31 Explainer Video Examples Worth Studying

I have watched a lot of explainer videos. Some as a viewer, most as someone who has to figure out why one works and the next one slides off your brain by the second sentence. After enough of them, you stop grading on production polish and start noticing something simpler: the good ones make a decision early about what they are willing to leave out.

That is the whole game. An explainer has maybe sixty to ninety seconds before a person decides whether to keep watching, and every extra idea you cram in costs you attention you cannot buy back. So when I look at a piece, I am really asking three things. Does it commit to one idea? Does the pacing respect my time? And does the visual style actually carry meaning, or is it decoration sitting on top of a script?

I pulled together thirty-one videos here that answer those questions well, across styles I keep pointing clients to: flat 2D, isometric 3D, screen-recording walkthroughs, mascot-led, cinematic. A few of them are famous. A few are workmanlike and I love them for it, because most brands do not need a Cannes reel, they need a clear ninety seconds that a stranger understands. I care less about the polish and more about the choice underneath it.

How I chose these

I skipped anything that only looks expensive. Every video below earns its place on a decision I can point at: a story structure, or a way to make an invisible product visible. I have grouped nothing by industry on purpose, because the lesson usually transfers sideways. A fintech team can steal a beat from a whiteboard cartoon, and a B2B platform can steal restraint from a payments ad. Watch them for the move, not the logo.

Chipotle, an animated short that sells a worldview

This barely mentions the product, and that is the point. It is a fully realized 3D short about a scarecrow watching an industrial food machine grind away, and the brand promise arrives as a feeling long before any words do. I bring it up whenever someone insists an explainer has to list features. It proves you can explain a company’s values through story alone, and trust the audience to close the gap.

Duolingo, three words and a mascot doing the heavy lifting

Bright flat 2D, the owl front and center, and a script that hangs the entire pitch on three adjectives. What I like is the discipline: they picked three words and refused to add a fourth. The mascot gives the animation a consistent personality so every scene feels like the same brand talking, which is harder to pull off than it looks.

Uber Eats, a service flow made legible

Clean motion graphics walking through how the thing works, step by step, with no wasted frames. This is the unglamorous workhorse format, and I mean that as praise. When your product is a sequence of actions, the job is to show the sequence clearly, and the animation here moves at exactly the speed a first-time user can follow.

Amazon, live action with graphics doing the explaining

Amazon Go had a weird premise to sell: walk out of a store without checking out. So they shot real people in a real space and layered graphic overlays to reveal the invisible technology tracking the whole thing. I point to this when a product is hard to believe, because the live footage grounds the claim and the overlays explain the magic without slowing the human moment down.

Grammarly, a benefit dramatized in type

Typographic animation where the words themselves are the visual, which fits a writing product perfectly. Instead of demoing the software, they dramatize the feeling of finally finding the right phrase. The style and the benefit are the same thing here, and that alignment is what makes it stick.

Microsoft Azure, isometric 3D for an abstract idea

Cloud infrastructure has no natural picture, so they built one: tidy isometric 3D that turns data centers and services into objects you can point at. The isometric angle is doing real work, giving abstract concepts a physical footprint on screen. When a product lives entirely in software, I almost always reach for a spatial metaphor like this.

Clever Devices, a complex B2B system untangled

Transit operations software is about as unsexy a brief as they come, and this 2D piece handles it with real clarity. It takes a sprawling system of buses and dispatch screens and stages it as one connected journey. The reason I include it: most explainers in the world are for products exactly this dry, and it shows the format works without a big idea, just organized thinking.

monday.com, fast UI motion tied to the real product

Layered, quick-cutting motion built on actual product screens rather than fake mockups. The pace is deliberately busy, which mirrors the promise that the tool does a lot. I flag this one for teams tempted to abstract their UI into cartoons: sometimes the real interface, animated with energy, sells better than a simplified stand-in.

Dropbox, the paper cutout that started it all

The original Common Craft cut-paper style, and the video a lot of people credit with defining the modern explainer. What strikes me watching it now is how low-fi it is and how little that matters. The clarity of the script carries everything, and it is a useful reminder that the idea beats the render every single time.

Google, an invisible process turned into an infographic

Search is a process nobody can see, and this friendly 2D infographic makes crawling and indexing feel concrete. Five minutes is long for an explainer, but it earns the runtime by breaking one big invisible system into small visible steps. I use it as proof that length is fine when every added minute buys a new piece of understanding.

Google, the same story compressed to sixty seconds

Here is the tight version of that same subject: a host, kinetic graphics, roughly a minute. Watching it back to back with the longer cut is a masterclass in editing to length. The short one drops detail and keeps the shape, which is exactly the trade you make when you cut a five-minute idea down to sixty seconds.

Ahrefs, a SaaS overview that mixes screencast and motion

A dense tool with a lot of features, sold by pairing real screen recording with motion graphics that keep you oriented. The graphics act like signposts so the screencast never feels like a firehose. For any product with a deep interface, this hybrid is often the right call, because you show what people will actually use.

Ahrefs, a tighter problem-then-solution cut

Same brand, leaner structure: state the problem, then show the fix. The pacing is faster and the promise lands sooner, which suits a viewer who is comparing tools and impatient. I like having both Ahrefs cuts side by side because they show one company solving the same brief at two different tempos.

Notion, a UI-led take on an abstract workspace

Notion is famously hard to describe, so the video leans on the interface itself, minimal and calm, to show the flexibility instead of naming it. The restraint matches the product’s aesthetic, which builds trust before a single feature is listed. When your brand voice is quiet, your explainer should be too.

Intel, generative storytelling built from your own data

The Museum of Me pulled your own social data into a generated CG gallery, turning a processor pitch into something personal and strange. It is more of an experience than a classic explainer, and I include it as a stretch goal: proof that the format can be a canvas for an idea nobody has seen before. Most briefs will not support this, but it is worth knowing the ceiling.

Google Nest, hero product shots plus animation

For a physical device, they blend glossy hero footage of the object with animation that explains what it does. The two modes trade off cleanly: the beauty shots make you want it, the animated bits make you understand it. That rhythm, desire then comprehension, is how I think about most hardware explainers.

Crazy Egg, the mascot that famously lifted conversions

A classic mascot-led 2D explainer that became a case study because it measurably moved sign-ups. Nothing about it is flashy, and that is the lesson. A friendly character, a clear problem, and a plain walkthrough of the fix can outperform a far prettier film when the script is doing its job.

Slack, a calm onboarding explainer

Clean 2D motion graphics introducing the product to someone who has never opened it. The tone is unhurried and the color system keeps everything on-brand, so it feels like an extension of the app rather than an ad about it. This is the reliable default for a first-touch explainer, and it is done well here.

Slack, one feature given its own character

Where the last one covers the whole product, this narrows to a single feature and gives it a warmer, more characterful animation style. Zooming in like this is smart once people already know the brand, because you can afford personality instead of basics. Feature-level explainers are how mature products keep teaching without repeating the intro.

Asana, animation fused with real screen recording

Here the animation and the live product screens are stitched into one continuous move, so it never feels like you left the software. That fusion keeps the piece grounded in reality while still letting motion emphasize what matters. It is a tidy answer to the constant tension between showing the real UI and keeping things visually lively.

Asana, kinetic type carrying the platform story

A different Asana approach, this one built on kinetic typography and 2D motion rather than the interface. It sells the idea of organized work at a higher altitude, before you get into buttons and boards. Comparing it with the fused-UI version above is a good reminder that one product often needs several explainers, each aimed at a different moment in the buyer’s head.

GitHub, mixed media with a sense of humor

Made by the studio BUCK, this mixes media and comedic timing to explain a developer platform to a broader crowd. The charm does real work here: it lowers the barrier to a topic that scares non-engineers off. Humor, used with intent, buys you patience from an audience that would otherwise tune out.

Shopify, an onboarding explainer with UI and graphics

Straightforward and effective: walk a would-be merchant from question to first store using UI plus supporting graphics. It answers the literal search query, what is this and how does it work, without dressing it up. Sometimes the best move is to build the video around the exact sentence people are typing.

PayPal, a fintech flow for a broad audience

Simple 2D animation explaining how money moves, pitched at everyone rather than the finance-literate. The simplicity is a deliberate accessibility choice, because payments touch people of every technical level. When your audience is truly general, plain and slow beats clever and fast.

Zendesk, a friendly walkthrough of a support tool

A warm 2D explainer for the Guide product, using approachable visuals to demystify a knowledge-base tool. The friendliness is on-strategy for a company whose whole pitch is better customer relationships. Your explainer’s tone is a product claim in itself, and this one practices what the brand preaches.

Zendesk, character-driven animation for service software

This one leans harder on characters to put a human face on customer service. People and their little frustrations make an abstract software category feel like it is about actual relationships. Characters are worth the extra animation cost when your product is really about how people feel, not just what a tool does.

Loom, async video explained concisely

A short, well-shaped explainer for a product that saves you from another meeting. It frames the problem, then shows the async fix, and gets out. The economy is the message, because a tool that respects your time should not waste it in its own ad.

Mastercard, payments in a minute

A branded illustration style compresses a global payments network into sixty seconds. The house look holds the whole thing together, so even a rushed topic feels intentional and owned. A strong, consistent visual system is what lets a brand move fast without looking generic.

Mastercard, the same style pushed toward purpose

Same illustration language, aimed at brand purpose rather than mechanics. Seeing the two Mastercard films together shows how one visual system can flex from how it works to why it matters. That range is the payoff of investing in a real style instead of a one-off look.

Trello, a screen-led demo of a visual tool

Trello is already a visual product, so the demo just shows the boards and cards moving in the real app. There is little reason to abstract an interface that is this intuitive to watch. When the product demonstrates itself, get out of the way and record the screen.

Twilio, motion graphics for invisible APIs

Communications APIs are pure abstraction, so the video traces messages flowing through channels as animated paths. Giving invisible infrastructure a visible route is the core trick for any developer product. I keep this one handy for exactly those briefs where there is nothing physical to point a camera at.

What the best ones share

Watch all thirty-one and the same handful of moves keep surfacing.

They pick one idea and protect it. Duolingo’s three words, Dropbox’s single premise. None of them try to say everything, and that restraint is why you remember any of it.

They match style to meaning. Grammarly animates type because it is a writing tool. Azure goes isometric because software has no natural shape. Trello just records the screen because the screen is already the pitch. In a good explainer the visual choice is always an argument about the product.

They respect the clock. The Ahrefs and Google pairs prove that the same idea can live at five minutes or sixty seconds, and the length should follow how much understanding each minute adds, not how much you want to say.

And they make the invisible visible. Amazon Go and Twilio both take something you cannot see and give it a body on screen. If your product is abstract, your first job is not persuasion, it is visualization.

How to get this right

If you are about to brief one of these, a few things save you from the most common misfires.

Write the script before you think about style. The animation should serve a sentence you already believe in, and if the idea only works because the visuals are pretty, the idea is not finished. I would rather see a rough cut with a sharp script than a gorgeous render with a muddy one.

Cut your feature list in half, then look at cutting it again. Every product team wants to show everything, and every strong explainer above shows almost nothing by comparison. Pick the one thing a stranger needs to understand and build the whole piece around it.

Decide who is watching and where. A cold viewer on a landing page needs the basics; a returning user needs a single feature with more personality, like the two Slack cuts show. One product usually deserves a few explainers, each aimed at a different moment, not one video trying to serve everyone at once.

Then commit to a style you can repeat. The Mastercard films work because the look is a system, not a mood board. If you nail one visual language, the next video is faster to make and unmistakably yours. If you want the mechanics of that, I wrote a separate piece on how to make an explainer video, and there is more on the flat-animation route in this 2D explainer video breakdown.

Where this leaves you

None of these landed by accident. Behind the polish there is always a decision about what to leave out and a style chosen to mean something. That is the part you cannot fake with a bigger budget, and it is the part worth stealing.

If you are staring at your own product wondering which of these to imitate, the honest answer is usually none of them exactly. The move is to figure out your one idea and the one style that argues for it, which is most of the work my team at Moonb ends up doing before a frame gets animated. Get that decision right and the rest is craft. Get it wrong and no amount of motion design will save the ninety seconds.