Gistil vs Eightify: a verdict before you watch, or a summary instead of watching

The short answer

Pick Eightify if you want to read a video instead of watching it: detailed key insights, the full text of the video, top comments and translations.

Pick Gistil if you want to decide whether to watch at all, and then watch only the parts that carry substance. Gistil gives a score and a verdict before you press play, shows where the useful minutes are, and can play just those minutes for you.

Put simply: a summary replaces the video. A verdict tells you whether the video deserves you.

Watch the demo1:53

What each one is

Eightify is an AI summarizer for YouTube. Its Chrome Web Store listing describes a summary “in just 5 seconds”, key insights, timestamped navigation, a top comments overview, the full text of the video and summaries and translations in 40+ languages. It handles videos up to 10 hours and uses one account across Chrome, iOS and Android. On the Chrome Web Store it has 200,000 users and a 4.0 rating from 859 reviews (as of September 2026).¹

Gistil measures a video before you watch it. For every video it gives:

• A score from 0 to 100 and a call in three metals: gold, 70 and above, worth your time; silver, 40 to 69, worth skimming; copper, below 40, skip.²
• A value map: the video split into segments, the brighter the bar the more useful the segment. Click a bar to jump there.³
• Play the useful part: one button plays only the most useful segments and skips the rest. Every jump can be undone.³
• Autopilot, soft or strict, which moves you past what is not worth your time while you watch as usual.³
• The gist and key moments, kept short, so you can read them before you commit.³
• Video topic review (1 credit): how fully the video covers its own topic, what is covered, what is missing, what to add and where to look next.⁴

The score is the same for everyone: in the extension, on the website and in the app.⁵

The panel next to a YouTube video. The line at the top is the verdict; the button plays only the useful segments; the map below shows where they are.

Side by side

“Not described in its listing” means we did not find the feature on Eightify’s store pages; it may exist elsewhere in the product. Sources: Eightify details from its Chrome Web Store and App Store listings;¹⁶ Gistil details from gistil.com and its pricing page.⁷⁸

Where Eightify is the better choice

It would be dishonest to pretend Gistil does everything. Eightify is stronger when:

• You want to read, not watch. Its insights are longer and you can shape them: more actionable, more controversial, a list or a Q&A, shorter or longer.¹
• You need the full text or a translation. Eightify gives you the full text of a video and works across 40+ languages.¹ Gistil does not export the text of a video.
• Your videos are very long. Eightify handles up to 10 hours; Gistil’s longest tier is 4 hours.
• You care about the comments. Eightify summarizes top comments; Gistil does not read them for you.

Where Gistil is the better choice

• You have more videos than evenings. A score and a verdict take one glance. If it says skip, you have saved the whole hour without reading anything.
• You still want to watch, just not all of it. Summaries are good at telling you what was said. They are weak at telling you whether it was worth hearing, and they read equally confidently either way. We wrote about that in why AI summaries of long videos mislead. Gistil keeps the video and removes the minutes around the substance.
• You want to know if a title is honest. Part of the Gistil score is how honest the title is, and the minute where the value starts.⁵
• You are learning a topic, not just one video. The video topic review tells you what a video leaves out and where to look next.
• You use Firefox. Gistil is on Firefox Add-ons as well as the Chrome Web Store.
• You open popular videos. Anything Gistil has already judged opens for free, for everyone, on every plan. You only use a credit when you are the first to ask about a video.⁸

What Gistil will not do

So you know before you install:

• It works on videos with spoken content. A video without speech gets no verdict, and no credit is taken.³
• It judges a video in the language it was made in. The verdict is shown in your language.
• It does not judge music videos. A song has no filler to skip, so Gistil steps aside and charges nothing.³
• It does not alter, download or cut any part of a video. It only tells you where to look.⁵

Pricing, plainly

Gistil has a free tier: every video already judged, as many as you like, plus 5 new videos of your own, up to an hour each. On the web, Silver is $10 a month for 130 new videos a month (up to 3 hours each) and Gold is $49.99 a year for 150 a month (up to 4 hours each). The mobile apps have their own weekly and six-month plans, priced by the store for your country. One plan covers the extension, the site and the apps.⁷⁸ See pricing.

Eightify Pro on the App Store is $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year.⁶ Its Chrome listing mentions a 7-day free trial for the extension.¹

How to try both in five minutes

1. Open a video you have been putting off.
2. With Gistil, read the score. If it says worth skimming, press Play the useful part and see how much of the runtime is left.
3. With Eightify, open the summary on the same video and ask yourself whether it told you enough to skip it, or made you want to watch.
4. Keep the one that matches how you actually use YouTube.

If you want to see what a verdict looks like first, browse the best of YouTube, measured: every video there opens at the minute the useful part begins.