Tubebuddy or VidIQ? Differences You NEED to Know

Hey creators, are you trying to grow your YouTube channel and you're looking at softwares like TubeBuddy and Vidiq and you're not sure which one is the best for you? Well, in this video we're going to be going over the pros and cons of both and also what I would recommend depending on where you are in the YouTube process. So I have different recommendations for beginners versus someone who might have a more established channel. So let's get into it. The first one we're going to talk about is TubeBuddy. Okay, so this is a very simple software. I mean it's really an extension that you can put on your web browser, which is great. It means it seamlessly integrates with YouTube. Super, super simple to use. That makes it great for beginners. It has less of a learning curve. It also has some really cool features like AB testing for thumbnails. Now I know YouTube recently came out with its own A B testing built into the system, but it's based more on watch time versus click through rate. And I think with TubeBuddy you will get more data. So stick around because I'm going to show you the back end of TubeBuddy shortly so that you can see the interface and the type of data you will get from this A B testing. Not only that, you can do bulk updates in TubeBuddy, meaning you want to bulk update titles, descriptions, thumbnails, table tags. You can do that in TubeBuddy very easily. It has great keyword research with lots of actionable steps and it's very, very budget friendly. So for I just checked the pricing on TubeBuddy, so $7.50 a month or $72 a year. So it won't break the bank, especially if you're just getting started with YouTube. Now let's talk about the cons before we go in for the screen share. Biggest complaint people give about TubeBuddy is that the interface is a little bit outdated. They have done some recent updates, but visually it's not as appealing as Vidiq, which I will show you later. It also is limited in its real time analytics. Vidiq will definitely give you a lot more information, but that can be overwhelming for beginners because if you don't know what to do with the information, it's not really valuable to you. And Another downside of TubeBuddy is that some of the cool features like the A B testing I'm going to show you are found in their more advanced licensing. Like I have the Legends license that has the A B testing, but there's still a lot you can do. They do have a free version. And like I said, the Pro version gives you a lot of additional data, and it's only $72 a year, so it won't break the the bank. All right, so let me go into Tubebuddy real quick. Just show you the interface here and then stick around because we're going to dive into Vidiq next. All right, so I'm in the desktop version of Tubebuddy just to show you all the features. So you can see on my Lauren Bateman guitar, I have the Legend license. On the creator Launchpad, I just have a Pro license. But just to show you some of the differences here, you can see I don't have the competitor scoreboard with Pro. I don't have the search range tracking, the brand alerts, the AB tests, and the retention analyzer, which you do have here in Legend. So I'm going to pop over to Legend just so that you can see what it looks like on the back end here. All right, so this is the general health report for my channel. It'll show you the number of views, the subscribers, the uploads, what my performance has been the last 30 days, where my traffic sources are coming from. In terms of keywords, saying guitar lessons for beginners is also doing very obviously doing very well for me right now. Finger exercises for guitar on the decline. So it just shows you what keywords you're doing well for, which ones are declining and why is that important? Because I have a video that was on finger exercises that was doing really well, and it's kind of declining in the rankings, which means it might be time for me to do a new video on that. Okay. To try and reclaim that. It just gives me audience demographics. This stuff can be easily found in YouTube as well, but that is the overall health health report. The big thing here is the AB test. So here is the A B testing. So you can see I've done a number of AB tests, just checking different things, different colors, different fonts. What works better, what doesn't, Having me in the picture versus not. As you can see, this variation did half as well. 1.79 versus 3. 8 4. So, yes, obviously, you know, for thumbnails, I would be like, this is too busy. It has too much text. But it's still did better than this one. So we tested it over a number of different things. Here is another test. So this one, the variation did a little bit better, so we switched over to the variation. Okay. So this is where you can see click through rate is the most important value here on TubeBuddy. There's also a lot of other data where in YouTube when you run an AB test it's only going to go off of watch time. And obviously YouTube wants watch time because they're selling ads. Now in this particular case it looks like the click through rate was slightly better. The watch time was slightly better. So for me, you know, again it gives you a confidence interval and again they say we recommend 95%. So you know, I actually was very big in statistics in college. This is not super, super high confidence level. So you know, either one would probably work. And I'll look through, you know, the data looks very, very similar. So I'm not seeing one of the other doing better other than, you know, it looks like the variation gets more likes the original gets more subscribers. Subscribers to me is maybe a little bit more important. But everything else looks pretty even. So that's one where there really wasn't a big difference. But let's take a look at one that had more of a difference. So let's go back to this one. Since this was such a big difference. So obvious. He obviously Here they are 100% confident that this thumbnail is going to do better than this one. Everything, all the stats, you know, the original is the engagement rate is 5% versus 3%. The click through rate is, you know, almost 2%. It is 2% higher here. So you're going to get a lot more views because the click through rate is higher. The average view duration isn't different, which doesn't surprise me because it's probably the same audience, the same type of person. Obviously because the first one got more views, it's going to get more watch time. Okay, so you can see in this case it was very clear cut that this original image did way better than than this new image that we tested. So we stopped the AB test and the original was put in its place. And that's what we're running with today. And that's the power that I really feel is here in Tubebuddy now, the keyword explorer. Let's hop over to YouTube. You can see there's a little TB up here. That's the extension I was talking about. And I pulled up one of my videos that recently came out and I can see the search rankings for these and you know, doing fairly well. I mean this is a newer video. Let's see, summer 69 guitar lesson is what I'm trying to rank for and it shows right now. That we do have the number one position for that as well. How to play Summer 69 on guitar. How to strum Summer 69. That's an interesting keyword. I might want to include that somewhere in my description to try and rank a little bit more. But it's just giving me an overall for this video. Just different information. The rankings, which is pretty cool. So that's the. Built in here over on the video and on the back end, it does have a title generator. You can test alternatives. It will also generate tags as well. It can add chapters to your videos. So you can see how the direct integration. Also you can see the rankings popping up in here on my tags. So here's the suggestions. I could add more tags if I wanted to by just clicking this plus button. Okay. So if I want to add that, I put it in there and now I can save this. And it's. It's part of the tags that are in this sum, this video. So you can see how it Simply integrates with YouTube. Makes things very, very easy to use. And it's very, very simple for beginners. The keyword explorer is right here. And you could, you know, I'll do this one Summer of 69 guitar lesson, and it will explore that keyword. It will tell you about, you know, the search volume. You know, you know, oh, it's an okay. Weighted versus unweighted. So this is a pro version. You won't get this in the free version. You do get it in legend. You do get it in pro. And unweighted is just how good this. This keyword is. In general, weighted is against your specific channel based on your search volume, your, your relevancy. Okay, the weight of your channel. And I like to do weighted because I want it to be like for my channel, if my channel put this video out, how likely is it that I would rank for this video? So overall, I got a 50 score. If I could get great, like if I added four beginners. Now, it's based on this specific keyword that you type in. And if you want more help with SEO, I'll put a link over here in the corner to where you can go and I'll deep dive in on the SEO and what all of this means. But you can see for keyword researching, tubebuddy is very, very simple to use and nice and easy for beginners. All right, so let's talk about Vidiq now. Okay, so the pros of Vidiq is it's a much more robust system. But the downside to that is that the learning curve is much steeper. There's also a lot more bells and whistles to distract you. So if you're a beginner, it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Vidiq also does the keyword optimization. It'll also show you trending topics and give you suggestions for trending content ideas. You can also track your competitors, see what your competitors are putting out, which could be important as you grow. The other thing that Vidiq recently added is AI capabilities in terms of creating titles or just coming up with content scripts. I don't particularly like their scripts that much or their AI generated thumbnails. I, I actually don't like their thumbnails at all. I don't think they're useful. We still make our own thumbnails, but the content ideas and just getting a general script is good. I think you can get much better scripting through a program like ChatGPT. Overall, Vidiq offers a much cleaner format in look. So if esthetics are big for you, definitely check out Vidiq. I'm going to show you what it looks like in a moment, but first let me emphasize some of the cons of Vidiq. And a big one is, is the pricing. Some people. So the pricing on Vid IQ is much higher. The boost is $19 a month or 1.99 a year. Again, I don't think it's that expensive. It's not going to break the bank in terms of business expenses. But for some people, you know, TubeBuddy is very, very cost effective for a lot of people. And like I said, the big learning curve. There's a much bigger learning curve on Vidiq, so it might take you a little bit longer to hit the ground running and really start using it. Also, Vid IQ gives you less tag suggestions than TubeBuddy does, unless you upgrade to two higher versions. So even Vidiq does have a higher level, but the boost level is perfectly fine for what you should need. Now let's take a deep dive into the back end of Vidiq. So I can just show you around a little bit and some of the features that are available with this program. Okay, so let's take a look now at the Vidiq dashboard. You can see it's a little bit more visually appealing than TubeBuddy, but you can see there's a lot more things to get distracted by. Competitors, outliers, subscribers, you know, daily ideas, which is great. You know that you, you can find trending keywords in here, and it works the same Way kind of as tubebuddy and that you would put in a keyword. So if I put in, let's say guitar Lessons for Beginners here, it's going to give me a ranking. You can find questions related. This is a feature that I really do like in Vidiq is that you can find questions to that keyword, which is super helpful because that's usually what people are typing in the search. So you can still do the same kind of research. And I recommend pick one and stick with it because sometimes they're going to give slightly different data, two different softwares, slightly different data. Sometimes you can also click on get video ideas which will tell you, you know, different ideas for your channel. So you can see here I've got a lot of guitar recommendations for video thoughts. This was going to tell me, you know, how likely it is if I did a video around this, that I'll get a lot of viewership and probably help grow my channel. You can also have this optimizer which will analyze your videos in real time and it'll give a score of your title and your thumbnail. Now this one, this is my latest video that's I was just showing you, that's ranking number one. It doesn't like the title. Um, but for me it's a very good SEO title. Um, you know, I'd be interested to see what they would recommend. So if you click on that, it will give you suggested titles. How to play Summer. Like that doesn't seem that much more exciting. So you know, they're giving these 97, but I don't think those are very much different than this. So I, from an SEO standpoint, I'm going to keep my, my original, the thumbnail it said was is. Is very good basically because you can see there's bright colors. I got the primer, the right red shirt, the yellows, the bl. So it tends to like my, my thumbnails, the title, sometimes not as much. And again, you know, you can play with it a bit and see, but you can see it. It'll rank all your videos and tell you where you can possibly make improvements. You can also track your competitors so you can look at the videos your competitors are making. You know, the outlier scores if that is growing the person's channel. So the higher this number is, the more viewership they're getting. The more subscribers they're getting, the more likely it is the to grow that person's channel. And again here, like I said, you can create thumbnails. I really don't like their thumbnail creator. I haven't found it's created one that I've liked yet. But you can, you can do lots of stuff here in Vidiq, but you can see how it can get very, very, like, overwhelming. They even have a script writer, like I said, which is nice. So if I had did my Summer of 69 guitar lesson, this is what you would see. So as I'm going through this, you can see it's doing a lot of thinking. This is taking way too long. This is why I, I never use this because this is taking forever. If I did this over in Chat GPT, I would have a full script written out in a matter of seconds. This is just taking way too long to process, but I'm going to go through it and see what it spits out at the end. All right, so just so you see, this thing is still, it's still loading. I went over to Chap GPT to ask it to write me a scri. And here you go, Chat GPT. I just prompted it. I said, you know, write me a YouTube script for guitar tutorial on teaching the full song of Summer 69 by Brian Adams. And here you go. Interest chorus even. Wow. I didn't even know it. Throw in some tab. That's pretty cool. So put in some tab. It's talking about the chords. All right. And you can see this. Chat GPT in like five seconds has written me out an entire script while Vidiq is still processing this script with CTAs and all this other stuff. So in terms of the scripting, I don't like like Vidiq. I think it just takes too long. You're much better. Look at this is already done. Would you like this in a PTF with the chord charts and tabs? So this is awesome. Okay, so it's giving me a full outline about how long each one should take. Of course I can expand upon this as much as I want to, but Chat GPT for scripting is so much better than Vidiq. So there we go. This is what they've given me. And you know, they're giving me like a full on script here, which this is a lot of text. And that's another reason I like Chat GPT for scripting because they use bullet points a lot. Makes it a lot easier. I, you know, and I know here Vidiq is doing all the angles and you know, they're doing their conclusions and all that stuff, but it took forever for them to make this script and time for me Is. Is very, very valuable. Now if we pop over to the YouTube side on this, you're gonna see some cool stuff that's gonna show up. So you can see in the regular searches here we have related topics. So YouTube does integrate with your browser as well. Okay, so here's that video again. So I'm just going to open that. And you can see it doesn't give as many in video statistics as tubebuddy as you can see here. It just kind of gives a general overline of the video, which. Which is okay, but on the back end. All right, so now I'm over to YouTube and you can see here, it's giving me some. Some generic information here about this general search term. Who are the top people. Surprisingly, I hold the top two videos on this one. I just typed that in. So that's interesting. You can see. So this is an older version of the video I did 134,000 views. I did this video four years ago. I just re released it 11 days ago. So it's a newer video. The current video is getting 30 views per hour. This is the great thing about Vidiq is it does give you a little bit more information about the volume of views directly on YouTube. So this new video is getting 30 views per hour versus the old video, which is still getting two views per hour. And this really had. This video had a good impact on growing my channel. Okay, so you can see here, like, you know, Justin Guitar did one. It grew his channel very, very well for this person. It grew their channel exponentially. Well, this one. Well, now let's look at the video itself. Less. Less information here than. Than tubebuddy on. On the actual video side of things in terms of keywords and rankings. And then on the back end, okay, now you can see it's adding in some titles here and analyzing. I like this title. Although the song is more than just two chords, the verse is two chords. But it's giving some suggestions for different thumbnails. And if I wanted to, I could go over to Tubebuddy and I could add a B, test these. These titles and see which title performs better. You can do that in Tubebuddy as well. So if I scroll down, you'll see some of the other suggestions, you know, vid iq. All right, so I scroll down to the tag section. You can see here the rankings pop in just like tubebuddy. These are giving me slight. Like you can see the numbers are slightly different here. So this is my overall score and this is the ranking. We're Tubebuddy and I believe Tubebuddy because I literally just typed this in and my video was number one on the search. But it's, it's giving me slightly different rankings than, than TubeBuddy. But also it will give you recommended tags as well that you can add in to the tag. So again, on the video side back here I feel like TubeBuddy is a little bit more helpful. On the main search side here I feel like Vidiq is a little more helpful. So you can see why I sometimes use both of these in collaboration to get a bigger picture of what's going on. So what's my verdict? Ultimately, as a YouTuber with over 550,000 subscribers, I use both of these platforms because they do different things. So TubeBuddy really on the SEO and the thumbnail side of things seems to be better. I also like it for beginners. Beginners, people just getting started with SEO, just getting started with YouTube, there's way less bells and whistles to get distracted by. And then Vidiq, as your channel starts growing and you need more analytics, more real time information about your channel, your competitors, trending topics, you can upgrade to Vidiq. And if you want to try them both, go to the link in the description below. I have both of my affiliate links down there. They both have free versions that you can test out both and see which is going to work best for you. But ultimately my suggestion is if you're just getting started with YouTube, TubeBuddy is going to be the simplest and easiest bet with the least amount of learning curve. And then as you grow, I would graduate into Vidiq when having a lot more information becomes more valuable to you.