As the world’s sixth-largest social media platform, TikTok is a serious competitor in the branding and marketing sector. Their 800 million monthly users provide the perfect audience for a lot of brands. The problem is that they can be a bit limited.

If your audience isn’t under 20 years old, TikTok might not deliver the best returns on your ad spend and branding campaigns. There’s no linking, tracking, or any kind of useful monitoring to speak of. These limitations have a lot of marketers looking for TikTok alternatives, and there are plenty to choose from. 

Clash

Clash is a platform created by former Vine star Brendon McNerney. It combines the best of Vine and TikTok with an emphasis on creator monetization. You can share looping videos that are up to 21 seconds long and popular content is delivered on the “Now Serving” page, the same type of effortless content feed that made TikTok so successful. Clash doesn’t provide sound bites, so creators are responsible for their audio. As of August 2020, Clash had over 200k users. 

Byte

Speaking of Vine, meet Byte. Six-second, looping videos and creators you can follow. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it was created by Dominik Hofmann, the creator of Vine. The fall of our beloved Vine can be mostly attributed to a failure to compete with the features other leading social media platforms were offering. The stars went elsewhere. Byte is making an obvious effort to reward creators with monetization and rich features, but since it’s so similar to TikTok, it will have a hard time gaining market share now that we’ve already replaced Vine.

Triller

Triller has carved out its own niche as an AI-assisted music video platform. It was the most downloaded app in the App Store in a record-breaking 50 countries as of August 2020, according to their press release. Triller allows you to record several takes of yourself performing a song and then uses patented AI and editing technology to combine the best takes into a professional-quality music video in seconds.

Funimate

Funimate makes you pay for advanced features, which, off-the-bat, is an issue for most consumers and creators. The incredibly versatile editing software for the looping videos and the extensive audio library have some serious potential. You can even collab with other users on Funimate just like TikTok’s Duet. At the moment, however, it’s performing about as well as any other pay-to-play product with less than 900k downloads.

The Obvious TikTok Alternative Choices

We’ve gone over some of the underdogs, but there are also a few obvious alternatives to TikTok as well. Snapchat has a larger over-30 audience, a ton of great editing features, an advertising mechanism, and still boasts 210 million daily active users.

YouTube is used by 73% of U.S. adults and we know it’s not going anywhere anytime soon (perks of being run by Google). Instagram has three video content formats (Reels, IGTV, and Stories) that are all continuing to perform well.

TikTok is still the king of short, looping videos, there are plenty of platforms out there serving your audience with the features you need!