Pros and Cons of the Best TikTok Alternatives
I love Tik Tok. As an adult, I’m not proud of this, and I won’t share the total number of hours I’ve spent scrolling to fall asleep, pass the time, or find out what Good Boy Ollie is doing. As Sunday approaches and there is no word from the Supreme Court, I feel increasingly empty. Everyone I know on TikTok is saying the same thing: where do we go from here?
While there are many options being discussed and new apps popping up almost daily, there are still few platforms that share TikTok’s most common traits. Here are a couple.
Red note
If you love TikTok, opening Red Note will immediately put you at ease—it looks very similar. Well, first you have to go through a tedious registration process, during which you agree to “who knows what” in Chinese and try to find someone you know.
Pros: Red Note is very similar to the original recipe; If all you need for your fix is the ability to scroll through an endless feed of content, Red Note may well fill your cup. There’s a “For You” tab and you can like, follow, and favorite just like before. There is even an alternative to TikTok Shop.
You’ll meet interesting new people (many Red Note users seem to be looking forward to Americans) and bonus: you might learn a little Chinese. Creating posts is also very similar to TikTok, where you can select a video or photo, add music, captions, filters, and have access to the same editing tools.
Cons: No hashtags – when you see them in posts, they won’t work. It seems Chinese hashtags do exist, if you can find the Chinese equivalents. Otherwise, if this is how you found content or “your people” on TikTok, you’re out of luck, at least for now.
Red Note doesn’t know you yet, so moving from TikTok, where serious users enjoy a curated feed, to Red Note will be a bit dissociative as it learns what you like. While you can find previous TikTok users on Red Note by searching their usernames individually, remember that the ban didn’t affect everyone—just Americans. Since international users didn’t have to leave TikTok, you probably won’t find them.
Over the past week on Red Note, many users of content that no one would consider controversial have been banned within just a day or after the first post. In particular, it seems like a lot of content creators who make queer content get banned (and you only have two gender options when you sign up). Remember that Red Note carries a lot of political baggage that TikTok doesn’t have.
It’s also entirely possible that Red Note could one day be subject to the same lawsuit as TikTok; however, it took years for the current lawsuit to make its way through the courts.
Conclusion: I think Red Note will quickly figure out how to localize the app so that Americans see it in English; From the moment I logged in yesterday until today, I could swear they added more TikTok-like features. Although it turned me off at first, today I found myself wanting to spend a little time searching for people I follow on TikTok and see what happens. However, I’m also very curious about what I agreed to when I signed up.
Instagram videos
In many ways, Reels seems like an obvious successor to TikTok, although it differs in the way you interact with your audience. The videos are more like a long Instagram story than TikTok.
Pros: You probably already know how to use Reels. It lacks some of the robust editing tools that TikTok has, but still has captions, filters, music, and text. You can tag people and companies, locations, and target specific audiences. Comments are not limited to a few sentences. Obviously Instagram has the advantage of being in English and using hashtags to help people navigate.
Cons: Instagram is meta, and meta is on the cusp of big changes regarding moderation. Part of the beauty of TikTok was its exceptional moderation tools, which allowed everyone to be generally well-behaved. Complaints about Instagram’s algorithm are endless and justified; you have very little control over what you see or who sees you, despite following accounts or asking not to see others. You will see a lot of advertisements. And everything about Instagram is about selling, promoting, or promoting, which is a turn-off for many creators.
Reels doesn’t seem to want to keep you on Reels – it regularly pushes you to regular Instagram. If you search by hashtag, you’ll get a mix of posts and videos (but not stories).
Finally, you can’t watch videos at 2x zoom on Reels, which is completely insulting.
Takeaway: Chances are you’re already using Instagram Reels in addition to TikTok because many content creators are splitting up their social media accounts, using them for different purposes and different audiences. In this case, you may want to consider creating a new IG account to transfer your TikTok followers to. It seems like most users offer an Instagram account to followers and many TikTokers have always kept an IG Reels account as a backup for their TikToks. You’ll likely find a similar audience, albeit less educated, on Instagram Reels.
YouTube shorts
Many big content creators are moving to YouTube and YouTube Shorts, and for good reason: money. If you monetize TikTok, Youtube is the most stable and predictable channel with similar revenue, and many of these big creators started on YouTube with longer videos. Ultimately, Shorts feels like a rudimentary TikTok, with less curation and less ability to organize. Since almost everyone knows what classic YouTube offers (ads, sponsored entries, and unverified comments), let’s talk about short videos.
Pros: YouTube is not going anywhere, ever. People know the platform and know what to expect from YouTube. The app is probably already installed on your phone. As with Reels, the feed is mostly filled with regurgitated TikToks, so it feels familiar. You can like the post (or dislike it, which is a new and fun way to deal with rejection) and follow other users. You can also search by hashtag and choose to watch short or full-length videos.
Cons: Short videos last a maximum of three minutes, not longer like TikTok and Reels. Although the interface for creating and uploading videos is simple, it is too simple. Unlike TikTok, you download and process the Shorts video first, then edit it in the cloud rather than locally on your phone to upload later, which seems like a big commitment if you’re not sure you’re ready. There’s nowhere to add subtitles, and while YouTube can add them using artificial intelligence, they’re often buggy. As with Instagram Reels, you’ll have to watch short films at normal speed, although you can speed up full-length videos.
There is a truly shocking lack of comment moderation or moderation tools. YouTube is (still) the Wild West, and for this reason many find it unappealing.
Conclusion: Shorts is completely different from TikTok. Which is surprising, since classic Youtube usually involves a deeper and more loyal relationship between creators and viewers, with people focusing more on specific creators than trends, hashtags or communities. The shorts, however, miss the mark in all of this. I suspect that people who will return to YouTube will do so for long videos rather than short videos.
Bottom line
It’s not that all American TikTok users are going down the drain. In the “this is the last video I’ll make on TikTok” videos I watch, users post links to all the platforms I named above, plus one more: Bluesky . Although Bluesky only allows you to post 60-second videos, it feels like home base until the swarm figures out where to settle.
In fact, I think you’ll be seeing the same content on all three platforms for a while while we wait and pray for TikTok to come back from the dead. All three tools feature the same portrait video with the ability to remix and share and add music.