VidIQ vs TubeBuddy: My Experience Using Both (Early 2025)

VidIQ and TubeBuddy are two of the most popular YouTube growth tools. Both offer keyword research, video optimization, and competitor analysis features. But which one is right for you?

After using both platforms for a while, in this VidIQ vs TubeBuddy review, I will break down how they measure up in terms of:

• Ease of use
• Keyword research
• Video optimization
• Competitor analysis
• Value for money

Let’s get started.

TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: A Quick Comparison

Before getting into the details, here’s a quick comparison table showing how both tools compare.

TubeBuddy —  The Comprehensive YouTube Growth Companion.

TubeBuddy is a versatile browser extension that allows creators to optimize their YouTube channel for performance and boost their productivity. It offers a suite of tools for keyword research, video and channel optimization, A/B testing, and community management.

Here are the top TubeBuddy features: 

• Keyword Explorer: Helps you find relevant search phrases to optimize your video titles, descriptions, and tags for higher rankings boosting viewership to your YouTube videos.
• A/B Testing: Allows you to test various elements of your video such as thumbnail, title, and description to boost performance and engagement.
• Click Magnet: Uses AI-driven recommendations to help you optimize your titles, thumbnails, and descriptions for higher click-through rates.
• Brand Alerts: TubeBuddy notifies you when someone uploads content related to your brand, helping you stay informed and track mentions across the platform.
• Bulk Processing: Saves your time by letting you complete large tasks with just a few clicks. You can bulk delete comments, easily find and update video titles and descriptions, or add thumbnail overlays to multiple videos.
• Suggested Shorts: Helps you identify the most engaging parts of your long-form videos and turn them into high-performing YouTube Shorts.

VidIQ — Skyrocket Your YouTube Views.

VidIQ is a browser extension and a web-based tool to help creators optimize their YouTube videos to boost performance. It offers comprehensive tools for keyword research, channel auditing, and community management. Additionally, it features an AI tool that can help in ideation, script writing, and generating titles, and descriptions for your videos.

Here are the top VidIQ features.

• Keyword Research: VidIQ allows you to find relevant search terms and tags for your videos, along with important metrics such as search volume and competition. This helps you optimize your content to reach a wider audience.
• Competitor Analysis: With VidIQ, you can track your competitors’ performance, including their popular videos, the number of views per hour, and the keywords they’re using. This provides insights into what’s working for them, which you can apply to your strategy.
• Daily Ideas: Generating new video topics can be time-consuming, especially if you’re struggling with ideas. VidIQ’s Daily Ideas feature uses AI to find relevant and creative opportunities personalized for your channel, making it easier to create new content.
• Trend Alerts: This VidIQ feature keeps you updated on the latest trends on YouTube, so you can create content that’s relevant and timely. You can set up an email alert for top trending videos or topics and see and track their performance. 
• Channel Audit: Using this feature you can get insight into your video metrics such as views, subscribers, and engagement metrics over time. This way you can view what videos are performing best and which ones are not. VidIQ will also offer suggestions that you can implement to boost the low-performing videos.
• AI Video Idea Generator: You can use its AI-integrated functionality to generate video ideas, scripts, titles, and thumbnails boosting your productivity.

VidIQ vs TubeBuddy: User Experience

User experience is key to how creators interact with any software. TubeBuddy and VidIQ are no exceptions. When comparing the two, I considered their ease of use, and how effectively they present data on both their web interfaces and browser extensions for easier access for an average user. Here’s how they compare. 

VidIQ offers a seamless experience on both its web app and Chrome extension, while TubeBuddy’s web interface feels outdated and less functional.

The VidIQ website dashboard interface feels modern and uncluttered. 

Its core tools are conveniently located in the left sidebar, with clear icons and labels for easy navigation. It also lets you choose from light and dark modes allowing you to customize the interface based on your preferences or working conditions. 

VidIQ’s browser extension delivers on usability. It does a good job of presenting data in a visually appealing way. It also loads quickly, runs smoothly, and doesn’t cause interface issues.

Meanwhile, TubeBuddy’s user experience tells a different story. The website dashboard feels outdated and lacks robust functionality, as most of its features are accessible through the Chrome extension. The web dashboard feels secondary, with limited value for day-to-day use.

TubeBuddy’s browser extension, however, remains powerful. Like VidIQ, it integrates with YouTube Studio offering comprehensive insights, helping you optimize videos, conduct keyword research, and analyze your competitors—all without switching to a separate dashboard. 

The results are presented in a user-friendly way with helpful visual elements. Additionally, it offers explanations for any data aspects that may be unclear or unfamiliar to new users. You can hover over info icons next to a term or metric to quickly and clearly understand what they mean.

Verdict: VidIQ offers a more modern and user-friendly web dashboard, making it easier to navigate and access all tools. Its Chrome extension also provides a good balance of performance and functionality. On the other hand, TubeBuddy has a feature-rich extension, but it can feel overwhelming, especially for new users. Additionally, TubeBuddy’s outdated website dashboard feels like an afterthought. That said, VidIQ easily outperforms TubeBuddy in terms of user experience.

VidIQ vs TubeBuddy: Keyword Research

At first glance, VidIQ and TubeBuddy’s keyword research features seem similar. But after testing both tools extensively, it’s clear TubeBuddy has an edge over VidIQ in several key areas. Let me show you.

VidIQ suggests more keywords, while TubeBuddy provides more data.

VidIQ’s keyword research functions similarly to traditional SEO tools like Semrush. Enter a search phrase, and it will display the search volume and competition level for the keyword.

It will also offer various suggestions, such as exact matches, related phrases, and questions associated with the main search term providing more keyword opportunities.

Additionally, it highlights top-performing YouTube videos related to your search phrase, giving you examples of what’s working for others. This helps you understand what type of content ranks well and can inspire your video strategy.

Lastly, VidIQ helps you discover trending keywords, which can be useful if you focus on creating viral and trendy content. 

Meanwhile, TubeBuddy’s Keyword Explorer takes a slightly different approach. Once you input a search term, TubeBuddy will immediately start suggesting related keywords in a “Google Autocomplete” style.

From there, it provides a more granular breakdown of keyword volume and competition using two scoring criteria — weighted and unweighted.

Let’s break down what they mean:

• Weighted — the score is personalized for your channel. It factors in your channel’s size, niche, and video performance to predict how well a keyword might perform specifically for you.
• Unweighted — the score gives a more general assessment, ignoring channel-specific data to provide a broader view of the keyword’s potential.

TubeBuddy also allows you to access keyword data from various sources, such as YouTube and Google, to broaden your research. 

But unlike in VidIQ, in TubeBuddy you can also view the keyword trend to identify whether the term is gaining or losing traction and whether it’s worth targeting based on its longevity.

Furthermore, TubeBuddy allows you to explore related searches and tags used, giving you additional keyword ideas. 

You can easily select relevant keywords, add them to the Topic Planner, copy them to your clipboard, or choose export to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Lastly, TubeBuddy shows the top-performing videos based on your selected keywords, providing insights into how other creators are faring with those terms.

Verdict: Both tools perform well when it comes to keyword research. TubeBuddy offers more keyword data while VidIQ offers more keyword suggestions. So in this case, it is technically a tie for both tools.

TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: Video Optimization

TubeBuddy’s SEO Studio tool helps you optimize video titles and descriptions by guiding you through the process with an easy-to-follow checklist. It assigns an SEO score based on how well you’ve incorporated your target keyword into the title, and description.

Once your title and description are optimized, TubeBuddy also provides useful tag suggestions to include, which you can sort by relevance, keyword score, and search traffic.

Additionally, TubeBuddy helps boost video performance with its AI-powered Thumbnail Analyzer which allows you to compare different video thumbnails and predict which design is more likely to perform better.

On the other hand, VidIQ takes a similar approach, with some notable differences. Firstly, it evaluates your video title and gives it a score between 10 and 100 based on factors like brevity, keyword usage, emotional triggers, and more. This ensures that your title is not only SEO-friendly but also clickworthy.

It goes a step further by offering optimized title suggestions to improve your ranking.

VidIQ also suggests tags based on your video’s title and description, streamlining the optimization process.

However, VidIQ falls short compared to TubeBuddy when it comes to thumbnails. While it provides useful feedback on the effectiveness of your thumbnails, it lacks the option to compare different thumbnail designs to determine which is more likely to perform better.

Verdict: TubeBuddy’s SEO Studio offers a more hands-on, step-by-step process, making optimization easier to follow. The AI-powered Thumbnail Analyzer is a significant advantage, allowing you to directly compare different thumbnails to see which one is likely to perform well — a feature that VidIQ lacks.

VidIQ vs TubeBuddy: Competitor Analysis

VidIQ provides detailed insights into your competitor’s channel so you can assess their performance. You can view their top-performing videos, recent uploads, and the views they’re gaining hourly or daily. Additionally, you can analyze their upload frequency, and subscriber growth, and see how you compare. 

With the VidIQ Chrome extension, you can monitor changes that your competitors make to their published videos, such as updating thumbnails or titles, and observe the impact of these changes.

You can also analyze the tags and related keywords their videos are ranking for, providing opportunities to compete in similar niches or target-related keywords.

On the other hand, TubeBuddy’s Competitor Scorecard, allows you to compare your channel to competitors in terms of views, subscriber growth, uploads, comments, likes, and more over a specific period (e.g., the last 30 days).

Using its Chrome extension you can view the tags your competitor’s video is ranking for and its position in the rankings providing keyword opportunities you can use to fine-tune your video SEO strategy.

Verdict: When it comes to competitor analysis, VidIQ takes the lead. While both VidIQ and TubeBuddy offer essential tools for tracking competitor performance, VidIQ also allows you to monitor changes in thumbnails, titles, and their impact on video performance — a functionality that TubeBuddy doesn’t offer.

TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: A/B Testing

TubeBuddy provides powerful tools to help optimize your video performance. Its native A/B testing feature allows you to test variations of video thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags to see which performs better. 

You can set the duration of the test and define what metric will determine the success of your experiment. That’s based on click-through rate, watch time, engagement, or reaching a specific view count.

But wait, didn’t YouTube release a similar tool called the Thumbnail Test & Compare tool, which basically renders TubeBuddy’s A/B testing useless?

Not quite. TubeBuddy’s A/B testing offers far more flexibility.

While YouTube’s tool only allows you to test thumbnails, TubeBuddy lets you test additional elements like titles and descriptions. Furthermore, the A/B testing feature on YouTube is currently available to a selected few creators.

Meanwhile, VidIQ doesn’t offer any form of A/B testing, making TubeBuddy the clear choice for creators looking to optimize multiple aspects of their videos.

TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: Pricing

Both TubeBuddy and VidIQ offer free plans with basic features, which can be useful for new YouTubers. However, when it comes to paid plans, that’s when they chart differences with a significant price gap.

TubeBuddy is generally more affordable than VidIQ. Its plans start at $2.25 per month with its most advanced plan, the Legend plan, costing $14.50 per month.

In comparison, VidIQ’s Boost plan costs $19 per month ($16.58 per month with yearly billing), while the Coaching plan is priced at $99 with an annual commitment—or $199 if you prefer monthly access.

If you’re just starting, VidIQ’s higher price point can be hard to justify when compared to TubeBuddy’s more budget-friendly options.

Which is Better: TubeBuddy or VidIQ?

Both TubeBuddy and VidIQ offer valuable tools to help grow your YouTube channel. They have many overlapping features including keyword research, competitor analysis, and video SEO optimization.. However, despite their similarities, each platform caters to different types of users.

TubeBuddy offers strong keyword research features and video optimization capabilities. It also includes unique features including A/B testing to help you boost your video performance and batch tools allowing you to perform bulk tasks faster. TubeBuddy’s AI features can generate video title ideas, suggest Shorts, and analyze thumbnails. 

Given that, TubeBuddy is ideal for creators who not only want strong SEO tools to enhance video performance but also value productivity-boosting features.  It’s also more affordable, making it the best choice for users looking to get a bang for the buck.

VidIQ, on the other hand, offers a more user-friendly experience. It includes robust keyword research and competitor analysis tools while also suggesting trending topics and personalized video ideas. The channel audit feature helps pinpoint issues in low-performing videos.

With that in mind,  VidIQ is better suited for beginners looking for an intuitive YouTube growth tool with strong keyword research and competitor analysis capabilities.

TubeBuddy vs VidIQ: FAQs

Can I use VidIQ and TubeBuddy at the same time?

Yes, you can use both VidIQ and TubeBuddy at the same time as they offer different features that complement each other, enhancing your YouTube channel’s performance.

Does TubeBuddy increase views?

TubeBuddy doesn’t directly guarantee an increase in views as you need to also create useful and engaging content. However, it can help you optimize your videos for better visibility in search results. It provides tools for keyword research, title, and description optimization, and A/B testing, which can indirectly contribute to higher view counts.

Can TubeBuddy delete your videos?

TubeBuddy cannot delete your videos; its primary function is to provide tools and analytics to help you manage and grow your YouTube channel.

Do YouTubers use VidIQ?

Yes, many YouTubers use VidIQ as a tool to analyze their channel’s performance, track trends, and optimize their videos. According to their website, over 20 million YouTube creators have used their platform.