Here's the trap. Two reps want to start sending video, one finds Loom at $18 a seat, and RevOps says use Vidyard at $89 because it writes back to the CRM. You approve the expensive one because the reporting sounds responsible.
The gap is $71 a seat a month, which is 4.9 times. Over a year that is $852 per person, or $4,260 across five reps. Both prices verified in August 2026, and both tools have a free tier.
The question worth asking before you approve it is what the premium is actually for, because it is not the ability to record and send a video. Both do that.
What does each video actually cost?
Per seat is the wrong unit for a format with a natural ceiling. Personalised video does not scale: it is a high-effort touch for named accounts, and a rep doing it properly manages a few dozen a week before it stops being personal.
| Videos a week | Videos a month | Loom per video | Vidyard per video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 43 | $0.42 | $2.06 |
| 20 | 87 | $0.21 | $1.03 |
| 30 | 130 | $0.14 | $0.69 |
| 50 | 217 | $0.08 | $0.41 |
At thirty a week, which is a genuinely committed rep, Loom costs 14 cents a video and Vidyard costs 69. Both are small numbers. The point is not that either is expensive, it is that the multiple holds at every volume, so the decision never gets cheaper with scale the way per-seat software usually does.
What does the premium buy?
Hosting on a branded page, engagement tracking, and writeback into the CRM. Those are real features with real engineering behind them, and for a team whose CRM is the system of record the writeback genuinely removes manual work.
The part worth thinking about is the tracking, because it is what gets used to justify the line item. Our own note on Vidyard is blunt about it: engagement tracking flatters itself, a view is not a reply, and optimising for views is how teams end up busy.
That is a criticism of how the data gets used rather than of the product. Knowing a prospect watched ninety percent of a video is genuinely useful to the rep about to follow up. It becomes a problem when watch rate turns into the number a team reports on, because watch rate is easy to move and replies are not.
Why is the licence the wrong thing to argue about?
Because the expensive input is the rep, not the software, and neither price comes close to it.
An in-house SDR costs $134,000 to $154,000 a year fully loaded on our own model, which at two thousand working hours is roughly $67 to $77 an hour, or a little over a dollar a minute. A personalised video is research, a recording, usually a retake, and a send. Call it four minutes.
| Cost per video, at 30 videos a week | Amount | Share of the real cost |
|---|---|---|
| Rep's time, four minutes | $4.47 | the actual cost |
| Loom licence | $0.14 | 3.1% |
| Vidyard licence | $0.69 | 15.3% |
The $71 a seat everyone argues about is roughly 12 percent of what a video actually costs to make. A rep who records one fewer retake per video saves more than the entire difference between the two products.
That does not make the licence choice meaningless, but it does mean the meeting about which tool to buy is worth less than a short conversation about how long people are spending on each recording.
Do video messages actually get more replies?
We do not know, and neither does anyone quoting a figure at you. There are widely cited lift statistics in this category, most of them published by the vendors selling video tools, and we have not traced any of them to a primary study.
So we are not going to print one. What we can say is that both tools have free tiers, which makes this the cheapest thing in your stack to test properly: send fifty videos and fifty good paragraphs to comparable lists and count replies. That number applies to your market, which no published statistic does.
So which should you buy?
- Loom, if the video is the message. It is the cheapest way to put a face in an inbox, and at a few dozen a week the tracking you are giving up is tracking of a volume small enough to remember unaided.
- Vidyard, if video is a programme rather than a habit. Multiple reps, CRM attribution required, someone accountable for reporting on it. The writeback is the actual product and it is worth paying for when a person would otherwise be copying links into records.
- Neither, until you have proved it works. Nobody has shown us that a video beats a good paragraph in your market. Both free tiers exist precisely so you can find out before committing $4,260 a year across a team.
- Whichever you pick, report on replies. If the quarterly number is watch rate, you have bought a metric rather than a channel, and we costed the rest of a working outbound stack in what cold email actually costs.
The answer to the question in the title is that $71 a seat buys hosting, attribution and measurement, and whether that is worth it turns on a question about your organisation rather than about video: does anyone need to report on this, or does someone just need to send it?