V1 Sports vs. SeamsUp: Coaching Platform & Sports Video Analysis Software Comparison

These days, it’s common practice to use video analysis to track and support any athlete’s developmental journey.

In particular, both coaches and parents have been convinced of video analysis’ power to accelerate learning by more than 70 years of reliable studies and hundreds of well-known anecdotes.

V1 Sports and SeamsUp are two of the most popular options for sports footage analysis.  

Both apps also claim to help private lesson instructors organize and scale their entire coaching businesses. 

And because V1 Sports and SeamsUp share a handful of features meant to enhance feedback, athletic performance, and instructor revenue, it can be difficult to decide which is the best choice for coaches, parents, or athletes. 

Despite being a bit partial (check the URL above), we genuinely want help with this decision-making process by comparing both apps’ features, pricing, and tangible benefits.

#The TL;DL Comparison Between V1 Sports and SeamsUp

Sports coaches and parents are both a busy bunch. If you're short on time, this "too long; didn't read" section will give you the basic gist.  

#Price Comparison

Despite having a few similar video analysis features, the ability for coaches, parents, and players to use all of those editing features for free is one way that SeamsUp stands out.

Yes, we mean free. 

In contrast, even the most basic analysis features in V1 Sports cost $39 per year as a parent or player and a minimum of $590 every year as a coach.  

#Coaching Business Comparison

But the biggest difference between the two apps, for instructors at least, comes down to SeamsUp’s full suite of coaching business tools that V1 Sports just doesn’t offer – even in their premium tiers.  

Here’s nine quick examples of unique SeamsUp-only coaching tools:

1. Automated client scheduling – like Calendly, but already integrated with everything you care about
2. Automated admin processes and communication with parents – so you can focus on getting athletes better
   
3. Instant payment acceptance  – goes directly into your bank account
   
4. Advanced business analytics  – to track the health of your brand and find new opportunities
   
5. Video call lessons – and the ability to offer every other instructional type imaginable 
   
6. In-picture personal feedback and technique demonstrations  – that you can overlay onto a player’s sent footage while analyzing – so clients can see your face and movements
   
7. AI-powered skeleton tracking – so that you can see your athlete’s posture and their limbs’ movement patterns more clearly
   
8. iMessage Equivalent Chat – so you can communicate with you clients anytime, anywhere in the exact way they're used to, but while keeping your coaching business separate from personal friends and family texts and DM's
9. A sales and Google search engine optimized personal coaching page  – that takes 5 minutes to set up but gets you new clients on auto-pilot
   

Okay, with our TL;DR out the way, let’s dive into comparing V1 Sports and SeamsUp in detail.

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#V1 Sports App Features

V1 Sports has been a valid option for coaches, parents, and players looking to review technique and game film since 1995.

Here’s a breakdown of what V1 Sports has put together feature-wise over all those years.

#Video Analysis

The V1 Sports app allows you to record your players and instantly show them how to improve – anywhere, anytime. It also allows players to share pre-recorded footage with their pre-existing sports instructor to receive one type of personal lesson feedback. 

The video analysis portion of the app offers tools such as instant playback and zooming in or out for further study of each clip, along with allowing its users to flip footage to be left or right-handed, draw lines, shapes, and angles directly onto their videos to call attention to particular points or areas of focus. 

Finally, V1 Sports app also lets coaches or parents compare different footage side-by-side to highlight key points found in experts’ techniques or track an athlete’s progress with videos from their past.

They take this normal video analysis feature a small step forward by letting users overlay the footage directly on top of each other to compare as well.

#Organization

All uploaded or analysis-created videos can be automatically cloud-synced and backed up with V1 Sports’ Pro Golf App. It also allows golfers to export and share their videos via text, email, or onto unspecified social media platforms.

Unfortunately, the current V1 Baseball App does not appear to let coaches, players, or parents cloud-sync, export, or share their own videos in any way.

But, with V1 Sports’ Golf App, coaches and parents can title these videos for easy library searching.

Specifically, golfers can can tag videos by club type and view angle, sort videos into folders, and search videos by name, folder, club, date, or view angle

Some version or combination of V1 Sports’ software supports all device types – laptops, phones, or tablets – both for Android and iOS.

#Player Models and Drills

The V1 Baseball App strongly advertises player models and drills that coaches or players can use – though these mostly need to be unlocked with a paid membership.

First, let’s address the player models.

V1 Pro Baseball offers premium paid users access to 6 softball clips and 6 baseball clips in total.

The video model clips are between 2 and 11 seconds in length. And each of these shows a single swing or pitch.

They also offer 45 simple drill examples in total that are between 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length.

But, let’s drill down on their drills. See what we did there.

Firstly, it’s a seemingly random collection of unrelated drills for all sorts of different use cases and positions on the field.

And 27 of these drills appear to have been filmed (without hyperbole) in the early to mid 1990’s. Which is decades before most current ballplayers were born.

To be fair, the age of a given drill may or may not have anything to do with if it’s still viable for modern players – despite the rapid rate of change baseball and softball have experienced since the 90s. 

But, more generally, any baseball or softball coach or parent knows that a few minutes spent searching and screen recording (or downloading) from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube would yield many more player models and drills.

And the drills you’ll find for free online will likely be a bit more up to date and may even be organized into meaningful (and related) drill progressions for your ballplayers’ specific use cases already. 

#Video Capture

V1 Sports’ Golf App can capture up to 240 frame per second in HD (1080p) on capable devices.

This reviewer was not able to find any online mention or documentation of what V1’s Pro Baseball App is capable of.

However, the current version of the V1 Baseball App definitely does not allow users to choose or adjust their frame rate nor their video quality in any way.

More importantly to note, the app made for baseball and softball also limits your in-app video recordings to a maximum of 30 seconds in length – which is a pretty short window of time. 

#Communication

The only communication possible on V1’s Golf or Baseball Apps is for parent or players to send (without any additional context) a video for a pre-chosen coach to analyze and add a voiceover to before just sending it back to that parent or player.

The coach can not add any recommended drills or additional video examples, nor can they write out a personal note or homework between lessons.

It’s a pure analysis and voiceover lesson, so the assumption is that the lesson must be negotiated, scheduled, and paid for either in real life or on other apps.

This assumption is further supported by the fact that connecting with a coach is simply a matter of searching for an academy or name that the player or parent already knows or works with – without any details on the coach's background or their lesson offerings. 

#The Problems with V1 Sports Coaching?

V1 Sports has thrown together a few video analysis and capture features that coaches can learn about and employ with their pre-existing clientele.

But aside from charging coaches monthly fees – which we’ll cover in the next section – there are at least three other big problems for coaches looking to manage and grow their online business using V1 Sports:

1. You’ll still need to negotiate scheduling and lesson prices with each client, which takes time and energy away from what you likely love to do – teach the game.
   
   And all these back and forths between you and your clients would need to be done with the iMessage app, social media DM’s, or email – which gets real messy real fast when you have more than a few clients mixed into your friends and family’s personal messages.
   
2. Both you and your clients would also have to combine V1 Sports with even more software applications in order to send, receive, and track those lesson payments – which means jumping back-and-forth between more than just the communication apps listed in point one above. 
   
3. V1 Sports might work with pre-existing in-person clients, but does not optimize coach listings to be found in Google searches locally or internationally, nor does it have any other mechanisms to help you gain new lesson clients to work with.
   
   Which means you’re forced to rely exclusively on word-of-mouth and your social media skills to increase your active client list. 
   

And all that extra time, work, and awkwardness (most coaches don’t like negotiating pricing) would just be for giving a basic video analysis lesson. 

And analysis style lessons are just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible with 1:1 online instruction.

Other types of online lesson interactions – like live video calls, for example – that parents and athletes crave cannot be done at all with the V1 Sports app. 

Again, if you wanted to create such lesson offerings would also need to combine the V1 Sports app with all of the following softwares:

• A communication app (iMessage, email, or social media DM’s)
• A payment acceptor (Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App)
• A live video tool (Zoom or FaceTime)
• And personal scheduling platform to deal with time zones and meet-up reminders (Calendly or Acuity).

That’s a lot of apps for a single hitting lesson. 

#SeamsUp App Features

As of 2022, the SeamsUp app has become an industry-leading sports analysis option and continues to push the envelope of what’s possible with private instruction.

#Video Analysis

Sports analysis tools are just one facet of what SeamsUp offers to coaches and players – but it’s a facet that we take very seriously. 

We first put together a comprehensive suite of video analysis features that includes everything apps like V1 Sports offer, like frame-by-frame video play-back, slow-motion, zooming in and out, flipping footage to right or left handedness, comparing two different footages, voiceover, and numerous drawing annotation tools – angles, lines, circles, squares, arrows, free hand, etc.

But then, we added in-picture personal feedback and technique demonstrations that you can overlay onto a player’s footage – which can be moved at will or expanded to full-screen – during your analysis sessions.

This allows your lesson clients to see your face speaking directly to them or your body demonstrating the proper movements overlaid on their sent footage.

Next, we also added our own AI-powered skeleton tracking so that you can see your athlete’s posture and their limbs’ movement patterns even more clearly. 

This skeleton tracking makes comparing your athlete’s clips side-by-side with those of elite professional athletes or their own footage from the past significantly easier.

#Organization

Then, SeamsUp revamped how you upload videos from your device’s camera roll and how you film them directly from within our app – along with re-imagining our entire file management system with a more intuitive and modern look and feel than anything else out there.

On SeamsUp, coaches can create folders in their Gallery for different footage types, like “Drills” or “Pro Player Examples.”

But you can also create folders named after each in-person player you work with from before you started using SeamsUp or any that you acquired outside of our app’s auto-pilot client acquisition efforts – and store all of their progress in one convenient place.

And, of course, our SeamsUp client management system stores every In Person, Analysis, Full Remote, or Live Call lesson that you accept within the app into their own searchable categories.

But, not only that, each lesson request you accept or feedback you record is saved in a robust player profile forever.

These player profiles include their name, profile picture, their parent’s name, their age, and every instructional interaction you and the client have ever had.

This allows you to track all of your SeamsUp connected clients’ progresses, and which drills or concepts you’ve previously introduced along their developmental journeys.

It’s like having an easily viewable and navigable receipt of everything high and low of the ballplayer’s mindset, technique, and in-game results – and all the knowledge and mentorship you’ve contributed to these along the way.

And, of course, it’s also a literal receipt of their lesson payments (which go directly into your bank account).

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#Player Models and Drills

Some coaches or parents may be wondering where you get the player models and drills to fill your SeamsUp Gallery.

Of course, coaches can record themselves or other clients to use as player example models and they can do the same thing for their favorite drills.

Such coaches can record these videos within the SeamsUp app, or pre-record them to upload into their Gallery later.

In fact, many coaches who already have a presence online will have tons of drills and examples already posted to their social media accounts. And SeamsUp allows you to bulk import them all at once into your Gallery.

But, for coaches who are just starting out and haven't built their own library of drills or pro player examples yet, there’s a very simple solution. 

Places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube can be particularly great sources of drills and player examples.

Screen recordings from fellow experts and accounts on these platforms are an easy way to stock up your SeamsUp Gallery.

It’s an easy 5 step process that takes less than a minute:

1. Search Social
2. Ask Permission 
3. Screen Record
4. Crop (if needed) 
5. Upload to SeamsUp

Simply find a player model or drill you like on your favorite social media platform.

Next, ask the original poster if you can use it for your lessons. They’ll likely say yes.

And then (after getting the thumbs up), screen record it directly with your phone or tablet.

Due to the interface elements of places like Instagram, you may want to crop your screen recording a bit in your device’s Camera Roll to remove any unwanted visual distractions from your video.

Then upload it straight from your Camera Roll into the SeamsUp. 

If you’re unsure how to do screenshots or recordings, check out this guide for iPhone or this one for Android.  

And if you're unsure how to crop visuals and trim the length of videos on your phone, here’s a guide for iPhone and here’s one for Android.

This process takes literal seconds to do and can easily fill up a free SeamsUp Gallery with stellar pro player models and cutting edge drills. 

#Video Capture

SeamsUp lets users choose their camera resolution up to 4k and their frame rate to optimize both quality and speed.

This is a higher resolution quality than what’s offered by any other video analysis app, including V1 Sports.

SeamsUp also allows slow motion capture up to 240 frames per second (fps).

And we have no time limit on how long you'd like to record your videos within our app.

#Communication and Other Coaching Platform Features

But, the differences between V1 Sports and SeamsUp are even more evident when comparing them both as coaching instructional platforms – and not just because one is completely free. 

These differences are more due to the fact that SeamsUp is primarily a marketplace created to bring athletes and coaches together for every type of private lesson imaginable. 

Players get one-on-one remote or in-person access to the world’s best coaches – finally breaking free of all geographic limitations.

Parents interested in coaching services can search and request private lessons from instructors in a couple clicks after looking over an instructor's full background and coaching philosophy.

Parents can also check out the reviews of other parents who have already worked with each of our platform-vetted professionals.

And coaches?

Well, they get connected with new local clients, along with the world’s first dedicated platform built to give, manage and grow their online lessons business.

A dedicated coaching platform goes well-beyond moving client communication away from emails and text messages and into a place that essentially does the same thing in a different app. 

Coaches want to focus on teaching the game and automate all the clerical admin back and forths.

But our automated lesson sales processes, like all the best set-it-and-forget-it tools, still gives you, as coaches, room to personalize the client messaging and reminders as much or as little as you like. 

Coaches using SeamsUp get all of the following features 100% free:

• A robust sales landing page. This page showcases your instructional services, qualifications, client reviews, and lesson offerings in a way that’s fully optimized to grow and scale your coaching business. And it takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
  
  This page can act as your website by itself, as its customizable URL is shareable on social media (or any other way you see fit) and searchable in Google (and every other search engine). But you can also simply add your SeamsUp sales page to your existing website or social media links. 
• Accept one-off or recurring package payments from clients. And you create your own prices and lesson offerings (like live video calls)–it’s total freedom to run your business your way.
• Manage lesson clients. Easily keep track of your client’s information, including their bookings, payments, and personal progress.
• Easy booking processes. No more back-and-forth scheduling or price discussions for live-streamed lessons. You set availability and rates. Players choose their slots. We handle time zones and everything in between.
• Automated sales processes. Push notifications and emails are sent automatically to verify client purchases and remind them when it’s time to meet for live lessons–so you can focus on teaching the game.
• Customizable message communication. Message new students (even create onboarding templates) and do the same for each subsequent lesson. 
  
• Custom branding. You and your coaching business are one-of-a-kind. A SeamsUp profile allows you to showcase the logo, coaching philosophy, content, and specific brand colors that set you apart. 
• No additional fees on lesson transactions. You’ll just find the same 3% processing fees (which goes to the banks) as you’d get charging your clients with Venmo or Cash App. 
• The Coaching Upgrade Program. An online video course teaching coaches how to create a brand, grow your social media presence, and how to use and optimize SeamsUp to make you more revenue. It also comes with a step-by-step coaching content creation template to follow.
• Top-notch customer support.  

So, our free suite of sports video analysis tools is part of a larger ecosystem of software solutions.

But our powerful analysis features can and are used completely separately, AKA on their own, by hundreds of coaches and parents for all sorts of uses in sport. 

And we encourage it – as you can tell by this article.

#V1 Sports vs. SeamsUp Pricing

V1 Sports and SeamsUp go about pricing their video analysis products very differently. 

Here’s a breakdown of each option.

#V1 Sports Pricing

#V1 Sports Pricing For Parents and Athletes

V1 Sports does offer some manner of free version for parents and athletes, but it’s incredibly limiting.

It only gives them the ability to:

• Record your video in app (not with your phone or tablet)
• Play the video you’ve recorded frame by frame
• Zoom in on videos
• Trim videos
• Save video to the cloud
• Group saved videos by session
• Send video to coach

In order to actually use the V1 Baseball App’s basic video analysis tools and editor, parents and athletes would need to upgrade to V1 Baseball+ and pay $9.99 each month or $39.99 each year.   

Only by paying this recurring subscription, can they do the following basic things with V1:

• Import any videos from a device’s camera roll
• Analyze videos with drawing lines
• Analyze videos with drawing boxes
• Analyze videos with drawing circles
• Analyze Videos with erasing drawings
• Analyze Videos with drawing different colors
• Analyze videos with compare
• Analyze videos with overlay
• View all drills
• View and analyze all player models

Yes, you read all that correctly.

#V1 Sports for Pricing for Coaches

The V1 Pro Mobile Coach Tier is their self-proclaimed most popular option for coaches. 
And, because it refers to using their app exclusively and is their cheapest option, we’ll only go over it in this app to app comparison article.

After some digging around, this reviewer was able to find the price of $69 per month and $590 per year for coaches to use V1 Sports.

#SeamsUp Pricing

#SeamsUp Pricing For Coaches, Parents, and Athletes

SeamsUp’s entire video and analysis tool suite and top-notch customer service are actually 100% free for all coaches, parents, and athletes.

None of our analysis tools are locked behind a paywall.

And this, of course, includes the ability to upload videos from your phone or tablet’s camera roll to be analyzed and organized.

You can freely import up to 30GB of video in your SeamsUp Gallery. In case you’re wondering how much this is, 30GB is roughly equivalent to 60 hours of standard-definition video.

Still curious as to how many actual videos that is?

The average video that a player or parent uploads on our platform is between 1-3 minutes in duration.

So even taking the high (3 minutes) as the average length, that means a parent, player, or coach using the completely free version of SeamsUp can save around 1,200 videos in their Gallery before even considering an upgrade.

Now, for free tier coach users wishing to export videos that were analyzed within the app and send them out via text, email, or share on social media, they will be limited to 5 such exports per week.

The Gallery export limit is mainly just for coach users trying to use the SeamsUp analysis tools to create social media content instead of giving actual lessons on the platform – and they can still create and export 5 days worth Instagram or TikTok posts.

Such coaches can also still upload and analyze (including both voiceover and in-picture overlays while giving feedback) for as many videos up to 30GB as they like. The limit is only on weekly exports.

But, there’s an important distinction to be made:

This export limit only applies to using the SeamsUp app’s Gallery storage.

Your private lesson video and communication storage is considered completely different with SeamsUp. All coach and player users can save and export an unlimited amount of videos from their actual Analysis, Full Remote or Live Call online lessons. 

There’s no limit whatsoever.

So, as a coach, your sent feedback and your clients’ videos are yours to export and share as you see fit.

#Additional Benefits for Parents Choosing SeamsUp

With SeamsUp, parents also have the ability to find traditionally inaccessible instructors and examine their complete resumes – as well as the opinions of other parents who have already worked with these platform-vetted experts. 

Before testing out a new coach, we want parents and athletes to be fully informed. 

Finally, SeamsUp enables parents to quickly obtain an elite (and discreet) second opinion on technique, mindset, or college recruiting in literally a couple of clicks. 

As you can see, the free version of SeamsUp already offers parents and athletes everything they need to track and improve their game.

But, for coaches, we threw in even more for free. 

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#Additional Free Benefits for Coaches Choosing SeamsUp

To briefly reiterate from earlier, after creating their coaching profile, private instructors, former pros, and online sports creators also – aside from access to our industry-leading video analysis tools – also get the following:

• A robust and searchable sales landing page.
• The ability to accept one-off or recurring package payments via credit or debit card.
  
• The ability to manage lesson clients. Keep track of your clients' information including their bookings, payments, and personal progress.
  
• Worry-free booking processes. No more back and forth scheduling or price discussions for live streamed lessons. We handle time zones and everything in-between. 
  
• Automated sales processes. Push notifications and emails are sent automatically–so you can focus on teaching the game.
  
• Customizable message communication for new students (onboarding templates) and for each subsequent lesson. 
• Fully custom branding.
• No additional processing fees for coaches on lesson transactions.
• The Coaching Upgrade Program. A complete online video course teaching coaches everything you need to grow and scale your business. 

Yes, everything above is seriously free for coaches. 

And it’s plenty to run just about any in-person or online coaching business imaginable. 

But, for former pro athletes and serious social media creators (or those who wish to become one), we do offer even more capabilities with our SeamsUp Pro offer.

#SeamsUp Pro

This tier is $29.99 per month or $359.88 a year.

This is still over $230 cheaper every year than V1 Sports’s least expensive coaching tier. 

And it’s month to month, so you can cancel anytime.

SeamsUp Pro includes all the features included in our free tier, in addition to:

• The ability to export and share up to 4k quality videos. Again, this is for creators looking to generate next-level social media content with our video analysis tools.
• A whopping 1,000GB of Gallery storage
  
  This is essentially an unlimited, near-lifetime amount of video storage that can be used instead of DropBox, GoogleDrive, or Google Photos. And it will definitely free up tons of space in your device’s Camera Roll for your life outside of baseball or softball.
  
• The ability to add an unlimited amount of fully customizable storage folders to your video Gallery. 
  
• No watermarks on exported or shared videos. 
  
• A full coaching business analytics suite. 
  
  This gives you advanced metrics to track the trends and progress of your public profile, your top lesson clients, trends, and compare your lesson offerings, prices, and revenue with similar coach competitors.
  

#SeamsUp: The Ultimate V1 Sports Alternative

#For Parents and Athletes

Both V1 Sports and SeamsUp give parents and athletes tools to analyze what’s working and what isn’t while tracking progress over time.

But with SeamsUp, parents and their ballplayers are able to use a full and nearly unlimited suite of video capture, analysis, and storage features that they just can’t find anywhere else.

They also get the ability to search for coaches well beyond their personal network and geographic area.

And, importantly, parents can see the full resumes and fellow parent reviews of these SeamsUp platform-vetted experts. 

The SeamsUp marketplace empowers parents and athletes to have all the facts before trying out a new coach. 

And it allows them to get a professional second opinion on technique, mentality, or college recruiting in just a few clicks, without any of the awkwardness or organizational politics that this very smart move might have traditionally caused. 

#For Coaches

V1 Sports was a great tool when it first came out.

It allowed basic video analysis from your laptop or mobile device, which had previously only been accessible to MLB clubhouses and university researchers.

But both the game and the needs of coaches and players have continued to evolve.

Coaches no longer need to manage client details and their scheduled times with a pen and paper or with the Notes and Calendar apps on your phones.

And they no longer need to communicate with these same clients via texts, DM’s, or emails that are awkwardly mixed into the personal messages of friends and loved ones.

And they no longer need separate apps to do things like give a video call lesson and accept online payments.

And, real shocker, parents don’t need or want to follow you across all these different softwares just to complete a single hitting lesson either. 

We’ve built SeamsUp for coaches looking to take the next leap in private instruction’s evolution.

We help you automate all the clerical work of scheduling, payments, and time-sucking (but non-essential) parent communications that once came with managing an instructional business – so you can focus your time and energy on teaching the game.

And coaches can seriously run their entire in person and online lesson business on it for free. 

Due to SeamsUp’s comprehensive and cutting-edge features and unique pricing model, we hope you will take this leap with us. 

Interested in giving us a shot?

Download SeamsUp here, and let us know what you think.

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