I have been a Stocksubmitter user for quite some time but the recent price increase has me look for other solutions to upload my videos. I have tried now Xpiks and although it has great features it work quite worse than Stocksubmitter to upload videos and so far I will not use it as the workflow is much slower than with Stocksubmitter for some glitches or parts that are not well implemented. The good and bad for both programs
PRICE:
Her Xpiks smashes Stocksubmitter. For just 35$ you have unlimited uploads vs many hundreds of dollars if you contribute with a big amount of files.
USER INTERFACE
Both are good and quite easy to grasp once you use them for a day. As I am used to StockSubmitter I like this one more as you have to jump less through windows and tabs. The important information is all in one main tab as opposite from Xpiks where you have to jump around more.
The look of Xpiks is much more modern vs the SS one that looks dated but as I said I prefer usability than looks
SUPPORT:
Stocksubmitter is much faster in this. You also pay much more for the program use so this is to be expected. It is also in chat form that is much more usable than the email Xpiks offers
UPLOAD and SUBMIT:
Here Stocksubmitter trumps Xpiks for video. I am uploading videos to 2 agencies nowadays: Adobe and Pond 5 . Uploading with Xpiks to Adobe was crawling slow, totally unusable and I tried many times at different days. Uploads to Pond5 had many failures too and although the speed was good I had to manually upload many times until all the vidos went through. I think something is not right with their Sftp implementation.
On the contrary StockSubmiter works as a charm, very rarely you get a failed upload. Speed with P5 is lightning fast and Adobe half the speed than P5 but still much much faster than Xpiks. None of the programs uploads as fast as when I use Filezilla Pro, with a symmetric 1 GBs/s upload fiber speed I upload dozens of Prores videos in a few minutes. That is uasully 20-50 Gb per batch upload.
SUBMIT:
No hassles with stocksubmitter. You upload and forget. No CSV exports/imports. Once you upload those all the metadata is submitted in an effective way.
With Xpiks although submission is not supported directly from the program in the case of Adobe Stock and P5 is does not matter that much because the program is able to embed titles, descriptions and keywords to videos for Adobe and P5. I don't know how it gets done as I thought that video has not the IPTC capabilities of still images but when you go to those two agencies the metadata written on the program is there. So that is truly great.
KEYWORDING:
Both programs have truly great tools to keyword. I would rate them A++. From within the program you have options to autokeywords or get similar images and pick up the best keywords.
VIDEO PLAY of files:
Perfect with stocksubmitter. You double click on the thumbnail and your predetermined video file player plays the video files
In Xpiks that is not possible in my case. You double click on the video and nothing happens. Only for this glitch I would discard Xpiks to manage videofiles. I have contacted support but unfortunately the solution they gave me a solution (enter in administrator mode or normal mode) did not fix the problem and said it was more something on my PC. Seems this problems does not affect StockSubmitter
Conclusion:
It is great to have options to upload to many agencies at once, as it saves you tons of time. I have been using SS for a long time and it works great. But recent price hikes and the dwindling stock incomes is beginning to make this an expensive solution. On the contrary, Xpiks is much more affordable and if it would work correctly with videos I would jump on it in a heartbeat because it is much cheaper. But the slow upload and inability to play my video files from within the program makes me stay with Stocksubmitter for the time being. I will keep an eye on Xpiks because if in the future those glitches get solved I will definitely make the jump because the money saving is huge with that alternative.
As I said in the tittle, this is my experience with both program that might be different to others. I could not find a good comparison on Youtube or here, so I wrote this so that others have some information before deciding, although both programs can be tried out for free and this is always the best path to know if a program suits your needs or not.