Tools To Improve Team Communication

Communication can be one of the toughest challenges at work, and often one of the most frustrating. We've all sat through meetings that could have been an email, or spent too much time crafting lengthy emails that could have been simpler. If you've experienced this, you know how draining it can be. Fortunately, Loom understands these pain points. Loom is a modern communication tool designed to help teams—whether remote or in-person—communicate more effectively through visual means, cutting down on unnecessary meetings and lengthy emails. In this article, we'll explore Loom's features and compare it to five other alternatives to help you find the best communication tool for your team.

Loom

Perhaps the best-known video collaboration app, Loom’s goal is to reduce meetings to a minimum and facilitate smoother, more efficient teamwork for companies around the world. Users of Loom can record videos showcasing their screen, themselves, or both to communicate their ideas visually and show instead of just telling.

Videos recorded on Loom are stored in personal libraries online and can be shared with a link, saving the time and effort of uploading and downloading content. Viewers can react to specific parts of the video using emojis, or leave a comment on a specific timestamp for others to see, taking asynchronous collaboration and feedback even further.

Features and Pricing

Being one of the top players in the space, Loom has a plethora of features that make it worthy of making it into your toolkit. Among these are:

• Shared libraries for all members of an organization to upload videos to.
• Drawing tools for on-screen annotations
• Automatic filler word removal (goodbye to ‘uhhs’ or ‘ums’)
• Custom recording dimensions for screen recording
• Virtual backgrounds to use in videos
• Background noise removal
• Integration with popular enterprise software such as Slack, Gmail, FigJam, and Salesforce, among others.

Loom’s Starter plan is completely free and allows users to store up to 25 videos of 5 minutes tops each in 720p. This tier allows users to edit their videos, record their screens and webcam simultaneously, and observe viewership insights, as well as get unlimited transcriptions.

Their Business plan starts at $10/mo per seat and opens the door to unlimited videos in 4k definition, recording length, engagement insights, and the ability to embed links within your videos.

Vidyard

Vidyard is a video recording tool directed at businesses that want to connect deeper with their customers and improve their remote sales experience.

Through Vidyard, users can quickly record and embed videos in their emails using scripted, ready-to-record templates that boost responses and flatten churn rates. This aids companies to send their prospects content that they won’t roll their eyes at, and keeps them intrigued.

Features and Pricing

Vidyard's two most distinctive features are:

• The ability to funnel users based on who watched previous videos in order to tailor a response for different audiences.
• Insights showcasing how people react and behave to certain videos, keeping businesses out of the dark and in full knowledge on how to improve their pitches.

Much like Loom's free plan, Vidyard users on their free plan can host up to 25 recordings of up to 30 mins in their library, with basic video editing features at their disposal. The Pro tier starts at $29/mo and grants unlimited videos up to 60 mins of run time, CTAs, and video performance insights.

Snagit

Snagit is a screen recording solution developed by Techsmith that allows you to share information quickly by capturing your screen and camera, as well as adding context through additional elements. This is especially helpful if you’re in a position where you have to manage remote teams whose success is deeply impacted by the quality of their communication.

All recordings made using Snagit can be trimmed on its built-in editor and subsequently shared as images, videos, or GIFs.

Features and Pricing

You can select custom recording dimensions for screen recordings within Snagit. It can also take full-page, scrolling screenshots that simulate vertical/horizontal scrolling to showcase all content within a web page.

The software offers a 15-day free trial with limited features. The full version requires a one-time purchase for a perpetual license. The software is upgraded every year and your purchase gets you a free upgrade to next year’s version. However, to upgrade the year after, you’d need to buy the software again. You can continue using your purchased version as long as you want.

Soapbox

Soapbox is a Chrome extension belonging to the video marketing platform Wistia that lets you record your webcam and screen simultaneously in a similar fashion to Loom. This gives you the ability to produce videos without the need for fancy equipment other than your laptop and yourself.

After recording, Soapbox allows you to edit your videos alternating between split-screen and full-screen layouts, making the result more dynamic and immersive for viewers. Like with other alternatives, Soapbox’s videos can be shared with a link or by embedding them to an email.

Features and Pricing

Soapbox’s Free plan grants a single user the chance to record 10 videos and get basic analytics to measure their performance. Premium plans start with the Plus tier at $24/mo, which increases the limit to 20 videos per month and the number of users to 3 per account, as well as the ability to include lead capture forms in a video’s visualization page.

Veed.io

Veed allows you to record, stream, and edit clean videos in one place to help you daze your customers and stand out among your competitors. With Veed, you can pair great content with a killer presentation by intuitively inserting your videos into visually-aesthetic templates, a feature even Loom is currently missing.

Whether you’re looking to replace meetings, or create social media content, video training, and e-learning materials; Veed’s extensive features allow you to turn collaboration into a fun, engaging, and memorable activity for your team.

Features and Pricing

Veed offers a wide set of helpful features that give users increasing creative freedom to make their videos the best they can be depending on the plan they’re on.

For customers on the fence, the free plan allows them to record watermarked video snippets for up to 10 minutes, 250MBs in size, and 720p export quality. They also get up to 30 minutes per month of automatic subtitle generation.

The Basic Plan starts at $18/mo, removing any watermarks, raising export quality to 1080p, allowing for unlimited file size, and providing up to 60 minutes per month of auto subtitles.

Users on Veed’s premium plans also get access to:

• Unlimited use of stock footage, music, and sound effects to use in the editing of videos within the platform
• Live collaboration and annotations on videos
• Text overlays and animations
• Background noise removal
• Filters & special effects
• Different aspect ratios
• Images & stickers

BombBomb

BombBomb is a video communication solution similar to Loom that encourages users to ditch long-winded emails and replace them with video email and messaging to create a friendlier and more intimate way of communicating between colleagues, stakeholders, and clients.

Users in BombBomb can easily record and share videos with others to add a human touch to business communication that helps solidify relationships and improve customer experience in a way often overlooked in newer technologies.

Features and Pricing

BombBomb initially offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. After that, its Essentials plan starts at $33/mo per seat, which includes unlimited video and screen recording paired with features like virtual backgrounds, video branding, CTAs, and tracking analytics.

Which Of These Tools Triumphs Over The Others?

All of these tools, while not completely the same, are working towards the same thing: hassle-free communication for remote teams to replace meetings and long emails with. So if you’ve already been using Loom or either of them for a while, chances are you’re better off sticking with it for the time being.

Since they all share similarities and benefits, learning how to use a new alternative from scratch based on a couple of features (and training your team to do so as well) may not be worth your time. Especially, when all of them are still implementing new functionalities to improve user experience every year.

However, now that you know the key differences between them in terms of features and pricing, it’ll be easy for you to assess if a different option on the list solves the needs of your workflow better than what you’re currently using.

FAQs

Q1: Does Loom have a time limit?

Loom has a limit of 5 minutes per video for users on its free Starter Plan. These users can only record and store up to 25 videos simultaneously. After using up their 25 looms, they’ll have to either delete some of them to free their storage to keep recording or upgrade to their Business Plan for unlimited videos and minutes per video.

Q2: Are there alternatives to Loom?

Thanks to the remote work boom, plenty of Loom alternatives have surfaced in recent years – some of them are direct competitors, such as Snagit, Vidyard, or Veed. Others are features of broader team communication apps, such as Slack Clips and Clip by ClickUp.

Q3: What are the benefits of Loom?

Loom helps businesses cut down meetings by 29% on average, according to information on their site. It also saves users the time and hassle of writing down long-winded emails by replacing them with the ability to explain things visually through video and screen recordings. Videos recorded on Loom are stored on your profile and can be easily shared with others using links, saving either party the effort of uploading and downloading the video.