Crackle is the best-known of the free ad-supported streaming services. It has a more robust content library than competitors like Tubi, but it still lags behind the streaming giants. It's free, but is it worth your time? Here's our complete Crackle review.
Crackle Review: A Strong Free Option for Streamers
User Experience
Crackle has been through some changes since we first reviewed it almost a decade ago. It even got a (temporary) name change: From 2018 to 2019, after it was acquired by Sony, the service was called “Sony Crackle.” It’s once again going by just plain “Crackle” now, but the basic idea here is still the same: Crackle lets you watch things for free, but it makes you watch ads.
Of course, Crackle hasn’t existed in a vacuum this whole time. Other free-to-watch streaming services have arrived on the scene over the past few years, including Tubi (2014), The Roku Channel (2017) and Amazon Prime’s FreeVee (2019). All of these services have the same basic idea, but Roku and Amazon have the advantage of being able to leverage their other products: Roku pushes The Roku Channel on users of its Roku devices and TVs, and Amazon pitches its free content inside of its ecosystems in much the same way.
Crackle is still hanging on in this increasingly crowded field, though. In our testing, we felt that Crackle's user interface was pretty strong. On the web app, you can view all of their movies unsorted, or you can drill down by genre, length, or alphabetical order. Crackle's web app lacks some of the content discovery features that, for instance, Netflix's interface offers. If you know exactly what you want, however, it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for.
On Crackle's other platforms, they use rows of films in a way that's a bit more reminiscent of Netflix's interface. This was nicer for content discovery, but made it tougher to quickly find specific films. There's a “Watch Now” tab that surfaces featured content, and you can check out TV shows and movies on separate tabs, too.
You'll get some additional functionality from Crackle if you create an account. You'll be able to create a watchlist (“Watch Later”), which is nice, as slogging through some of the lower-quality content to find the gems on Crackle probably isn't something you want to do every time you log on.
Making an account is useful, but Crackle has made the key design choice not to actually require it — a great move that gives the app some much-needed convenience. Free apps like Crackle tend to have shallow streaming libraries (more on that later), so it’s important to be able to pop in and out quickly. The ability to skip the login step is key.
Content
Crackle's content library clearly lags far behind Netflix, Hulu, and the rest of the big boys. Since our last review, the service also seems to have lost some ground to its free competitors, including Tubi, The Roku Channel, and FreeVee.
Crackle's TV shows are a mixed bag. The selection includes some nice nostalgic options and a few solid animated shows. As of this writing, one highlight is the classic anime “Cowboy Bebop.”
Like other free streaming services, Crackle fills the gaps in its catalog with lower-quality content. Generally, this content isn't quite as prevalent or as useless as it is with competitors like Tubi TV. That's nice, as it makes it less frustrating to get to the next high-quality film when you're surfing Crackle. The flip side of this is that the lack of filler makes it very obvious just how small Crackle's content library is.
In years past, we’ve gotten used to seeing the same movies on multiple free services at once (it’s far less common with paid services, which prefer to ink exclusive deals). We still see some overlap between Crackle library and those of competitors like FreeVee, but it’s happening less often with high-quality titles. At the same time, Crackle’s library seems to be getting thinner. It’s possible that Crackle’s competitors are paying up for exclusive deals — or perhaps Crackle is simply not spending like it used to. Either way, Crackle’s library looks a little worse this time around than we’re used to seeing in past reviews.
Streaming Quality
If HD picture is important to you, you may be disappointed in Crackle. The picture quality topped out at just 480p for the films we tried. This is probably the biggest complaint we have in our Crackle review – even YouTube videos stream in HD, guys!
The good news is that the streaming was very smooth (though at 480p, why wouldn't it be?). Movies loaded quickly and streamed reliable on all of the devices we tried. We didn't find a huge difference in either picture quality or streaming consistency across the different platforms.
Load times were minor, though not as unnoticeable as we might have hoped — two seconds or so seems to be the norm. That’s still a little rough, given the streaming quality we’re talking about here.
Platforms
In addition to their web app, Crackle is available on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV. You can get apps for all the current-gen and last-gen gaming consoles with, the lone exception of Nintendo's products. It also has an Android app and an iOS app, both with Chromecast support.
We tried Crackle on five platforms: a laptop (via the web app), an iPhone, an Android tablet, a Roku Ultra, and a Chromecast (casting from both iOS and Android). The streaming quality was pretty much the same across all of these platforms. The user experience was a little different on the web app, as we outlined in the User Experience section.
How Much Does Crackle Cost?
Hooray, it's free! Crackle's main appeal is that you don't have to pay a dime for the subscription.
Of course, if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. Crackle will run ads during your program. Ads run for a couple of minutes (you'll usually get four or five ads of 30 seconds or so each) and pop up about every 10-15 minutes. You'll only have to deal with one ad at the beginning when you start a new program.
Verdict
Crackle was once the most promising of the free streaming services, but its current incarnation feels much lower-quality than competitors like Tubi, The Roku Channel, and FreeVee.
The price is right, of course, so there’s no reason not to download Crackle. Unfortunately, there’s also not much of a reason to do so.
You left out Android TV in the list of available platforms.
Where the hell did you get this from? This service is not free…
Maybe it wasn’t free in 2017, but it’s free now in 2022. Well, you get a full 3 minutes of commercials every few minutes. It’s pretty bad actually. But, your’re not paying money for it.
Crackle is a complete effing joke. I can’t imagine anybody paying for content a plays in skips, starts, restarts, freeze ups, and simply a horrible viewing experience. This shitshow is worse than Xfinity’s Peacock.
Free would be too much to pay these idiots to watch their shitshow of freezeups, muted audio, multiple restarts, blah blah blah
The commercials come in nice and clear with elevated volume, as for the movies. Well the first 20 minutes runs great, then skip, skip, jump, lag time, clear commercial, movie skip lag, skip more lag, clear commercial, movie lag, skip… very annoying, I won’t ever use this service again.
Same – can’t stand Crackle and will not watch it anymore.
There are a couple of shows we like, however with commercials interrupting the programs every five minutes it gets tiresome and frustrating
Exactly the same experience and also will not use in the future. Longer and more frequent commercials, too.
I find Crackle has changed into a raciest TV station. There are other stations that are not one sided. This is deleted on my Roku box!
Wish it would play more than one episode then it says retry then go out come back have to fast forward just to have it play 20 mins sad really if they could fix it because there is a lot of shows I would watch
I tried Crackle for the first time today, activated my high speed Wired internet TV, watch almost half of show then got this rediculous “Uh Oh something went wrong” retry message that would do anything. Did the same on my tested 250Mbps wifi connection. The commercials play perfectly and then the show won’t recover after the commercial. I actually watch half of a 90 minute show before this occurred. Now I can’t get it to continue without restarting the show, then not feeling confidant that it won’t screw up again. I don’t want to be crude, but my impression is this streaming service/application sucks.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing with Cackle.
The interface is terrible on Fire TV… Every time you connect you get some review hyping one of their series and you can’t stop it… As you browse it keeps playing in the background.
Seven commercials during ONE stop of a movie. Do this ten times during a movie and the movie will take three hours to watch. Bunch of BULL! I understand ads, but seven is absolutely laughable and ridiculous. I will definitely not be using this platform again.
Half the time it won’t stream and when it does the picture and volume don’t match up or the picture is distorted and not very clear.
The commercials do come in great with the volume that is elevated to lift you straight out of your chair. Not exactly what you would expect coming from Sony; a real disappointment!
Crackle fizzles with a boatload of commercials. Might help with shorter commercials and less definitely on filler content. It’s worth paying for a service just not to get frustrated. Tubi seems to do better in this department in my opinion.
Watched “Aliens” during a hotel stay. Crackle is a F**cking waste of time because of the long commercial breaks with repetitive commercials, HD for commercials but low for the program, and the fact that it lost my connection and place in the movie repeatedly. I finally gave up and watched antennae TV because of the BS service. Crackle sucks!
Simply put Crackle should be renamed “uh-oh, something went wrong” because that’s what you’ll view far more often than any movie and if you’re lucky that’s what you’ll get first rather than the first 15 minutes or less of a movie that won’t restart no matter how many times you “retry”. This happens on my phone via service provider, various wifi including at home, direct on home p.c. and via my vizio tv that crackle was factory loaded on. Bottom line. Its not the best free streaming service So far Tubi is and thats saying something, something like crackle is horrible, frustrating and for a company like Sony disgraceful and they should be ashamed for attaching their name to it. I know I’m ashamed at giving them my time and believing they’d deliver a service that at least matches if not betters free streaming services that I’ve never heard of. Truly a shame as Sony owns the largest library of movies, good movies and with this experience I’d be hard pressed to even consider a sony service at a price no matter how cheap.
“Uh-oh, something went wrong.” Third time in tonight’s movie … so far. Add that to a ton of commercials and you’ve got quite the service here — quite a disgrace of a service. Sony, aren’t you ashamed to be associated with this mess? The movies are adequate — enough for killing time on a weeknight — but the technical implementation is still inferior to competitors. Tubi and Kanopy, to name two, far surpass it.
Is there any streaming platforms that have serveral faith based channels or multi channel
We very happily pay for PureFlics. Great faith based offerings.
Crackle is crap! 7 minutes of movie then 1.5 minutes of adds! You can’t even get into the movie. I get that it’s free, but how about 15 minutes of movie to 2 minutes of adds? Then at least you could start to get into the movie. CRAP.
Crackle is complete trash and completely unusable. Your standards are too low.
Way too many and too long commercials, right there with regular tv. Plenty of other, better options. Bye bye Crackle.
Better than tubing?! Uh…no.
Better than tubi?! Uh…no.
It’s working fine as looks good in my Roku Ultra and 10 year old Samsung flatscreen.
The is remember it was crap when it started and I used a Firestick.
Not so many commercials this time but it had so many before I had give up.
Glad it got much better.
This service is TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!!
It freezes and ads are ridiculously long, 4+ minutes in some cases.
I wouldn’t waste your time trying to get a free movie. Pay a few bucks and rent ad free. When it does freeze on you, you have to start from the beginning and waste more of your precious time getting back to your spot in the movie only to watch more ads.
This article was clearly paid for. Crackle is absolute garbage. If you want to see 48 minutes of commercials and 12 minutes of show per hour, then maybe crackle is for you. The liar that wrote this article should be cancelled.
Tried to watch a movie on Crackle last night, first commercial break was FOUR MINUTES LONG. Four minutes seemed like an eternity, gave up on the movie.
I’ve tried to use crackle six or seven times. I’ve never gotten through one hour of viewing without the “uh oh something has gone wrong” error popping up. $4.99/month ????? I would rather burn five $1 bills than go through that aggravation again.
One platform not listed is Xfinity (Comcast). They began allowing access to various streaming services via their cable box a year or so ago. Things like Freevee, Pluto and Tubi work well as do HBO Max and Peacock (not surprising as Peacock has the same parent company). Crackle on the other hand is as horrible as others here have stated. Lots of loud commercials (which I could live with since I don’t pay a subscription fee and can mute) but what I can’t live with is the “Uh-oh, something went wrong.” with the big orange Retry button that doesn’t help but just goes back to the same message. It doesn’t help to restart from the beginning. Even doing a full power cycle of the cable box doesn’t help. Since other streaming apps work well it is clearly Crackle rather than the cable box that is the issue. Other comments here make it clear the issue I see is seen by others on different platforms. Really sad as there are some things on Crackle I’d like to watch.l
I’ve watched a movie. About 3/4 of the way through. Had to stop to do something else. Come back to finish and this is the 6th or 10th SET of ads I’ve been through. Will the movie EVER come back? It’s been over 20 minutes of ADS! This is ridiculous!