Congrats, you did a killer presentation or screencast, now you want to upload it to the interwebs and share with the world, but what service should you use? I’ve used both YouTube and Vimeo and wanted to compare and contrast the two.

Appearance

I love the look and feel of Vimeo, it appeals to my tastes, and feels like a crafted app versus a video marketplace. It embeds well in my blog, and until recently was the only way to upload very long videos to the web for free (YouTube now allows authorized accounts to do this too). While YouTube looks much better now, it’s no match for Vimeo

Processing

Once the video is uploaded it can take quite awhile to process on both services. While you are waiting YouTube allows you to access the embed code, while Vimeo makes you wait. This is nice to queue up a blog post without having to wait for the video to finish processing. Vimeo will give you a video processing time estimate which is nice, while YouTube just gives you a progress indicator. Vimeo also sends you an email when your video is done processing, another plus.

In my informal speed tests YouTube was faster at uploading and processing videos. While uploading the video below, YouTube won by a few minutes. Your mileage may vary.

Quality

Here is the exact same video uploaded to both services, which do you prefer?

YouTube

Vimeo

Social

Both services allow for discovery and exploration, Vimeo has <3’s and YouTube has thumbs up. I’m not sure either service does a great job of exploration, the majority of traffic to any of my videos comes from people linking to it, or from my hosting it on my blog. So don’t expect any content you put on either service to suddenly take off without some work from you.

Integration

YouTube wins this one hands down, quite a few services will expand youtube links into the actual video, including Propane the Mac client for Campfire and Facebook. While Vimeo link-embedding exists in many services, it tends to be ignored by the smaller players.

Winner

Vimeo looks better, YouTube has a lot of UX polish, and seems to be faster at processing videos. While I’ve used Vimeo heavily in the past, I plan on using YouTube a bit more in the future, if i left any important details off, let me know in the comments or on twitter @schneems