It’s our main goal as a journalist: explaining tricky concepts and to share it with our audience so they can understand the world around them.But that doesn’t mean it has to be in words. With the right tool you can explain data and complex information in a short and quick way. We made a list with the best explainer tools and a guide how to get started.

Before we go into tools, we want to give you some advice on how you can start with your very own explainer video. It helps you to make considered decisions and find the right explainer tool for your story.

1. Ask yourself whether the information lends itself to being explained and animated. Do you have enough data and visual elements?
2. Figure out what you want to explain and start with that. Don’t be distracted by the details. Knowing what the core of your story is, is even more important when you start with an explainer video.
3. Ask yourself which visual elements your story has which you can use.
4. You don’t need to code to make an explainer video, but there are always limits with tools. Figure them out before you start in order to save time.
5. Make a storyboard on paper to make your story clear and keep in mind what the limits of your tool are.
6. Don’t be afraid to fail. Innovation starts with experimenting.

Powtoon

Now you know how to start, you only need the right tool for the story. One of our favorite tools is Powtoon. With this tool you can easily make a whiteboard animation. Start with an adaptable template or start from scratch. Add some text, icons, colors, photos or upload voice-overs and music. Ofcourse you can embed your creation in your own website.

Animaker

Another tool on our favorites list is Animaker. This tool is different from Powtoon because it gives you more possibilities to work with color and animated icons. It allows you to add a background, characters with different expressions and hundreds of sound-effects and music. It is very useful if you want to work with a main character in your video

Animatron

Animatron is a little more difficult but it gives you more possibilities in customizing a video. Import your own media, draw a shape, use premade backgrounds and icons and animate them. With the timeline you can decide when the objects exist on the canvas and when they move. This tool is very useful if you want to add some animation to your existing mediafiles.

Biteable

With Biteable you start by choosing a category such as business explainer or presentation. The tool has ust four steps: deciding the timeline, color, audio and watching the preview of your video. You can’t customize a lot, but it’s a very useful tool if you want to make a quick explainer video.

Explee

Explee is an easy-to-use paid animation tool. A basic version costs you about 7 dollar per month, but you can try is for free for two weeks. It has a huge library with icons in different categories such as animals, buildings, business and characters. You can add different effects to the icons and they will be drawn for you on the screen such as a real whiteboard. You can also upload your own mediafiles in the video and export your file to your computer.

Icons

When you get started with animated video it can be useful to have some icons. Check out The Noun Project: this tool on our library list allows you to download free icons-families in all sorts or sizes. Also check out our other library-tools such as Pixabay for high quality stock photos and Soundcloud for not licensed music.