Pictory Review: Features, Pros & Cons

So you want to learn about Pictory AI? Well, you’re in the right place! This Pictory review spills the beans on the good, the bad, and the ugly of this AI-powered video editor software.

Pictory Review Summary

Pros

• Incredibly easy to use
• You can use it as an online video cutter
• It has a 15-day money-back guarantee
• Customer support responds promptly

Cons

• Not every voice-over sounds convincingly human-like
• The AI-generated images and videos don’t always match your text

Incidentally, Pictory has a Trustpilot score of 4.6 stars out of five (based on 65 user reviews). 

What is Pictory AI?

Pictory is an AI-powered platform that promises to “automatically create short, highly-shareable branded videos from your long-form content.” Everyone from a blogger to a YouTube channel creator to a social media manager can use this software as their online video editor, YouTube video editor, online video cropper, etc. 

It was founded on September 1st, 2019, by three entrepreneurs, and raised $2.1 million in a January 4th, 2022, funding round. At the time of writing, Crunchbase estimates that Pictory gets 683,042 monthly visitors to its site.

Product Background

Here’s a brief timeline of Pictory AI:

• September 2019 – The Pictory team builds a prototype of the product at a Seattle hackathon.
• July 2020 – Pictory AI’s first version launches and is made available to the general public.
• January 2022 – Pictory AI raises $2.1m in a Series A funding round.

Pictory AI’s founders are as follows:

• Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder – Vikram Chalana
• Chief Product Officer and Co-founder – Abid Ali Mohammed
• Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder – Vishal Chalana

Pictory’s Series A funding round backers include:

• Voyager Capital
• FUSE
• Bill Bryant
• Omri Bahat
• Bharat Shyam

The company is four years old.

Features & Benefits (Pros)

If you want a platform that facilitates online video-making with pictures and music, free or paid, Pictory AI might be worth a look. I discuss its features and the benefits each one offers in this section.

Online Video Making with Text

Thanks to its ReelFast technology, Pictory’s powerful artificial intelligence can turn your scripts into videos within minutes. The software sources images and videos from StoryBlocks, a repository of over 3 million stock resources, which saves you the trouble of painstaking research.

In addition, Pictory acts as an AI music generator of sorts. It pulls in royalty-free from Melodi.ie, giving you access to over 15,000 tracks for your video. Best of all, the tracks are forever free, which is excellent because it means you won’t have to worry about copyright notices or platform take-downs.

Blog to Video

Pictory’s blog-to-video capability can help bloggers increase engagement by converting their blog posts into videos. For example, if you hesitated to do it before, you can now start a complementary YouTube channel and upload the videos there to drive traffic to your blog. 

Also, you can repurpose your blog content for video-based social media platforms like TikTok and (increasingly) Instagram, which will let you reach audiences that prefer to learn via video. Digital marketing agencies and online tutors will benefit the most from this feature.

Automatic Captions

Pictory makes captioning videos easy, which is ideal if you’re hosting a webinar, coaching online, doing a product demo, or other video-based information-sharing sessions. This feature is also great because it makes your content accessible to people with hearing disabilities.

The automatic captioning feature also saves you time and money you’d otherwise spend manually captioning your videos or outsourcing the work. And it’s very reliable with nearly human-level accuracy.

Highlight Reels

You can use Pictory as an online video trimmer to create shorts for social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and so on. This feature is amazing because it lets you convert full-length videos into trailers, highlight reels from your webinar, short and shareable product demos, and other shorts. 

In addition, you can brand your videos with your logo and customize the video captions (specifically the fonts and colors). This capability includes adding intro and outro screens for the video.

Voice-Overs

If you need voice-overs for your videos, Pictory provides some realistic-sounding options for you to try. They’re categorized into male, female, and child, and they’re available in 40+ accents, including American, British, Australian, and South African. All voice-overs I’ve mentioned are AI-generated.

Alternatively, you can upload pre-recorded voice-overs or choose to record one in-app. In the latter case, Pictory’s AI will automatically sync your recording to the video (available with the Premium and Enterprise plans). However, as I’ll highlight below, not all the AI-generated voices sound natural. So you may find yourself recording voice-overs more often than you’d like.

Video Editing

Pictory’s video editing capabilities are impressive. They make it easy to subtitle your recorded videos. You can use it to edit Zoom meeting recordings, pre-recorded video podcasts, recorded webinars, training and demo videos, and more.

Also, you can remove bloat from videos by getting Pictory’s AI to transcribe them. The transcription process is important because it helps you identify spots in your video where you use filler words (“ums” and “uhs”) or leave awkward silences. 

Putting the Features Together

Here’s how you can create a video in six easy steps using the features mentioned above:

1. Select the Input Source: You have two options for doing this: either copy and paste your article or paste in the article’s URL.

2. Edit the Text Summary: Once your article is in, Pictory will highlight some sentences in it. You can leave Pictory’s highlights as-is or remove and add some highlights of your own.

3. Edit the Storyboard: Using the contents of your article as inspiration, Pictory will choose from over 3 million royalty-free and licensed images and video clips to match your article’s theme. The AI’s choices won’t always match your article, so you might have to intervene. Still, making the changes is straightforward, and you can include your own assets.

4. Add Music Track and Voice-Over: Once again, Pictory will select royalty-free music for your video. It’s up to you whether you choose or change the selected tracks. In addition, you can choose AI-generated voice-overs for your video or record some yourself. 

5. Choose a Theme and Customize with Your Branding: Pictory provides animations, fonts, and colors you can add to enhance your video. Choose the ones you want and add your brand logo, intro, and outro screens. 

6. Preview, Generate, Download: Finally, preview the video to make final adjustments. Once you’re happy with the final product, generate the video and download it as an MP4 file.

Pictory is that straightforward to use!

Weaknesses (Cons)

No product is perfect. As such, Pictory also underperforms in some key areas, which I’ll discuss briefly below.

Robotic Voice-Overs

I mentioned that Pictory has a selection of realistic-sounding voice-overs. That assertion holds true for most of them. However, you may hear some voice-over options that don’t sound terribly convincing. To be honest, a few of them sound downright robotic to the point where you’d be better off recording your own instead.

Video Text Mismatch

Another drawback I found when using Pictory is the AI’s video choices didn’t always do my text justice. I found that I had to swap out images and videos on more than one occasion, which was a bit of a hassle.

Pricing Plan

Pictory AI’s plans include:

• Standard Plan: It costs $19 per month. You can create up to 30 videos and up to 10-minute-long text-to-video projects, amongst other features.

• Premium Plan: This plan costs $39 per month. It lets you create up to 60 videos and 20-minute-long text-to-video projects.

• Enterprise Plan: You’ll have to contact the Pictory team for the details.

When you pay annually, all plans come with a 33% Pictory discount. In addition, you can get a Pictory coupon code online. Unfortunately, since this is subscription-based software, you can’t get a Pictory lifetime license.

Payment & Refund Policy

Pictory offers a 15-day “no questions asked” money-back guarantee. You can ask for a refund within the guarantee period, and Pictory will oblige.

Customer Service

The Pictory AI team provides multiple avenues through which you can contact them. The main way to get in touch is via email at support@pictory.ai. 

Alternatively, you can use the chat button at the bottom-left corner of the application’s screen to send them a message.

Finally, Pictory AI has a Help Center you can visit for answers. It has articles and explainers that can walk you through common tasks you’ll be performing with the software.

Also, Pictory’s support team is very friendly and responds promptly. 

Pictory Alternatives

What are the alternatives to Pictory out there? And are they any good? To answer these questions, we have to briefly examine two of its competitors.

Pictory vs. Invideo

Like Pictory, Invideo is excellent for making online videos using nothing but text. Where this video editing software shines over Pictory is in the template department. It offers more pre-made video templates than Pictory, and these additional video styles result in saved time spent starting from scratch.

However, Invideo has a steeper learning curve than Pictory, meaning you might initially struggle with it if you’re using a video editor for the first time. In contrast, Pictory offers an intuitive user experience that gets you making videos quickly.

Pictory vs. Wisecut

Wisecut is another Pictory alternative that uses the power of AI to turn text into video. You can use it to trim down your videos into manageable and shareable shorts, cut out awkward silences, apply subtitles and captions, and more.

This software has the edge over Pictory in terms of language support. In addition to its video-editing capabilities, Wisecut can auto-translate your content with the click of a button. Unfortunately, Pictory doesn’t currently support translations into multiple languages, making Wisecut a more appealing option. 

FAQ

Final Thoughts