstrations and explanations.

Pricing

Gander costs just $0/month for up to 5,000 impressions. Our Growth plan (starts at $90/month) includes up to 100,000 impressions.

2. Spott

Spott (or Spott.ai) is an interactive platform that lets you add interactive elements and features to all kinds of media types, including video, ads, PDFs, and images. The template-based system lets you drag templates onto your media, employing whichever interactive features are contained within the template. 

This functionality makes it extremely simple to add whichever interactive elements stand to increase conversions, all from a user-friendly interface that doesn’t have a huge learning curve.

Most interactivity is limited to outbound clicks (to product pages, lead generation forms, landing pages, etc.), so it’s not a good fit for dynamic or two-way interactions. Spott does support branching videos (not just linear video) as well as interactive ads (GDN, DV360, VPAID/VAST). The latter is a unique capability most other solutions don’t offer.

Note that Spott was recently acquired by Publitas, a much broader marketing media publishing platform, so Spott’s future as a standalone product is uncertain.

Key Features

  • Analytics for data-driven decisions
  • Huge library of templates
  • Options to add interactivity to video 
  • Branded and custom short links

Main Industry

Spott is ideal for big brands with high-polish videos and hefty marketing budgets looking mainly for a feature overlay or outbound click mechanism. 

Pricing

Spott is an enterprise-focused product that doesn’t disclose pricing information. Every account uses custom pricing.

3. Thinglink

Thinglink is an immersive learning product aimed at both businesses and educators. It has an educational focus even in business contexts, where it’s most frequently used for tutorials or training. Anywhere employees or users might need to be educated on how to perform a task or how to use a product, Thinglink can work well.

Thinglink is a hotspot-based interactive video software that allows users to turn anything in a video into a link. And it’s not just for video: The same tech powering Thinglink also works in presentations, 3D objects, and several other use cases.

Every hotspot (Thinglink’s name for its interactive links) is fully trackable, so users can understand which links are getting traffic and which aren’t. This interactive video solution is powerful when used with learners in the classroom and the marketing or comms department.

Plus, with the Scenario Builder, you can create branching scenarios — perfect for eLearning.

Whether you’re creating simple interactive learning videos or complex branching training modules, Thinglink is worth a look.

Key Features

  • Easy-to-learn editor
  • Anything can become a link
  • Branching scenarios
  • Integrations with Microsoft, Google, Canva, and Canvas
  • Compatibility with every major learning management system (LMS)

Main Industry

Thinglink is great for any industry with eLearning and corporate training needs. It’s also great for schools, museums, libraries, and higher education. 

Pricing

Individual Thinglink licenses are $41/month for marketing and communications professionals. Team memberships start at $208/month. 

Educators and institutions using Thinglink enjoy drastically discounted rates ($60/year for an individual teacher and $3/year per user for schoolwide licenses).

4. Wirewax

Wirewax is a video creation, studio, and editing platform that once allowed businesses to add interactivity to their videos. With it, users could add tailored interactivity to video content thanks to Wirewax’s smart tagging technology. Quizzes, polls, and in-video links were all part of the Wirewax studio. Users could also leverage Wirewax for some video production tasks, making it a central hub for both interactive and traditional online video creation.

However, since the platform was acquired by Vimeo in 2021, it’s become difficult to determine which features are available where. Existing Wirewax customers can still log in to the studio platform, but attempting to create a new account will push you over to Vimeo. 

Key Features

  • Automatic captions/subtitles in 83 languages
  • Powerful studio interface (for legacy users)
  • Deep Vimeo integrations (for new users)
  • Polls, quizzes, and in-video links

Main Industry

Any video-heavy business can benefit from the features in Wirewax — assuming you’re happy being a part of the Vimeo ecosystem.

Pricing

It’s no longer possible to buy Wirewax as a standalone product. Its feature set has been rolled into acquiring company Vimeo’s Advanced monthly plan, which costs $65/month.

5. Kaltura

Kaltura is an enterprise-focused video-centric tool suite that includes virtual events, town halls, webinars, training, video messaging, and video portals. The full Kaltura experience is dizzyingly broad, but within the video portal app you’ll find some interactive features, like quizzes and captions.

Kaltura may feel like overkill for some businesses looking for interactive video software. But if you’re looking for a much broader suite of capabilities (including the ability to create your own custom video interface that doesn’t rely on Vimeo or YouTube), it’s worth a look.

Key Features

  • Virtual classrooms, webinars, and events
  • Fully customizable video portal
  • Video content management system (CMS)
  • APIs and SDKs available
  • Compatible with most LMS

Main Industry

Kaltura is best for enterprise businesses looking for a wide-ranging video and live events platform. Certain pieces of Kaltura also have a role to play in the classroom.

Pricing

Kaltura offers a wide range of mix-and-match solutions, and most of them (including the tools we’re reviewing) are custom-priced. 

6. Brightcove

Brightcove is a video streaming technology company with three core products: Marketing Studio, Communications Studio, and Media Studio.

These are powerful, wide-ranging tools that can do just about anything you can imagine with video. Included in the Marketing Studio are some limited interactivity capabilities. They aren’t the main focus of this brand, but including some interactive capabilities alongside other tools many brands need is a nice touch.

Key Features

  • Powerful audience insights
  • Ad monetization features
  • Streaming and OTT platform (including advertising, streaming, and hybrid)
  • Business-oriented CorpTV

Main Industry

Brightcove is ideal for media companies, comms professionals, and marketing directors at large firms.

Pricing

Brightcove is all quote-based pricing, but some sources suggest it starts at $199/month.

7. Cinema8

Cinema8 is an interactive video brand that creates immersive interactive experiences with high engagement levels. It’s a no-code, drag-and-drop platform that leverages more than a thousand widgets to give you easy interactive capabilities.

If you need something that doesn’t exist yet, you can build custom widgets by wrapping custom CSS, HTML, and JS code into them.

Cinema8 uses AI and machine learning to enable object and motion detection within videos, allowing the platform to make smarter choices in turning your videos interactive. 

For example, with Cinema8 Sense AI, clickable hotspots don’t just take up a static space on the video. They move with the object as it moves across the frame. 

Key Features

  • Advanced analytics and statistics
  • Smart overlays and hotspots
  • No-code interface
  • Huge widget library
  • Support for 360, AR, and VR

Main Industry

Cinema8 is great for eLearning, eCommerce, and dynamic native advertising.

Pricing

Starter pricing is $249/month (includes 10 interactive projects); Growth bumps that project number to 25 for $449/month. Need unlimited projects and higher bandwidth? Professional is $1199/month. 

Custom pricing for multiple brands, white labeling, and custom domain registration.

8. DilogR

DilogR is a quiz-oriented interactive video platform that allows brands to embed multimedia content into quizzes and other visual marketing assets. Video chaptering and segmentation allow brands to build interactive videos with branching paths.

DilogR is an ideal solution for brands with complex products or customer journeys, but not so much for eCommerce and retail. It’s also a good fit for brands looking to step up their interactive marketing efforts. If quizzes, surveys, and polls are the missing piece in your marketing strategy, DilogR could be the tool you’re missing.

Key Features

  • Interactive quiz videos
  • Surveys and polls
  • Interactive images and slides
  • Video branching and chaptering
  • Audience segmentation

Main Industry

DilogR is best for organizations doing market research and anyone else needing a video-based quiz marketing solution.

Pricing

DilogR Basic costs $83/month (for up to 299 leads and 15 GB storage). DilogR Pro costs $249/month (999 leads and 50 GB). The Pro plan includes more quiz completions, integrations, views and click-throughs, and video marketing bandwidth.

Find Out Why Gander Is the Best Interactive Video Software Brand 

Interactive video is the next frontier for digital brands: it combines the compelling power of video with the interactivity users want (and demand from the rest of their internet experience).

The problem — until now — is that implementing interactive video on your own is a technically complex, resource-intensive endeavor.

But not anymore.

Gander is the best interactive video platform because it gives you powerful, attention-grabbing interactive video experiences in a simple interface anyone can use. We handle the technical heavy lifting; you just sit back and enjoy the massive benefits of interactive video. 

Gander is the fastest, simplest, and most powerful way to implement interactive video for your brand. See why our interactive video software is the perfect fit for your business: Get started for free today!

Kimiloluwa
December 14, 2023