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Animaker Review & FAQ

Animaker is an online, do-it-yourself video animation software allowing people with no experience in video production and editing to make their own high quality videos. Animaker claims to have helped “over 7 million people create awesome videos by themselves,” and “is trusted by some of the world’s leading brands” including Amazon, Siemens and Nokia (at least according to Animaker themselves).

To help you decide whether you should try Animaker, I wrote up this review outlining my experience with it, as well as a FAQ answering all the main questions people have had about it.

(If you’d like to skip straight to the verdict on whether Animaker is any good or not, click here)

How does Animaker work?

Unlike most video editing software, Animaker is cloud-based, works in a web browser and does not require you to download anything. That makes it super-handy to get started with, as there’s no waiting for a clunky download to finish. The other big advantage of working in a web browser and saving to the cloud is that you can save your work and resume it anywhere. You could be working on an Animaker project on your desktop, for example, and then keep working on it when you’re away on your laptop later, without having to install or download anything else.

A curious point is that Animaker uses Flash which is largely considered to be ancient technology that went obsolete years ago. But it works just fine in all modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox. You may just need to adjust your settings to allow animaker.com to run Flash, as was the case with me:

Signing up to Animaker

Signing up to Animaker takes no more than 1 minute, and you don’t need to enter any information beyond your name, email and password. Just fill out this form on the website:

Then you can get started creating a video immediately:

Creating videos with Animaker

First you’ll be taken to this screen, where you choose a template for your video:

These templates are all quite high quality and a huge help compared to if you’re doing a project entirely from scratch with ordinary video editing software. With each template you’ll get several different scenes that you can edit as you wish. For example, here’s me choosing “the 10 most visited cities in the world” template:

On the left you can see the list of scenes. The first scene will be the introduction scene with header text of “the ten most visited cities in the world.” Then, the following scenes will each be showing some city — if you enlarge the image above, you can see the second scene shows a map outline of Seoul, Korea, with its number of visitors. Each following scene will then be in this format.

At the bottom left, you can see you can select how long each scene should show for, while the menu on the far-right is used for adding things. Here are all the elements you can add to your video with Animaker:

As this is primarily a review of Animaker and not a tutorial going over every different feature, I’ll not go into more detail than that. But here are some screenshots of some of the different elements in action:

Changing a background

Adding a pie chart

Adding some clip art images

Making special effects

Adding transitions

I found Animaker to be a pleasure to use compared to every desktop-based video editing software I’ve ever tried. As a complete amateur when it comes to video editing, there’s a significant learning curve with using tools like Adobe Premiere, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, but that wasn’t the case for me with Animaker — it was all completely easy and intuitive.

Is Animaker Voice any good?

Animaker Voice allows you to turn your text into speech for your videos so you don’t need to narrate them with your own voice. While it’s of decent quality compared to other text-to-speech services, it will still be obvious that it’s a robot speaking, not a real person. And it will be vastly worse than a professional voice over artist.

What is Animakers pricing?

Animaker should cost you between $10/month and $39/month, depending on what features you need and how many of their premium (paid for) graphics and effects you use in your videos. If you need more than 20 premium downloads per month, you have to contact them for pricing. I personally find this type of pricing model quite annoying and wish there was just a single flat fee for everything, including unlimited downloads.

Are there any Animaker coupons or promo codes?

There are no working promo codes or coupons that I could find for Animaker, despite many (fake) coupon sites claiming to have one. The option to enter a coupon didn’t even appear for me when I went to the ordering screen, so I highly doubt there is or has ever been a real coupon or promo code for Animaker.

Where can I find Animaker tutorials?

Animaker is simple enough that you can probably work out everything on your own. However, there are some decent tutorials on YouTube and the Animaker website here.

What are some example videos that were made with Animaker?

Here are a few good ones:

What are the alternatives to Animaker?

The primary alternatives to Animaker are Moovly, Vyond (formerly GoAnimate) and Powtoon.

Moovly vs Animaker: Moovly pricing starts at $49/month, so much more expensive than Animaker.

Vyond vs Animaker: Also starts at $49/month, and adds a Vyond watermark on the free plan and does not export high quality video (making the free version largely useless for anything serious).

Powtoon vs Animaker: Starts at $19/month.

Is Animaker recommended?

I quite like Animaker, and was impressed with its ease of use and features. I recommend it to newbies to video editing who want to make simple explainer videos without spending hours learning clunky desktop video editing software. If you are already a pro at video editing, or you’re looking to make videos that require advanced video editing functionality, you’ll probably want to skip it.

If you’re lucky, you can get away with using Animaker for free — you can still create HD videos on the free version and get a reasonable amount of graphics (albeit the free graphics and effects are just a small fraction of the premium ones). It goes without saying that you should only pay for Animaker if you’re in the process of making a video and find that you really need some of the premium graphics and effects.

Summary
Review Date
Reviewed Item
Animaker
Author Rating
4
Software Name
Animaker
Software Name
NA
Software Category
NA
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