A Frame.io alternative for review and approval.
The link is the login, and the player is your export.

Read those two shapes against your own list of people. A post house where five editors, an assistant and a producer are all inside the tool every day is buying seven working seats, and a per-member rate is an honest way to charge for that. A two-person shop where the third, fourth and fifth people on any project are clients who watch a cut twice and type four notes is buying something else entirely, and a flat plan matches that shape better because the thing that grows is the library rather than the headcount.

The free tiers tell you what each product thinks it is. Frame.io Free gives you 2GB of storage and up to 2 projects, which is a trial of a review platform. Starter here is 5 GB with one film at a time, and the whole review room is in it: versions, timecoded notes, drawings, per-version approval and the marker tools. Neither one is a place to run a business. Both are enough to run one real round before you decide anything.

The third row is the one to be careful with, in both directions. We are not telling you what Frame.io does to your upload at playback, because we did not verify it today and a comparison page that guesses about a competitor’s pipeline is worthless. What we can state is our own behaviour, and it is unusual enough to be the reason this page exists: there is no transcode anywhere in the path. The file that plays in the review room is the file you exported, at the data rate you exported it at. Nobody built a smaller copy, so there is no ladder to argue with and no gap between the picture you approved in the grade and the picture your client is reacting to.

That has a cost, and it lands on the reviewer. With one rendition and nothing smaller to fall back on, a weak connection buffers instead of quietly dropping to a lower quality. A platform that builds a proxy ladder will feel better to a client watching on a phone in a car park, and that is a real trade rather than a rhetorical one. Send a lighter export when reach matters more than the data rate, and send the heavy one when the note you are waiting for is about the grade.

The room also generates captions with a speech-to-text model, which the owner edits and a reviewer can submit corrections to, and the caption panel has a search field where every matching word is a button that seeks the player to the moment it is said. On a forty-minute interview cut, that turns finding the line the client is talking about into one click rather than a scrub. Caption generation is metered in minutes a month by plan, with 20 minutes a month included on the free Starter plan.

There is no panel inside Premiere or After Effects that shows this room. The marker tools move notes into the timeline, which is the part that matters for the work, but the reviewing itself happens in a browser tab. If your objection to browser tabs is what sent you looking for an alternative in the first place, this is the row where we lose and you should stay where you are.

The codec rules are the same for everyone and worth stating plainly. Browser-decodable codecs stream: H.264, HEVC and AV1. ProRes 422, ProRes 4444 and DNxHR are hosted for download rather than streamed, because no browser decodes them. Camera RAW is never uploaded raw and never streams anywhere; the honest workflow is to finish to HEVC or ProRes first. 8K plays when the viewer’s hardware decodes it, which is a sentence worth reading twice before sending an 8K round to a client. Uploads go up to 5 TB per file and are resumable, so an interrupted transfer picks up rather than starting again.

And the meter is worth checking against your own habits. Storage is the only thing counted here, so a round watched forty times costs exactly what a round watched once costs, but a library of every version of every job you have ever cut is a bill that grows. Delete or archive the versions you no longer need. What happens after the approval, when the finished file goes to the client and the link has to still work in eighteen months, is a different problem with a different answer, and it lives on the delivery page. If you are still choosing a category rather than a product, start with the review and approval guide.