A 2023 Toonly Review: Read Before You Buy

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With animated explainer videos, you can say goodbye to generic marketing and offer your audience unique and memorable visuals.

By using videos in your marketing, you can get up to 83% more qualified leads annually — but it can be tough finding the right tool for the job.

Although there are countless video creation tools on the market, for this review we’ll be focusing on Toonly.

We’ll delve into Toonly’s features, pricing, and its pros and cons to help you decide whether or not this is the tool you’ve been looking for.

Let’s get started.

1. What is Toonly?

Toonly’s logo

With Toonly, you can create unique animated explainer videos to increase your conversions and brand awareness.

This drag-and-drop explainer video creator was born from the creators of the popular Doodly software.

Although both tools are made by the same developers, they differ where it matters — we’ll get into this later in this review.

Toonly claims that animated explainer videos are the most popular type of video among marketers today.

Let’s take a closer look at who can benefit most from using this tool.

1.1. Who should use Toonly?

Toonly is suitable for a variety of businesses, including:

Businesses that sell physical products or services
Trainers and presenters — Increase learner retention by visually explaining complex concepts
Nonprofit organizations — Recruit volunteers, request donations and create compelling stories about your mission
Human resource companies — Deliver your message to employees, recruits, or job seekers, and address new or important company policies
Agencies that offer Facebook advertising, search engine, and email marketing

Did you know that by using video content you can boost your conversions by a whopping 86%?

According to Toonly, having an animated explainer video on your home or landing page can also reduce your bounce rate, on average, by 34%!

To take advantage of this opportunity, you can add your animated videos to your landing pages as well as your:

Sales letters
Product pages
Facebook ads
Social media channels
Blog posts
Emails

If you’re looking for a simple tool to create landing pages, email marketing campaigns, webinars, (and more) to add your videos to — look no further than systeme.io!

Besides the above-mentioned benefits, let’s take a look at what other benefits a tool like Toonly provides.

2. Benefits of Toonly

One of the main benefits of Toonly is its ease of use — making it suitable for anyone regardless of their level of design or technical skills.

Because of this, you can create beautiful, professional videos without having to break the bank by hiring an expert.

Using videos also makes a topic that would be boring to read about interesting and memorable for your audience.

Plus, animated explainer videos can:

Boost your sales by effectively helping your prospects understand your product or service
Increase your brand engagement and awareness through videos that can be easily shared on social media platforms
Minimize the need for support calls, as they’re great for answering common customer questions
Improve your website’s Google ranking with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Animated explainer videos can improve your ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) because:

Google’s algorithm tends to rank websites that people spend the most time on higher in the search results.

Because users spend 88% more time browsing websites that have videos, this will improve your SEO.

By ranking higher on the SERPs, you’ll increase traffic to your website, ultimately increasing your brand awareness and your conversions.

Are you itching to see whether Toonly’s features will prove beneficial to you? Let’s find out!

3. Toonly’s features

Although Toonly boasts a number of features, let’s take a closer look at the most noteworthy ones:

3.1. Toonly’s library

Toonly’s Library

Toonly has a sizable library of images, characters, backgrounds, pre-set scenes, and audio tracks.

It’s important to note that there are no stock photos — all of Toonly’s images have been hand-drawn to ensure that your content is unique.

However, some users have stated that the images, characters, and sounds are somewhat limiting and lacking in diversity:

Review on GetApp

Toonly does, however, let you upload your own image files as long as they’re in the following supported formats: JPG, PNG, and GIF.

3.1.1. Characters and animations

Source: Toonly.com

Toonly’s character images include a variety of ethnicities, genders, and ages — and there are also themed characters to choose from.

You can make these characters come to life by choosing pre-animated actions you’d like them to perform in your videos.

Here are some examples of what you can make your character do:

Clap
Say “hi”
Exercise
Do yoga
Dance
Lip sync

The lip sync is an interesting animation — simply record your voice or add in a pre-recorded audio to get your character to speak.

Because Toonly classes lip sync as an animation, when your character speaks, speaking is all it can do — no walking or waving, just talking.

Customizing a character’s emotion is also very limited, and it’s only an option with certain characters and actions.

Toonly also doesn’t let you upload your own animation options if you’re dissatisfied with what's already provided.

Even if you’re a coding wizard and you’d like to create your own animations, Toonly’s software doesn’t permit it.

3.1.2. Backgrounds and audio

Toonly has 81 backgrounds and scenes that cover a range of topics and niches.

You can also upload JPG or PNG files if you’d prefer to use one of your own designs instead.

Unfortunately, Toonly doesn’t offer any video templates.

They do, however, offer pre-set scenes if you prefer not to work from a blank canvas.

These pre-set scenes already have a background, people, and props as seen below:

Example of Toonly’s pre-set scenes

Simply customize the scenes to suit your preferences — change the positioning and sizing of the items or add in your own elements.

Customization of your scenes is somewhat limited — you can’t change the coloring of your props and scenes to match your brand.

In terms of adding audio, you have the following options:

Toonly’s library of 20 audio tracks
Upload audio in MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA, FLAC, or AAC formats
Use the voiceover feature

The customizing of the audio tracks is fairly basic, you can:

Adjust the volume
Apply a fade-out effect
Turn playthrough on or off

Playthrough lets you decide whether or not you want the audio to play throughout all of your scenes.

3.2. Camera features

Toonly’s camera features

Toonly’s camera features let you zoom in and out, pan left and right, and tilt up and down.

You can use a combination of these camera features in your videos to create special effects.

Tutorial #8 gives you an in-depth walkthrough on how to use Toonly’s camera tool to achieve the desired effect.

3.3. Video importing and exporting

Toonly lets you export your video to other devices or software and upload your video directly to your website and social media accounts.

Some video creation tools let you upload a video into your scene and animate over it — this isn’t possible with Toonly.

You can also download your animations to your computer in the following formats: MP4, OGG, WebM, and MKV.

When saving your video, you’ll have the option to choose between 480p up to 4k or 2160p resolution.

Bear in mind that although there’s no limit on the length of your videos — increasing the resolution or length can increase the rendering time.

Apart from causing frustration, this can also negatively impact your marketing efforts — any delay will cause most internet users to click away.

3.4. Tutorials and support

Toonly’s support page

Toonly’s Support Desk offers a variety of FAQ and troubleshooting solutions if you’re in a pinch.

They also offer users additional support with:

Live chat
Email support tickets
13 tutorial videos
A knowledge base of 89 articles

With this support at your fingertips, creating a video should be easy sailing. Let’s do a quick run-through of how you’d create a video with Toonly.

4. How to use Toonly

To create a video on Toonly you’d:

Select a preset scene or a background of your liking, and drag it into the video area, as shown below:

Toonly’s drag-and-drop interface

You’d use the same drag-and-drop functionality to add images, sound, dialogue, and people into your scenes.

You can add, duplicate, delete, and rename your scenes.

You’ll notice a bar in-between each scene on the right-hand side of your screen.

Here you can choose how you want your scene to transition to the next scene, as seen in the image below:

Toonly’s scene transition settings

With the bars located at the bottom of your screen, you can adjust how long you’d want each element of your video to appear for:

Source: Toonly.com

The ruler just above the colorful bars goes up in 1-second intervals — with the bars below it indicating each element in your video.

To adjust the duration of each element or scene, simply drag the bar left or right to shorten or lengthen how long they’ll appear on the screen.

Once you’ve added the necessary components, you can preview your video and make adjustments as needed.

Unlike some other video creation tools, Toonly’s preview is instantaneous.

This means that you can preview your video as often as you’d like without any buffer time.

If you’re happy with the outcome, you can save and export it to your social media page or embed the link on your website.

Unfortunately, Toonly doesn’t have an auto-save feature, and you’ll need to use another tool to add captions to your videos.

This is disappointing, as 92% of consumers watch videos with the sound off, with 50% relying on the captions.

5. Toonly vs. Doodly

Depending on your needs, these two tools will deliver vastly different results.

What differentiates these tools is that Toonly is used for exciting animations, while Doodly is suitable for videos that require text and fewer distractions.

Doodly is a whiteboard animation tool, meaning that the content is displayed as if it’s being drawn or written on a whiteboard, as shown below:

Source: Doodly.com

Just drag a doodle image onto the canvas, and Doodly will automatically draw the image for you.

Doodly can be used for sales or social media, but overall Toonly’s animated videos offer a better solution for online marketing.

With Toonly you’re given more features to experiment with, and the videos are more unique and entertaining.

6. Toonly’s pricing

Toonly’s pricing

Toonly gives you the option to pay monthly or annually — the latter will save you 49% on your subscription.

The pricing of their 2 plans, as illustrated in the image above, is for the monthly payment option:

Standard plan — $39/month
Enterprise plan — $69/month

You can also buy Toonly for a one-time fee of:

$67 for the Standard license
An additional $97 for the Enterprise license

You can only get the Enterprise license after you’ve purchased the Standard license.

Unfortunately, Toonly doesn’t offer a free trial.

However, if you’re dissatisfied with the tool, they do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Before we determine whether or not Toonly is worth it, let’s take a closer look at what each plan has to offer.

6.1. Toonly’s Standard plan

The Standard plan is priced at $39/month or $20/month if you opt for the annual subscription.

With this plan you get:

30 characters
17 character animations
1,058 prop images
71 backgrounds
10 premade scenes
21 scene transitions
20 background audios
3 text animations

This plan also gives you access to Toonly’s Facebook group, but you don’t get access to the Toonly Club.

6.2. Toonly’s Enterprise plan

The Enterprise Plan is priced at $69/month or $40/month if you opt for annual billing.

For this, you’ll have access to:

82 characters
30 character animations
2,024 prop images
139 backgrounds
20 premade scenes
101 scene transitions
142 background audios
5 text animations

With this plan, you get access to the Toonly Facebook group and the Toonly Club where you get new characters and props each month.

With both plans, you get premium support, no limit on the number of videos you can create, and you can use Toonly on multiple devices.

Let’s weigh up Toonly’s pros and cons to help you decide whether or not the expense will bring you worthy results.

7. Pros and cons of Toonly

Pros

Suitable for a variety of businesses

User-friendly and intuitive interface

Simple payment structure

30-day money-back guarantee and one-time fee option

Regular software updates

No buffer period when previewing your videos

Cons

There’s no free trial or Free plan

No auto-save feature

You can’t add your own animations

Limited lip sync and character emotion customization

You need another tool to generate subtitles

Limited library of characters and props

7.1. Recommended if . . .

We recommend Toonly if you’re:

Looking for a tool with an intuitive interface that requires little to no knowledge on creating videos
Looking for a tool that has no preview buffer
Tried Doodly and you enjoyed it — you’ll likely prefer Toonly with the added features

7.2. Not recommended if . . .

We don’t recommend Toonly if you’re:

Looking for a tool with a bigger library and more customization capabilities
Wanting to use video templates or import your own videos and animate over them
Looking for a tool that lets you match the prop colors to suit your brand
Wanting to try it for free before fully committing to a monthly/yearly payment plan
Looking for built-in support for captioning