PRODUCTS
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Adding video to your site is easy.
But, building with video as a product layer is not so much.
The moment your team goes from embedding a few demos to actually integrating video into your workflows - user uploads, personalized playback, in-video search, AI tagging, analytics, and cross-device streaming, you realize most “video hosting platforms” weren’t built for this.
Wistia was designed with a different goal in mind. It’s great if you want to drop a demo video on your homepage, embed a webinar, or gate a lead magnet with an email form. It gives you a polished web player, basic engagement analytics, and a simple UI. For marketing teams and content publishers, it works well.
But if you’re building an actual video product where users are uploading videosyou’re your playback is personalized, if there is a need to track playback errors or automate encoding pipelines - Wistia starts to show its limits. You don’t get infra control neither you get in-depth playback data. You can’t tune video quality, optimize delivery paths, or plug into native apps. It’s simple by design, but that simplicity can block product velocity as your needs grow.
FastPix focuses on just one thing: video.
That focus means we spend our time building what matters most to teams who treat video as part of their core product. Our mission is to solve, simplify/abstract and automate in this space. Our stack is complete and interoperable. You can start with uploads and playback, then turn on AI-based tagging or analytics with one API call - not a new platform. Everything from encoding to delivery is automated, optimized, and production-ready. Our pricing is transparent and usage-based - no jumps, no bundling, no gated features.
We’ve seen teams outgrow “video hosting” and rebuild from scratch. We think you shouldn’t have to. If you’re building with video and care about reliability, flexibility, and room to grow - FastPix might be the better fit.
Now, let’s explore a few differences in a little more detail.
a) Encoding & delivery
First, to encode a video with FastPix, you can upload, encode and stream your video in a few mins. The video is ingested using our global accelerated uploads network, encoded using our per-title encoding, and playback URL is made available to you.
Our per-title encoding means AI/ML looks at each video and decides the best encoding recipe based on what’s actually in the content. Action scenes that need more bits get them. Static shots or simple animations get compressed more. You end up delivering the same or better experience while saving bandwidth, especially helpful when your users are on mobile data or watching from lower bandwidth regions.
In contrast, Wistia uses a fixed encoding pipeline. You upload a video, wait for it to process, and get a predefined set of renditions. It’s designed for simplicity, which works well if your needs are basic. But if you want to adapt encoding settings for your actual audience, there’s not much you can do. You don’t get knobs to turn. FastPix, on the other hand, gives you infrastructure-grade control; the kind of pipeline Netflix uses, abstracted behind a simple API. No video engineers required.
Now let’s talk about Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) - a foundational technology for smooth playback across devices and networks.
At FastPix, every time we encode a file, we create multiple renditions of a video, each encoded at different bitrates and resolutions. For example, think 480p, 720p, 1080p and 1440p. We do this for every video file. These renditions are what make adaptive bitrate streaming work. When a user hits play, the player automatically picks the best version based on their internet speed and switches mid-playback if that changes. No buffering. No pausing. No user complaints.
It just works, whether they’re on mobile data in São Paulo or switching networks in an office Zoom room. You don’t need to configure anything. You don’t need to define bitrate ladders. You don’t even need to know what ABR is. We handle it behind the scenes for every video.
b) In-Video AI
Wistia’s AI helps you create: transcript, auto-chapter, make your video a bit more accessible. Whereas, FastPix’s video intelligence helps you build: generate semantic chapters, detect NSFW scenes for content moderation, index video content for search, pull out entities, create key moments. These tools aren’t cosmetics. They’re infrastructure. If you're building a learning platform or a support automation tool, all these differences matter.
c) Playback & security
Video doesn’t live in a single browser window anymore. Your users are watching on phones, tablets, smart TVs, desktop browsers - sometimes even casting from one to another mid-stream.
FastPix was built for this world. We give you player SDKs across platforms like Web, Android (Media3), iOS (AVPlayer) and Flutter. Along with a customizable player and analytics layer underneath. That means you can launch playback fast, log what matters, and stitch data across devices. No need to wrangle different player engines or hope your metrics make sense at the end of the funnel.
Wistia’s player is clean, customizable, and great for marketers embedding videos on a landing page. But it’s tied to browser contexts. If you’re building native apps, there’s only an iOS SDK - no Android, no Smart TV. If you’re building an app-first product, you’ll have to plug in your own player and lose the benefits of any data Wistia collects.
Next considering ‘security’; that’s another fork in the road. Wistia supports basic controls: password-protected videos, domain locks, email gates. That’s helpful for gated webinars or sales decks, but not enough when your business depends on content delivery. If you’re worried about scraping, link leeching, unauthorized embeds, or piracy - you’ll need token-based playback, signed URLs, and DRM.
FastPix brings in full playback security including Signed URLs, HLS tokenization, and support for Widevine, FairPlay, and PlayReady DRMs. You don’t need to layer in another provider or write custom logic. Just turn it on, and your streams are protected. All this happens behind a single API layer with no separate config, no separate pricing, no separate product.
d) Quality of experience data
Most tools will tell you how many people watched a video. Or how long they watched. That’s helpful for content teams. But if you’re building with video, you need more. Say startup time on your mobile app quietly jumped after a new release. Or a segment of your users in South Asia keeps hitting rebuffer stalls. Or your error rate spikes, but only on a specific device. Wistia won’t tell you any of that. FastPix will.
Every session is tracked with our Video Data platform even if it lasted milliseconds. We capture over 50 metrics by default: rebuffer rate, startup time, time-to-first-frame, device info, delivery errors, bitrate switches, player logs, and more. No setup needed. No separate analytics product. It’s part of the pipeline.
All of these aren’t vanity metrics. They’re the ones that help your team actually debug, fix things, and move faster. And yes, we include 100,000 free view sessions a month with every FastPix account. We do this because you shouldn’t have to pay extra just to know what’s going wrong.
We offer integrations for all the most popular web, mobile and Smart TV SDKs, including Next.js, React, React Native, Android, iOS among others. If you're building a real video product, these SDKs make it possible to ship faster across platforms, without reinventing playback logic or debugging how to surface QoE metrics in your app. On mobile, our SDKs hook into native players like AVPlayer (iOS) and Media3 (Android), giving you smooth playback and full analytics without extra glue code. And on the backend, our language SDKs simplify uploads, metadata, stitching, and more. Then there’s webhooks. FastPix gives you video-specific webhooks that tell you exactly when a video upload is complete, when a live stream goes online, or when it ends. You don’t need to do any polling or any guesswork. You get clean, event-driven hooks to power your workflows that keep your UI in sync, and catch issues before your users do.
10 different pricing variables make life hard at most video vendors. Wistia is simpler but only until you grow. Their pricing is tiered by video count, bandwidth, and access to features. If you hit your limit, you need to upgrade plans even if you only needed a tiny bump.
If you want webinars, that comes on a higher plan. If you need more videos, you need upgrade. Hit bandwidth cap once? Jump up - or negotiate. And this goes on. FastPix uses one pricing model: usage-based.
With FastPix, you’re paying for exactly what you use. We don’t bundle features you don’t need, push you to overbuy, or surprise you with hidden charges. And no enterprise call just to unlock some basic features. New users receive $25 in free credits to explore our services without any upfront commitment. This includes access to all capabilities, allowing you to experiment with our platform risk-free. Billing in one metric: minutes basis, means it is fairly easy to understand, plan and budget for us. And if that is not helpful, we built our own pricing calculator to provide estimates tailored to your specific usage patterns.
You can also join our FastPix for startups program where you get $600 in free credits (plus extras you’ll actually use) to help you get to product-market fit.
If you’re still choosing between Wistia or FastPix, here are some questions to think through:
A. Are you embedding video, or building with it?
B. Do you need just a player, or a programmable infrastructure?
C. Will your video usage grow over time - users, geographies, devices?
FastPix suits teams who care about quality, control, and scalability - but don’t want to spend months stitching together encoding, playback, analytics, and AI. Folks choose us for speed, flexibility, and developer efficiency. We’ve built our platform to take care of the hard parts of video so you can focus on what matters most: your product. Sometimes we might not tick every checkbox for basic publishing workflows, but we have seen almost no one misses them once they’ve experienced what it’s like to build with everything in one place - and we’re just getting started.
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Wistia embeds are SEO-friendly and help pages rank by injecting structured data and transcripts. With FastPix, you'll need to handle SEO via your CMS (e.g. JSON-LD, sitemaps), but you gain more control over metadata and indexing strategy - especially for dynamic video content.
FastPix supports uploads up to 500 GB in contrast to 26 GB in Wistia (8 GB for free account). It accepts all common video and audio codecs. However, FastPix also offers chunked uploads for large files and accelerated global uploads via CDN.
Yes, FastPix offers configurable RTMP/SRT ingest, API-controlled simulcasting, low latency, and live-to-VOD features. You get deeper infrastructure controls than Wistia’s event-focused live tools.
FastPix provides editing features like clipping, watermarking, thumbnail & GIF generation, video stitching, and audio overlay directly in its platform. For advanced editing, FastPix integrates easily with third-party tools via APIs.
You get support from our devs and tech experts. We’ve got a team of dev folks and video experts to get you set up. And you may also snag a product consultation with the FastPix co-founders, too: they’re the brains behind FastPix and many other video centric businesses since the early-2010s. They’ve wrestled with everything video...continuously… to build, tinker, and scale complex video workflows.
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