Best All-In-One Transcription and Video Editing Tool:
Spoke vs Pictory vs Wisecut

Spoke, Pictory, and Wisecut are known as transcription and video editing tools, but the biggest advantage of using these tools is the speed of editing videos. 

Instead of having to mess around with timeline editors, cutting and stitching different scenes together… You just have to edit the transcription (like a word doc) to edit the video!

Record multiple takes in one video and simply keep the transcription of the one you like to automatically delete the rest.

In this blog, we raise the question: Which of these three SaaS tools is the best transcription and video editing tool?

We’ll give you an overview of each tool, the different features they have, and the pros and cons that go along with each individual tool.

Features of Spoke.app, Pictory, and Wisecut

What is Spoke.app?

Spoke.app is a software that allows you to record, transcribe, make highlights of, and share all your video conversations.

✅   Pros of Spoke.app

✨  Excellent Transcription Quality

✨  Spoke has the best editing UX

Click on any part of the transcript and the video jumps to that moment and plays automatically (same as Wisecut).

Pictory, on the other hand, pauses the video. And you have to move your mouse to the other side of the screen to click play, or you can hit the space bar to play.

You can edit the transcription by hovering over any word and click. Pictory requires double click (which IMO is unnecessary).

Wisecut is the worst of the 3. You have to click the “edit button” before going into the edit mode. And after each cut, it takes 2-4 seconds to save and forces you out of edit mode.

✨  No wait time to share

There’s no need to render and download to share a link to your edited video. Just share and your team can see it immediately.

On Pictory you need render (and it’s long). WiseCut doesn’t have a share link.

✨  Quick rendering

Spoke is fastest followed by Wisecut and Pictory.

✨  Nice Subtitles

I like the design of Spoke’s captions. Big, with character outline for ease of read. But there’s only 1 style and you can’t change the yellow color.

✨  Easily add a scene from another video

You can easily slot in a scene from another clip while editing your video. Also possible in Wisecut but easier with Spoke. Not possible on Pictory.

✨  Record & Transcribe LIVE

You can record any screen (think berrycast) and transcribe while a meeting/ presentation and webinar is ongoing. That means you record and transcribe one of those long ass webinars while you work on other stuffs.

✨   Create instant highlights LIVE

Video editing on Spoke is all about extracting the highlights from a long presentation. But what if you could edit the video LIVE while the webinar is running? Just click on “Highlights” at the beginning and end of a section and Spoke turns it into a “Scene” that you can download or mix with other scenes.

✨  Reorder scenes with drag & drop

Maybe you wanna move the most important highlights of the presentation on top. Can do that with Spoke and Wisecut.

✨  Global search for keywords

Search for keywords across ALL your scenes and transcriptions in your entire library. Find what you need faster and create a new project by combining highlights from different videos.

❌   Cons / Need Improvement

👎  Cannot import video with URL

All 3 tools can’t do that (Spoke, Pictory, Wisecut) and I hope they introduce it. The only way to import a video is via upload. Happyscribe on the other hand allow you to transcribe any video with just a URL.

👎  No Undo/ Redo button

Can’t undo if you make a mistake.

👎  Can’t change subtitle design

The default one looks good but might not fit your branding. It has a distinctive look with each words light up in yellow when they are spoken.

What is Pictory AI?

Pictory is a powerful software tool that lets you create videos from your long-form articles or transcriptions.

On the other hand, it also allows you to create transcriptions from any of your videos so you can repurpose that content in any way you want.

✅  Pros of Pictory AI

✨  Amazing deal terms

A max stack gives you 100 hours. The same will only get you 27 hours on Spoke and 20 hours on Wisecut.

✨  Merge & Split gives you more caption design control

Allows you to control how the Subtitle will show up. Getting too long? Split it!

✨  Use AI to get highlights

Just like Genei (an AI summarizer) picks up the main point of an article, Pictory uses AI to identify the highlights in your video. It won’t be 100% accurate but a good start.

✨  Standard looking Subtitles

Pictory’s subtitles look exactly like the one on Youtube. Black background white white text. No frills but familiar to many. You can also turn the background translucent or remove it completely.

✨  More video editing features

After editing the captions, you’ll enter into a simple video editor where you can add intro/ outro, more scenes, adjust subtitle placements, and more.

✨  Add BGM (with library)

Choose a BGM from their library and add it to your video. The recent update allows you to adjust the volume.

✨  Download in different aspect ratio

Maybe you want square video for Facebook and wide video for Youtube. This makes it easier to adapt your video to different platforms.

✨  Undo button

The only one among the 3 that allows you to undo/ redo your edits. Very handy as you’re bound to make mistakes.

❌  Cons / Need Improvement

👎   Need more BGM with categories and filters

There’s only about 50 of them and you have to listen 1 by 1 to find a good fit. Need categories to help us find what we need quicker.

👎  Poor text editing features

The current options are extremely basic. You can only adjust font size, highlight text, and remove formatting. It would be good if we could have the usual features like bold, underline and strikethrough. And the ability to add colors, change fonts, rotate text and so on…

👎  Rough Cuts

The cuts esp at the end of a sentence/ paragraph are quite rough and it jumps to the next scene abruptly. Sometimes leaving half of the word chopped off. You can however fix that with Merge & Split.

What is Wisecut?

Wisecut is a software tool that allows you to easily and quickly edit your videos using AI and voice recognition. 

✅  Pros of Wisecut

✨  Automatic audio enhancement features are great

I selected a video where the speaker was soft. WC could enhance the volume and make it sound good. Would be good if we could see the different types of enhancements WITHOUT needing to render first.

✨  Direct export to Youtube

Saves time for YT content creators.

✨  Good Subtitles

Apart from the high quality transcription, it exports to a proper file format with timestamps. Spoke also does that, but not Pictory.

✨  Auto Punch in/ out makes your video more watchable

The AI will choose the right timing to zoom in and also zoom out creating the effect of multiple cameras shooting. I wish they could allow us to do that manually.

✨  Smooth Jump Cuts

It cuts away silences and filler words quite smoothly.

✨  Adjust media & BGM volume for each scene

Helpful when speaker is too soft in some scenes or let’s say you want to highlight sections of the video.

✨  Customize Subtitle look and feel

This sounds so simple but it’s where Spoke & Pictory fall short. With Wisecut you can adjust the both the text and background color.

❌  Cons / Need Improvement

👎  Cannot click on a word to start editing

You have to activate it by clicking a button first. Unnecessary clicks.

👎  Cannot watch video while editing

To watch the video, you have to exit “edit mode” by clicking the button again. A lot of unnecessary clicks to enter and exit “edit mode” repeatedly. If they can’t fix this, I suggest adding keyboard shortcuts.

👎  You cannot cut any word you want

This is a major flaw for the video editor. Usually you can remove by simply highlighting any text you want and delete. Wisecut divides captions into paragraphs, and you can delete only these predefined paragraphs.

👎  Slow cutting

Each “cut” takes 2-4 seconds to confirm AND automatically exits “cut mode”. If you want to continue cutting, you have to click a button and enter cut mode again. Unnecessary clicks.

👎  Unable to select any sentence you want to create highlights

You can, however, select the predefined scenes and convert them to videos. But what happens if you want to convert half of scene 1 and half of scene 2? Can’t do that.

Which one should you choose?

1. Spoke.app

Spoke is best for transcribing on the go and extracting highlights from different videos and easily stitching them together.

This is perfect for extracting highlights from meetings, presentations, webinars or client interviews.

I love taking courses. So Spoke can also help me extract key insights from each lesson.

2. Pictory AI

Pictory has extremely generous transcription hours (10x more than Happyscribe) and they are very accurate.

 

They also have a basic video editor, which I hope will improve over time, and the ability to export in different sizes.

Good for content creation and repurposing longer videos into shorter clips. (Garyvee style)

3. Wisecut

Wisecut is made for longer videos, ideal for YouTube content creators. That’s also why they have YT integration.

 

The AI features can improve the quality of your videos while saving you time on editing.

There are still a lot of rough edges and UX issues, but they are on the right track and show potential.

We need to monitor the changelog while their campaign is live to estimate how long they’ll take to mature.

Note that the low transcription limits mean you’ll likely need to upgrade in the future, at a cost of $3.8/hour.

Conclusion

With all of this features, pros and cons written down, I feel that Spoke is best for personal use or for team coordination, while Pictory and Wisecut are best for content creation.

I have purchased both Spoke and Pictory for now, and may replace Pictory with Wisecut depending on how they develop over the course of their campaign.