Frame.io vs Vimeo for client delivery.
One is a review room. The other is a channel.

Frame.io attaches storage to paid members. Pro gives 2 TB with the first member plus 2 TB per additional paid member for up to 5 paid members; Team gives 3 TB with the first member plus 2 TB per additional paid member for up to 15. Free is $0 for up to 2 members with 2 GB. Enterprise is a custom price with custom members and storage. The pricing page also lists a separate mounted-storage figure per tier: 2 GB on Free, 250 GB on Pro and 500 GB on Team. There is an annual toggle on the pricing page, described there as a 13 percent discount; Frame.io does not publish the annual dollar figures, so this page does not state them either.

Vimeo attaches storage and bandwidth to the plan, not to the person. Free lists 1 GB of storage and 2 TB a month of bandwidth. Starter lists 2 TB of storage, Standard 4 TB with 5 seats included, Advanced 7 TB with 10 seats included, and both Standard and Advanced go up to 200 seats. Enterprise is custom. All plans are ad-free and list 4K, HDR and Dolby Vision support. Vimeo does not publish dollar prices on that plan page, so there are no Vimeo prices here.

Read those two paragraphs as cost curves rather than as feature lists. Frame.io gets more expensive as the number of people in the room grows, and buying storage means buying members or buying add-ons sold in 250 GB increments at a price Frame.io does not publish. Vimeo gets tighter as the number of people watching grows, because the meter is delivery. A four-person shop with a thousand viewers and a forty-person agency with three viewers will reach opposite conclusions, correctly.

A Frame.io share link can carry a passphrase the viewer has to enter, and an expiration date, which Frame.io describes as removing access to the link once it is reached. Permissions decide whether the viewer can comment or download, and a viewer who downloads picks the original file or a proxy. Commenting can be switched off. If it is left on, a first-time commenter who is not signed in is prompted to enter a name and an email address. Frame.io does not state publicly whether plain viewing on an ordinary share link ever requires an account, so treat that as unknown rather than promising a client either way.

Vimeo splits the same job across plan tiers. Public and Private are available on all plans. Unlisted, Password and Embed only each require a paid plan, and password protection prompts the viewer on the player before the video plays. Anyone at a named company is Enterprise only. For a round of notes, Vimeo has a folder review page that requires a Standard, Advanced, Pro, Business, Premium or Enterprise plan, with per-recipient control over commenting, video downloads, the review page status and resolved comments; the review link can be given an expiry date or have expiry disabled, can be password protected, and can show a team logo or dark mode. Vimeo does not state whether a reviewer needs an account, which is worth confirming with your own test before you send it to a client who will not create one.

One asymmetry deserves calling out, because it bites on the handover rather than during the work. Frame.io puts the original download next to the proxy inside the same share. Vimeo puts viewer downloads behind a paid plan, off the embedded player, and without bulk downloading. If the deliverable is a set of twelve files that the client needs on their own drive, that is twelve visits to twelve video pages.

Vimeo states plainly that when you upload or stream a video, it is converted to other resolutions to ensure successful playback on different devices and networks, and publishes what those renditions deliver at most: 0.3 Mbps at 240p, 0.5 at 360p, 1.5 at 540p, 2.5 at 720p, 7 at 1080p60, 12 at 2K and 22 at 4K. Vimeo describes those as maximums that vary with content complexity, not as targets you can raise by exporting bigger. That is the number to hold in mind when a client says the grade looks flat on the link.

Frame.io generates proxies at 2160p, 1080p, 720p, 540p and 360p in H.264 or H.265 MP4 with AAC audio at 128 kbps, and offers a download of either the original file or a smaller proxy. Its ingest side is the more generous of the two: assets up to 5 TB in size, up to 500 assets at once, up to 250 folders, 10 folders deep, and 10 concurrent queued upload jobs, with supported video formats including MOV, MP4, MXF DNxHD, MXF ProRes, MKV, AVI, WebM, WMV, FLV, 3G2 and 3GP, and MXF JPEG2000.

So the honest summary is that neither platform shows your client the file you exported. What differs is the escape hatch. Frame.io offers a downloading viewer the original file or a proxy from the same share, which is why it survives as a handover tool even though its player is not the point. Vimeo optimizes for a viewer who will never download anything, which is exactly right for an audience and awkward for a deliverable.

If the work is the review round, Frame.io is the right answer. A team whose week is versions, comments and approvals should pay for the tool built around that, and should accept the per-member pricing as the cost of the thing it is good at. The comment permissions, the passphrase, the expiry date and the original-or-proxy download are enough to hand the final file over at the end without moving it anywhere else. Buy Pro or Team on the number of people who genuinely need to be in the room, and remember that adding a member adds 2 TB, which is sometimes the cheapest way to buy storage.

If the work is a public portfolio with an audience, Vimeo is the right answer. Per-plan pricing with seats included is the correct shape when the people who matter are watching rather than commenting, the plans are ad-free and list 4K, HDR and Dolby Vision, and 2 TB a month of delivery is a lot of viewing for most independent work. The privacy settings are strong enough for a screener if you are on a paid plan. Go in knowing the 4K ceiling of 22 Mbps and the download restrictions, and neither will surprise you later.

If you are trying to make one of them be the other, stop. Frame.io does not give you a public page for an audience. Vimeo gives you a folder review page only on the plans it lists for it, and it does not hand your client the original file from an embed. The common mistake is not picking wrong, it is picking one and then paying to bolt the other half on.

Full disclosure on where you are reading this: uncompressed.io is neither of those two products. It is a place to host a finished film. Browser playback uses your uploaded export without another platform re-encode. Codec, device and connection requirements still apply. Unlimited video streaming is included, with no per-view or bandwidth overage charges. Storage and team-seat charges are separate. That is a narrower job than either Frame.io or Vimeo does, and if what you need is a review workspace or an audience platform, the two paragraphs above are the answer, not this one.