Finding the best video editing service for your unique needs is challenging. Especially since comparing services involves a huge number of factors. From pricing model and turnaround times to what’s included in packages and what you’ll pay extra.
One of the first big decisions you have to make is whether to go with a freelance editor from platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, or to opt for a professional video editing service, such as Tasty Edits.
We’ll start by contrasting the pros and cons of both options, from cost to peace of mind. Then, we present the results of a case study. For this, we submitted an anonymous video order on both Tasty Edits and Upwork and compared the experience of having it edited.
Tasty Edits vs. Upwork: Key Facts
- Tasty Edits is a professional video editing service with a team of 50+ hand-picked editors, video managers, thumbnail artists, and YouTube growth experts.
- Upwork is a global freelancing platform, including for video editors. Freelancers have ratings and reviews left by past clients.
- Tasty Edits’ video editing pricing is project-based - a flat base fee per video.
- Upwork freelancers’ pricing varies wildly depending on the services offered and their location.
- Tasty Edits clients get access to VOMA, a custom-built platform for managing the whole video editing workflow: submitting orders, communicating with editors, reviewing drafts, downloading deliverables.
- Upwork has a messaging system, but file sharing and draft review systems are up to the freelancer.
- Opting for freelancers promises low costs and high flexibility, but often ends in ghosting, inconsistent quality, and language barriers. The editor we chose went AWOL for 6 days, delivered a poor draft, then cancelled the contract.
- In contrast, professional video editing companies have tested workflows, redundancies, and internal accountability. Other team members can always step in and ensure your project is finished and meets your quality standards.
Keep reading for the full scoop!
Freelancers vs. Video Editing Companies - Pros and Cons
Hiring a freelancer on Upwork has a few big advantages. It’s one of the largest global freelancing platforms, and so people offer every conceivable kind of service on it. Including video editing.
Plus, many Upwork editors are very specialized. No matter if you want marketing videos or adventure vlogs edited, you’ll be able to find someone with the requisite skill set.
Furthermore, Upwork freelancers are located all over, many in countries with lower living expenses. That means you can get services at cheaper rates.
However, there are major downsides to hiring freelance video editors, on Upwork or elsewhere. The big one is that they work independently – meaning little accountability. Too often, they ghost clients or deliver inconsistent quality. Furthermore, since many are international, time zones and language barriers also pose difficulties.
In contrast, video editing companies have standard operating procedures (SOPs), quality standards, and internal accountability.
Tasty Edits, for example, has a team of 50+ editors, video managers, thumbnail artists, and YouTube consultants on staff. Each was hand-picked from hundreds of applicants based on their skills and experience. They then went through additional training.
Each video order automatically comes with your personal video manager who performs quality-checks before an editor sends you drafts or deliverables.
Companies also have redundancies. If your video editor gets sick or has an emergency come up? Then one of their colleagues steps in and makes sure your project gets finished on time – and at the guaranteed high level of quality.
Finally, many video editing services – such as Tasty Edits – offer additional services, such as thumbnail design and channel management. This gives you a centralised, friction-less content-creation workflow with a trusted creative partner.
The one downside of working with video editing companies? Their pricing is higher than that of cheap-ish Upwork freelancers.
Case Study: Having a Video Edited on Upwork vs. Tasty Edits
Enough of the theory. Let’s take a look at a practical example.
For our case study, we submitted raw footage of an adventure vlog – a hiking trip in the mountains. We made it easy:
- All files were neatly organised in sub-folders.
- We wrote detailed instructions for the editor.
- We submitted an example video to give them an idea of the style we expected.
Here’s what our experience with Tasty Edits and Upwork were like, including navigating the websites, looking at pricing and service offers, submitting our orders, communicating with our editors, reviewing drafts, and looking at the final edits.
Navigating the Websites
To begin with, we rated how easy it is to navigate Tasty Edits and Upwork’s websites before you hire your editor.
Tasty Edits’ website is a dedicated company site. All the information you need on pricing and services, as well as a portfolio of past projects and reviews by clients, appears on the main page. There are separate pages with details for services like editing vertical video or thumbnail design.
Apart from that, Tasty Edits’ website also features an in-depth Creators’ Blog, with in-depth articles on topics from fine-tuning monetization to streamlining video creation workflows.
Once you’ve scouted out pricing options and testimonials, all you need to do to hire an editor is to hit “Get Started”.
Upwork’s website is a little more complex, since video editors are only one of many kinds of freelancers offering their services here. You have to filter for the services you’re looking for using the site’s main categories.
After you’ve navigated to the video editor section, you can refine your search by setting additional criteria. These include star ratings, pricing, experience, availability for immediate work, and others.
Using these filters, you can narrow down the huge pool of contenders to those editors that match your individual needs – and they need to be available.
And then comes the work of comparing the freelancers to find the best candidate.
For our test run, we chose the highest-rated, Upwork-certified freelancer in the video editing category.
Pricing and Services
The next aspect we compared in depth was pricing options on both websites.
Tasty Edits’ pricing is project-based. You pay a flat rate for a video to be edited. Plus, you can get certain add-ons, like custom-made thumbnails. The basic rate for a single horizontal video is $327 and for a vertical video (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or TikTok) $94.
There are bulk discounts: If you purchase a multi-video package, the per-video price goes down significantly, as low as $278 for a horizontal and $80 for a vertical video.
Trending Package
- 4 horizontal videos (7% discount)
Viral Package
- 8 horizontal videos (15% discount)
Trending Package
- 15 horizontal videos (7% discount)
Viral Package
- 30 vertical videos (15% discount)
Tasty Edits’ video editing package is comprehensive, including:
- unlimited effects and SFX,
- overlays, titles and burned-in captions,
- motion graphics, including animations, and
- free licensed assets such as music, sound effects, and stock footage.
On Upwork, pricing is much more varied, as each freelancer gets to decide how much they want to charge for their services.
Basic pricing varies significantly depending on an editors’ skills, turnaround times, and included services. Location is a big factor: For an editor with the same solid skillset, the cost of living is much higher in the US than in India.
The top-rated freelancer we chose had a several pricing options available. They differ with respect to delivery times, allowed source footage length, the number of revisions offered, and whether services such as motion graphics and sound design are included.
Since our source footage is fairly long, we picked their “Advanced” package that would cover it.
Submitting Your Order
At Tasty Edits, you submit your order via their custom-built Video Order Management Application (VOMA). The VOMA app was developed specifically to meet the needs of both video creators and editors.
Its main upside? You no longer have to hop between multiple platforms during the editing process. Instead, VOMA offers a one-stop shot to centralise all your video creation workflows.
To submit your order, you create an account and enter your contact and payment info. This gives you access to your VOMA dashboard, your personal video editing hub. Here, you can purchase editing credits, submit orders, message your editors, review drafts, and download finished videos.
Once you’ve purchased the editing credits necessary for your video, submitting an order is easy. All you have to do is create a new order and fill in a form. You’ll be asked the basic specs of your video, such as:
- Its type, length and format,
- the date you want to publish it,
- creative details like the style and tone,
- and other instructions.
Plus, you can pick from several add-ons, such as thumbnails following a particular style, and vertical or square reformats.
Unsure about anything? Have special requirements? You can also book a call and hash out exactly what you need.
On VOMA, you can also share your raw footage directly – securely and rapidly. This is thanks to a back-end integration of an industry-leading file transfer service with strong encryption and transfer rates of up to 10 Gb/s.
How it works
Submit orders in VOMA
Our custom-built platform makes it easy to upload footage, review drafts, and collaborate with your team in one place.
Log In
Place Your Order
Review
Submit orders in VOMA
Log In
Place Your Order
Review
On Upwork, you have to create an account on the main site. Again, your contact details and payment information are required.
Afterward, you have to go to your freelancer’s page to select your package. What details a freelancer asks you for will vary – from next to nothing to detailed forms to fill.
In our case, it was fairly straightforward. All we had to do was paste our Google Drive link with the footage and the Google Doc with our detailed editing instructions. We were responsible for providing the cloud storage for all of the raw files, though – and it’s quite slow.
And we’re all good to go! Let’s see what the editors come up with.
Communicating With Editors
At Tasty Edits, all communication with your editors happens in VOMA. You can message your editors in the main chat on each of your projects. Plus, you’ll get an email notification if one of your editors messages you, either for more information or to let you know their status on your project.
Each project also has a video manager, who quality-checks every deliverable before sending it to you for review.
Soon after we submitted our project, we got a message that an editor, John, had been assigned. And a confirmation from John himself that he’d started work on the project.
On Upwork, communication happens in the website chat. Here, you have an overview of all the freelancers you’ve hired before and all the messages you’ve exchanged with them.
After we submitted our order, we didn’t get a message from our editor directly. We did get an automatic confirmation from Upwork that everything was on track.
Reviewing Drafts
One of the most delicate steps in handling a video editing order is to review drafts and give feedback to your editors.
Even the best video editor can’t see inside your head and divine exactly what you want out of a finished product. Especially on a first order. They’ll do their best to hit the tone and style you want. After that, it’s up to you to let them know what they can improve to match your creative vision.
How you submit that feedback varies.
At Tasty Edits, you’ll get a message when a draft is ready for you to review. On your dashboard, you’ll see the status of your project has changed to “Draft”. Then, you can scroll down to the deliverables section of your VOMA dashboard and leave feedback directly.
The video will open in a preview environment (powered by Frame.io), where you can comment on different parts of a video. If there’s a sequence at 2:32 that you don’t like, you can easily leave a timestamped note for your editor to change it.
You can even make annotations directly in each frame to specify the placement of elements or highlight details you want altered.
Once you finish your notes, you can shoot your editor a quick message and update the status of your project on VOMA to “Revision Needed”. Or “Complete,” if you’re already happy.
On Upwork, the process is clunkier, since the platform doesn’t have an in-built review tool. Instead, we got a Google Drive link from our editor for our first draft. We reviewed everything and left extensive comments in the chat.
Turnaround and Delivery Times
At Tasty Edits, the guaranteed turnaround time is 48 hours for the first draft of your video and 24 hours for revisions. (For shorts, it’s 24h on the draft as well.) Since you can enter your target publish date during order submission, you’ll know exactly when your video will be good to upload.
In the case of our Tasty Edits trial video, everything went smoothly. We submitted our order on Sunday and picked the following Wednesday as our target delivery date. By Monday evening, we had a first draft. By Tuesday evening, all revisions we requested were done.
On Upwork, things quickly went sideways. The delivery time our editor guaranteed for Advanced Package customers was 5 days. We submitted our order on a Friday. By the following Wednesday – the due date! – we got irritated. Still no word on a first draft.
Finally, the first message from our editor trundled in – asking for more time.
Worse than that, the editor asked us questions about the raw footage that made it perfectly clear that they hadn’t even started the edits.
After another six days of radio silence, we followed up on the project. We’re promised a first draft by the end of that day. It eventually came the day after.
The editing quality was mediocre at best, so our revision notes were long and detailed. Already when submitting them, we dreaded how long the revision would take.
In the end, we needn’t have worried about that. Our editor simply told us that the draft we got is the best they can do. And promptly cancelled the contract.
Fifteen days after submitting our order, we were left with no finished video. Just a ton of frustration.
Overall Editing Quality
Comparing the videos, it’s fairly evident that the editing quality at Tasty Edits is superior. (You can find them below and see for yourself.)
The video is short and snappy, it’s got an eye-catching opening sequence, and makes use of diverse transitions, overlays, VFX, animations, and pop-ups. It’s funny, upbeat, and keeps the viewer engaged during its whole six-minute run.
In contrast, the Upwork edit – which never saw a second draft – drags on. Early on in its 12 (twelve!) minutes, it becomes monotonous and boring. The edits are simplistic – no animations, VFX, overlays or anything of the kind. An uninspired opening sequence, wildly fluctuating audio volumes, off-rhythm background music, and odd color grading all irritate the viewer.
The absolute low point of this edit – and that’s saying something – comes at 7:25, a slow-motion effect. Suddenly, the video looks laggy, choppy, just plain unpleasant to watch. That’s because our footage was shot at 30fps, so you can’t just slow it down much without losing fluid motion. There are ways to compensate for this, but our editor evidently didn’t use any.
There is no way of knowing for sure, but it’s possible our freelance editor simply fed our raw footage through AI to get a fast, mediocre edit to pacify us.
See for Yourself: Video Comparison
Tasty Edits’ snappy clip.
The freelancer’s dragging draft.
The Bottom Line: Tasty Edits vs. Upwork
The bottom line of our Tasty Edits vs. Upwork comparison is that Tasty Edits unequivocally comes out on top.
In terms of website navigation and order submission, the two video editing options are on par. When it comes to pricing and the diversity of services, Upwork even has a slight edge because you can find a massive range of freelancers with varying pricing models.
However, for every aspect of the actual video editing process, Tasty Edits wins hands-down. Not only does it centralize all video workflows on your personal VOMA dashboard, making it a breeze to communicate with editors and review drafts. Its video editing quality is also vastly superior and its delivery times lightning fast.
Partly, that’s because it’s a video editing service. One of the big advantages of submitting your order to a good video editing company is that there’s always someone there to make sure that your video will be delivered on time. If an editor is out sick, for instance, one of their colleagues can take over and finish your project.
We don’t think our Upwork editor left us hanging just because they felt like it. Perhaps something came up in their personal lives, they were overworked, or not feeling well. That happens. They didn’t charge us, in the end.
But we were the ones who took the hit.
At the end of the day, the video editing experience at Tasty Edits is light-years ahead of Upwork. It’s smoother, more personal, and free of delays and frustrations.
FAQs
Is Tasty Edits or Upwork better?
After our in-depth comparison, and submitting the same video order to both services, Tasty Edits came out on top, both in terms of editing quality and experience. Our editor from Upwork – one of the highest-rated on the platform – delivered a mediocre draft, 11 days after the promised date. Tasty Edits’ video was done well, and with time to spare.
Where can I hire a video editor?
The basic choice when hiring a video editor is between a video editing company and freelancers. For freelancers, platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are great places to start. Some of the top video editing companies include Tasty Edits, Video Husky, and Dava Marketing. While some freelancers are fantastic, professional video editing companies offer greater security and accountability.
Is a freelancer or a video editing service better?
Video editing companies are the better bet. A big advantage is that there’s always someone there to make sure that your video will be delivered on time. If an editor is sick or fully booked, one of their colleagues can take over and finish your project. Furthermore, editors already get pre-selected for high-level skills during the hiring process. There are smooth standard workflows and predictable turnaround times.
Is Upwork good for video editing?
Upwork has a huge variety of video editors, with varying pricing models, skills, and specializations. However, you need to keep in mind that these are freelancers: They may not always be available for work, and you may face delays if something comes up in their personal lives.
