Pick Templater if the people making your videos are motion designers who live in After Effects. Pick Shotstack if the people making your videos are developers who want a cloud API and an editor they can put inside their own product. Most of the confusion between the two comes from the fact that both can turn a template and a list of data into a pile of finished videos.
We make Templater, so you should weigh what follows with that in mind. We have tried to be fair anyway. Everything we say about Shotstack comes from what Shotstack says about itself on its own homepage, and where their page is silent we say the page is silent, not that something is missing. We have also tried to be plain about where Shotstack is the better fit, because for some teams it clearly is.
Two different starting points
The cleanest way to see the difference is to ask where the template lives. With Templater the template lives in After Effects. A designer builds a composition the way they always have, with their own layers, their own expressions and their own motion. Then they “rig” it with Templater, which means they mark which layers should change. Text, images, branding, graphic elements and colors, embedded footage. Any layer, or every layer, can be dynamic. After that the template is paired with a data source and Templater produces one video per row.
With Shotstack the template lives in the cloud. Shotstack describes itself as a cloud video editing platform offered as an API, with a white-label editor SDK that you can embed and brand. You design templates visually, and their page says those templates are turned into code and rendered at scale through the API. They list JSON Templates, Studio Templates and Workflow Templates and Modules. Their homepage does not mention After Effects, so we will not guess at how the two relate.
That one difference, where the template lives, explains almost everything else. It explains who is comfortable using each tool. It explains where the rendering happens. It even explains what a “bug” looks like. When a Templater job goes wrong, the answer is usually inside an After Effects project, and a designer can open it and look. When an API job goes wrong, the answer is usually in a request, and a developer can read it.
Neither starting point is the grown-up one. They are tools for two different kinds of builder.
What each tool is built to do
Let us take Shotstack first, because their list is easy to state. They offer programmatic editing and rendering in the cloud, bulk generation from templates, and AI video generation. The use cases on their homepage are automated social highlight reels, sports highlights, personalized videos with merge fields, and listing videos for real estate and automotive. They provide SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby, in addition to the editor SDK. There is a free sandbox that does not ask for a card. They also say more than 20,000 businesses and developers in 119 countries use it. For anything about their paid plans, see their pricing page. We are not going to quote it.
Read that list as a developer would. It is a set of building blocks. You call an API, you pass in data, you get a video back, and you do not own or maintain a render machine. If you are building a product, that is attractive. The video becomes a function call. And if you want your own customers to edit videos inside your own application, a white-label editor SDK is a direct answer to that need.
Now Templater. It is an After Effects plugin, and it comes in three roles. Rig prepares an After Effects project for dynamic content. You map your data to composition layers and preview how those layers change as the data is processed. Pro includes everything in Rig and adds batch rendering and batch replicating of re-versioned master compositions from your data. Bot includes everything in Pro and lets you build automated video systems. Bot checks periodically for incoming data to start new renders, or you can push data in with the command line.
Data can come from Google Sheets, tab-separated files exported from Excel or Numbers or Sheets, JSON files or JSON feeds, or QUE, our own cloud data source. Layout rules adjust dynamic layers relative to their containing composition and their sibling layers, so a longer name pushes things around the way a designer would have pushed them. Time Sculpting, which is patented, lets footage of different lengths drop into a template without breaking its timing. Text from any language works, including right-to-left scripts, as long as your installed fonts have the glyphs. You can preview a composition with real data before you render anything, and you can read the logs when something looks wrong.
Look at what Templater is concerned with. It cares a great deal about the design surviving the data. That is a motion designer’s worry. Shotstack’s list cares a great deal about the video being available as a service. That is a platform builder’s worry. Both worries are legitimate. You just need to know which one is yours.
Picking by team: designers or developers building a product
Here is the decision we would walk you through if you called us.
If your team is motion designers and video producers
Picture a small studio that makes weekly graphics packages for a sports client. A designer has already built a polished lower third, a scoreboard bug and a player card in After Effects, with easing and texture and a look the client approved months ago. The data is a Google Sheet that the client’s staff update. The studio does not want to rebuild that design in a different editor, and nobody on the team wants to write code to move a text box.
For that studio, Templater fits because nothing about the design has to be re-created. The designer rigs the existing project, pairs it with the sheet, and renders. The thing the client already approved is the thing that ships. Our sports production walkthrough shows how that works in practice.
The same logic applies to anyone whose skill is After Effects. If your craft is expressions, precomps and careful timing, then a tool that lives inside After Effects respects that craft. Shotstack’s homepage does not mention After Effects, so a designer should ask Shotstack directly how their own project would move into it, or whether it would need to be rebuilt in their editor. That is a fair question and it is theirs to answer.
If your team is developers building a video product
Now picture a different company. It runs a platform for real estate agents, and it wants every new listing to produce a short video automatically. There is no motion designer in the room. There is a backend team, a database of listings and a roadmap. They want to call something, hand over an address, a price field and some photos, and get a video back. They also want agents to tweak the result inside the company’s own app, under the company’s own brand.
This is the job Shotstack describes. A cloud API, SDKs in four common server languages, a sandbox to try it in and a white-label editor SDK for the customer-facing part. Listing videos for real estate and automotive are on their own list of use cases. A developer team can get to a working prototype without installing After Effects anywhere, and they never have to ask whether an After Effects license covers a server.
We want to be direct about this. If your core need is a hosted video service inside your own product, and you do not have a design team that lives in After Effects, Shotstack looks like the better fit. We would rather tell you that now than have you spend a month bending Templater into a shape it was not made for.
If you are somewhere in between
Plenty of teams are. A marketing group might have one designer and one developer. In that case ask who will maintain the templates a year from now. If the answer is the designer, Templater has the advantage, because the template stays a project file the designer already understands. If the answer is the developer, a code-first platform may feel more natural, because the template stays something the developer already understands.
Templater is not only for people working by hand, though. Bot exists for teams that want videos produced on demand with no one pressing a button. It supports a command line interface, an Event Scripts API, and shell scripts and ExtendScripts that hook into Templater’s processes. Our own page describes Bot as the edition for developers who want to build web or mobile apps that create dynamic videos from user input. With QUE, there is also a cloud data source with an API, so an app can send data in over the web. QUE also connects to more than 5,000 apps through Zapier, which matters to people who would rather click than code. So a developer who wants to build on top of After Effects has a path. It simply starts from a different place than an API-first platform. You can read more about that angle in our post on QUE’s API.
Where the work actually runs, and what that costs you
Rendering is where the two tools differ most, and it is also where we think teams get surprised.
Shotstack renders in the cloud. Their page describes programmatic editing and rendering in the cloud, so the machines belong to them and the capacity question is theirs to answer. For a developer team that does not want to think about render hardware, this is the point of the whole product.
Templater runs on machines you control, because it needs After Effects. That has real consequences, some good and some not. On the good side, you can work offline, and you use the hardware and software you already own. Our companion app Projector renders locally too. It runs several renders in parallel based on the core count of the machine, so an eight-core machine renders eight videos at once. Your assets stay on your machine, in transit and at rest, and are never visible to another party, including us. Projector can also transcode to formats beyond what After Effects offers natively, and it can send finished videos on to platforms such as Vimeo, JW Player, Frame.io and AWS S3. For a studio with security rules about client footage, that setup counts for a lot.
On the less comfortable side, you have to size and run those machines. Our FAQ says Templater can produce hundreds of thousands of videos, either in a queue or in parallel across several machines each running Bot. It also gives you a way to estimate time. You render one video that resembles the rest on a machine like your production machine, then multiply by the number of videos. If you run two machines, the total time is about cut in half, three machines about a third. That is simple and honest, and it also tells you something. Capacity is a thing you plan.
The cloud question needs its own paragraph, because people ask it all the time. Yes, you can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, and Dataclay requires no special license for that. But Templater needs After Effects installed and running there, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not allow After Effects on a server. You would have to speak with an Adobe salesperson about the right license. That is an extra step and an extra conversation, and a pure API product does not ask you to have it. If you were hoping for “no machines, no Adobe, just an endpoint,” that is a point for Shotstack.
A few other limits are worth knowing before you choose Templater, and we would rather list them than have you find them later. Templater reads from a single data source, and within a Google Sheet it maps to a single worksheet. It does not read an Excel file directly, so you export to a tab-delimited file first. A single text layer has to use one font, size, weight and style, so mixed styling inside one line needs a workaround using adjacent layers. None of these is a deal-breaker for most jobs. All of them are the kind of detail a designer-friendly tool still has.
For the details on how many videos a machine can reasonably produce and how to build a project that survives a big batch, our guide on making hundreds of personalized videos from data goes through the whole process.
Control, cost of ownership and what happens when you need help
The last part of the choice is about control over time. A tool you pick today will still be around in two years, and the question is what that relationship looks like.
With Templater you own a license and an After Effects installation. We offer a Standard license, which is active on one machine at a time, and a Floating license, which any number of machines on a network can share as long as one uses it at a time. Our licensing guide goes through how to choose. We do not put prices in articles like this one, so see our licensing page for those. There is a 30-day free trial, and it is a fully featured Bot, so you can test the top edition before you decide. If you buy and it does not work for you, contact us within 30 days for a refund.
With Shotstack you work with an account and an API. They offer a free sandbox so you can try it without a card, and their pricing page has the rest. We have no view of what that costs over time, so look at it yourself and run the math on your own volume.
Support is another place to compare. Standard support comes with a Templater purchase. We also sell Premium support, which reaches beyond our software to the video, data and other files you use with it, and an Ultimate package that adds support for remote JSON feeds and event scripting. Beyond that, implementation services can range from helping one creator set up a first project to consulting with a company’s developers on integrations. Consulting comes from people who have worked in production. Those engagements are quoted individually. If you want help writing a script, such as authenticating with a third-party database before pulling data or sending a message when a render finishes, our team writes those too. We can say what we offer. We cannot say what Shotstack offers beyond what their homepage states, so ask them.
There is also a question of what you are building toward. Templater can serve as the engine behind a white-label video service, and our post on white label video editing software explains how. The idea is that you give your own customers custom video creation without building the compositing layer yourself, and the designer keeps full control of how it looks. Shotstack points to its white-label editor SDK for a similar goal, but the experience is different. Theirs puts an editor in front of your end user. Ours puts a designer’s After Effects work behind an automated pipeline. Which is closer to your idea depends on whether your end user needs to edit, or just needs to receive.
One more consideration is human judgment. Automated video is fast, and fast can be wrong. Templater includes spot checks, which render stills or short clips of specific frames from data-merged compositions, so a person can look at how real data landed in the layers before a big batch goes out. We built that because we think a human should stay in the loop on the decisions that matter. If your process depends on a designer reviewing output, ask how each tool supports that review.
The honest summary is that these two tools overlap less than they appear to. Both make a lot of videos from a template and data. They start from different ideas about who the builder is. Templater starts with the designer and the After Effects project. Shotstack starts with the developer and the API.
If you are a motion designer, a studio or a video producer, and the video you want already exists, or could exist, as an After Effects project, try Templater. If you are a developer team building a product that needs video as a service, with an embeddable editor and no render machines to manage, try Shotstack. And if you cannot tell which camp you are in, run both free trials against the same one job and see which one your team finishes without complaining. You can start with our Templater page, and our learning hub has tutorials for the first hour.
We covered a lot of ground there. Here are the questions people ask us most when they are weighing a designer’s tool against a video API.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Templater a video API like Shotstack?
Not in the same way. Templater is an After Effects plugin. You rig a project, pair it with data, and render. Its Bot edition adds automation, a command line interface, and an Event Scripts API, so developers can build on it. Our QUE data source also has an API. Shotstack describes itself as a cloud video editing platform offered as an API, with a white-label editor SDK. The two reach a similar result from different starting points, so decide based on who builds your templates.
Do I need After Effects to use Shotstack?
Shotstack’s homepage does not mention After Effects. It says templates are designed visually, then converted to code and rendered through its API. If you already have After Effects projects, ask Shotstack how they would move over. We can only speak for Templater, which does require After Effects, since it is a plugin that runs inside it.
When is Shotstack the better choice?
When you are a development team building a product that needs video as a service. Shotstack offers a cloud API, SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby, a free sandbox, and a white-label editor SDK you can embed and brand. If you have no designers working in After Effects and you do not want to run render machines, that package fits that job well. Its listed use cases include listing videos for real estate and automotive and personalized videos with merge fields.
Can Templater render in the cloud?
Yes, with a condition. You can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, and Dataclay requires no special license for this. But After Effects must be installed there, and Adobe’s standard license agreement does not allow After Effects on a server. You would need to speak with an Adobe salesperson to get the right license. Plan for that conversation before you build.
How many videos can Templater make?
Our FAQ says you can create hundreds of thousands. Templater can work through a large workload in a queue, or you can run several machines with Bot in parallel to produce more videos per hour. To estimate time, render one video similar to the rest on a machine like your production machine, then multiply by the batch size. With two machines the total time is cut in half, with three machines it is cut to a third.
Can I try Templater before I buy?
Yes. We offer a 30-day free trial, and it is a fully featured Bot, so you can test the top edition. If you buy a license and find it does not work for you, contact us within 30 days for a refund. Remember that if you buy Rig after the trial, functions such as Render and Replicate will not be available, because they belong to Pro and Bot. Check which edition you need first.
Which Templater edition would a developer need?
Most developers building automation want Bot. It includes everything in Rig and Pro, checks for incoming data to start renders without anyone clicking, and supports the command line interface for pushing data in. Our page describes it as the edition for people who want to develop web or mobile apps that create dynamic videos from user input. A designer who only prepares projects needs Rig, and someone processing batches by hand needs Pro.
