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Panopto vs. Kaltura

Choosing the right video management system is critical so we’ve compiled 10 questions to consider when comparing Panopto to Kaltura.

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Overview

On the surface, Panopto and Kaltura appear to offer similar capabilities for recording, managing and sharing your institution’s video. There are, however, fundamental differences that may affect your organization’s ability to grow, scale, and deliver easy-to-use, secure, live and on-demand video.

Panopto

Panopto was founded 13 years ago as a video solution for universities and enterprises, and has grown into the leading provider of video management systems globally. For higher education, Panopto has grown in direct response to the teaching, distance learning, training, and communication needs of higher education institutions, and is now mission critical for distance learning environments. With over 1,000 university customers, including 22 of the world’s top 25 universities, Panopto is the leading video management system for education. For enterprises, Panopto’s solution drives learning, training, knowledge sharing, communication, meeting recording, and is a key component for enterprises expanding remote work environments.

Kaltura

Kaltura, by contrast, was founded as a solution for the broadcast and media industry, which has a heritage of providing video over closed networks to set top boxes. This key difference means that, with Panopto, your organization will always have the most robust, flexible, dependable, and scalable video solution to meet your user and administrator needs.

Panopto vs. Kaltura: Capabilities

See how Panopto and Kaltura compare across some of the most important video management capabilities.

Built to Scale

At Panopto, we’ve always believed that video and technology should just work, under any circumstances. To do this,we created a cloud-based, end-to-end video solution that can be managed from anywhere, and can record using commodity hardware. Panopto maintains server infrastructure for its cloud-hosted service and ensures its continuous, optimal delivery. One of the earliest video providers to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Panopto’s platform can adapt to any scenario at scale, at any moment, even in a crisis. AWS provides the backbone for the Panopto Cloud, which includes geographic server options in the United States, European Union, Canada, and Asia Pacific. The Panopto Cloud is secure, scalable, has high availability for redundancy, and is built to ensure uptime and reliability. This means that Panopto is always available when it’s needed. In fact, we are so confident in our uptime that we openly publish the history of any cloud issues at trust.panopto.com.

Kaltura, by contrast, operates its own data centers, requiring massive hardware investments that have limited ability to scale. Challenged to operate at a scale not anticipated in 2020 and beyond, a number of customers are finding that the Kaltura network is not able to reliably meet their needs.

Focused on Customer Service

At Panopto, customer satisfaction and customer service are paramount to everything we do. Video management systems are mission critical—and our goal is to deliver for our customers. As a part of this, we believe that being transparent about results is important. We measure and publish customer satisfaction using a standardized measure that’s been adopted by more than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies — our Net Promoter Score (NPS) shows how likely our customers are to recommend Panopto. In our most recent NPS survey, Panopto received a score of 70, which puts us far above the SaaS industry average of 30. You can read more about it here.

Making Video Easy

Panopto’s product and technology investments are made with the education and enterprise markets in mind. Because Kaltura’s primary focus is media companies, its product development investments, partnership efforts, professional services, and licensing model reflect this. Furthermore, it’s reflected in the company’s complex, fragmented product and pricing model, which is designed for media companies needing piecemeal custom video solutions.

While fragmented product and pricing models work for media companies, they don’t work for universities and enterprises. Kaltura lists more than 15 different product offerings on their site. Such product combinations introduce unnecessary complexity, confusion and cost unpredictability. They typically require customers to hire expensive Kaltura professional services agents to implement highly custom solutions at an unpredictable cost, with ongoing engagements as customer needs and Kaltura products evolve.

By contrast, Panopto’s product and pricing model are designed for simplicity and predictability, making it easy to buy, deploy, use, and maintain. Our integrated video management system is purpose built for large institutions to seamlessly scale video to meet any and every need.