Wondershare DemoCreator

If you’re looking for the quickest comparison between TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and Wondershare’s DemoCreator – Camtasia is the better product, in terms of overall features and performance, and especially in terms of getting product support. However, Camtasia is basically $180/year, or $300 for a perpetual license. DemoCreator is $45/year, or $75 for a perpetual license. If you’re a student, you can have DemoCreator for only $30/yr versus Camtasia’s $213 for a perpetual student license.

 By all measures, DemoCreator is the more affordable software. With such a drastic price difference, DemoCreator is certainly worth considering. Thankfully, both Camtasia and DemoCreator offer free trials.

Standard Features

DemoCreator is a powerful program. You can do quite a lot with it. Core useful features include:

• Screen, Webcam, and Audio Recording
• Full Video Editor with layers, effects, timeline, text overlays, captions, pan/zoom, etc.
• Basic audio editing capabilities
• Easy to navigate interface
• Webcam on screen with chroma key (Greenscreen effect)
• Cloud Sync & Uploads (like to YouTube)

All of these features are also offered by TechSmith’s Camtasia studio. 

Unique Features

DemoCreator offers a few features that separate it from competitors. The usefulness of these features varies.

Drawing Tools

DemoCreator offers built in sticker/annotation tools you can use while you’re recording a video. For example, you can draw arrows or numbers on the screen to point out certain things during the recording. Depending on your workflow, this could be a very useful feature. Of course, you can also add these things during editing.

Camtasia does not have a built in solution to add annotations and stickers/arrows while recording, to my knowledge. However, you can easily add similar objects when editing.

Virtual Avatars

DemoCreator offers… virtual avatars. There are a few dozen characters to select from. If you’re afraid of showing your face online, or want to develop a persona to present your videos, I suppose this could be useful. DemoCreator uses your webcam to project basic facial movements and hand motions onto a virtual avatar.

This feature works surprisingly well once calibrated. It smoothly tracks eye, head, hand, and mouth movements with decent accuracy. However, there appears to be a slight delay between the movements you make on your webcam and character movements. For talking, this isn’t really noticeable. But when you move your hands, the delay will be more obvious to you. Of course, the end viewer won’t see you, so they won’t be able to tell. You just need to plan your hand movements out appropriately if you’re going to use them and practice, otherwise your character could end up looking quite odd.

I do not believe there is a way to import custom avatars from other services or applications. You are stuck with the avatars they give you, for now.

While this feature is fun to play with, I think you’d be better off finding an external virtual avatar tool for streamers if you want to add this type of thing to your video.

Paid “DemoCreator Effects” Subscription

DemoCreator offers premium effects beyond the standard effects included with the program. Things like special animated title screens, overlays, and such. You can add them to your projects for free, but when you go to export, you’ll be rudely asked to pay $16/mo or the effects will be removed.

While there are a fair number of good looking paid effects, the effects that actually come without the extra subscription are subpar. It’s nice that this offer is available if you find effects you like, but I wish the baseline effects were better. Especially since this is primarily marketed as a screen recording / video tutorial tool. The included basic text effects and shapes could look much, much better. Most of the default options are ugly. I would have less of a problem with this subscription if the base offerings were better. 

For comparison, Camtasia offers significantly more included video effects and better looking annotations. DemoCreator does at least have the basics covered, with fade transitions, pan/zoom, simple text, etc.

Performance

DemoCreator supports GPU accelerated video encoding. However, it seems to take longer than many other video editors I’ve used, even with acceleration enabled. To render a 1440p video with DemoCreator, it takes about as long as the video runtime itself is to render. If the video is 30 minutes long, it will take me 30 minutes to render the product. With Camtasia, usually it renders significantly faster, taking about 50% to 60% of the full runtime of the video to render that video. If you don’t have a dedicated graphics processing unit, you could see a render time running 2 to 3 times the video’s actual runtime. In fact, before I found out DemoCreator had GPU encoding, it took me over 1.5 hours to render a 30 minute video tutorial.

I have experienced no crashes in DemoCreator at the time of this review. I’ve produced 4 videos with it, and have probably spent around 16 hours working with the application, in total. But this does not mean the experience was always smooth.

After upgrading to version 7.01, I experienced a pretty major issue. The program was not recording or saving my video recordings properly which is a pretty important part of a program like this. It was producing blank or corrupted files with no audio or video. 

I searched online for a solution but could find none, and I’m extremely skilled in seeking resolutions online. I tried contacting them via chat, but it was just one of those support chat bots. I could have called them, but I hate talking on the phone with people. It appears there’s no simple way to contact an actual support person with written communication, which is less than ideal.

Eventually, I resolved the problem by disabling my webcam and resetting all the settings. I’m not sure what caused the issue, but that fixed it. I took several other troubleshooting steps beforehand, and wound up wasting about an hour of time fixing this problem.

Side By Side Camtasia Comparison

Next, let’s look at Camtasia and DemoCreator side by side. DemoCreator is the image on the left, and Camtasia on the right. You can use the slider in the middle to compare interfaces.

 You’ll notice that they look pretty similar, because they function almost exactly the same as each other.

Conclusion

Overall DemoCreator is likely sufficient software to record your video tutorials and presentations. It’s significantly cheaper than its main competitor and shares most of the same features. You can certainly produce professional quality videos with either Camtasia or DemoCreator.

As DemoCreator is based out of China, native English speakers may have difficulty getting good support and occasionally things on their site do not appear translated quite right. You may also occasionally run into bugs, like the recording issue I mentioned earlier in this review. If quality support is important to you, Camtasia is probably a better option.

If you or your company are in a position where Camtasia is an easily affordable business tool, Camtasia is my recommendation. If you’re an independent creator or small company with limited budget, DemoCreator may be your best bet.

Finally, there are plenty of other alternatives I did not discuss in this review.

Alternatives

Depending on your needs, or your access to other multimedia software, it might not make sense to use DemoCreator or Camtasia.

• For Very Basic Videos
  • If you just need to record video of your screen with some audio, both DemoCreator and Camtasia are overkill. 
  • If you’re using Windows, the built in snipping tool now supports video recording. Just open “snipping tool” and click the little video button.
• OBS Studio
  • OBS studio is a free and open source screen recorder targeted at live streaming. However, it also handles saved recording just fine.
  • It is basically the standard software used by the vast majority of Twitch streamers.
  • It has many advanced live edit video and audio processing features.
    • You can layer a webcam feed over your desktop, or multiple other video feeds
    • You can apply filters and effects to audio and video
  • This is my first recommendation if you’re looking for a video recording application with lots of features. However, these advanced features come at the cost of the application being a little more complex to learn and use, more so than the other screen recorders listed here.
  • If you want to further edit videos, you’ll need to use a dedicated video editor, like Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, etc. If you already pay for any professional video editor, it might make sense to record videos with OBS and edit them in your existing software.
• CyberLink Power Director
  • PowerDirector is a consumer focused video editor. It supports an easy-to-use interface with many included effects. 
  • Functionally, the editor works very much like Camtasia and DemoCreator.
  • CyberLink’s PowerDirector has been out for a very long time as far as software goes. 
  • Newer versions include a screen recorder plugin. However, this only supports up to 1080p recording. This means you cannot record in 1440p or 4k, as many professional uses demand. 
  • It regularly goes on sale for around $50/yr, with a perpetual license available for $140. This prices it pretty evenly between Camtasia and DemoCreator.
  • If you need to record in resolution over 1080p, this might be a good option to use in combination with OBS as your recorder.