Ultimate 360 Action Cam Comparison: GoPro vs Insta360 vs DJI!

This is your complete comparison guide between the three main 360 cameras on the market today: the DJI Osmo 360, the GoPro Max 2, and the Insta360 X5. I’ve been putting these cameras through their paces side by side—and not just side by side, but also individually—over the last 6 to 8 months, depending on when each model came out. In doing so, I figured out which things matter, which things don’t, which things are similar, and which things are very different.

One important note: this video is definitely not sponsored. I’m going to tell you the good and the bad about all three of these cameras. All three have awesome things and all three have drawbacks, and I’m going to explain them all to you. I’m going to dive through about 45 different categories, some of them really quick and some of them more in-depth.

Super fast note: I have made many of these comparison rigs over the last decade for action camera comparisons, and I would argue this is the best one I’ve made to date. I put links down in the description on how to make this perfect comparison rig, just in case you want that. With that, let’s simply get right into it.

Price and Availability

The very first thing, of course, is the price. Here are the prices on all three of those right there. As you can see, they’re pretty similar. But that gets to probably the most important thing if you’re in the US: the DJI Osmo 360 from DJI is not officially available in the US. You can buy it through third-party companies, but those third-party companies are sourcing it from outside the US. Thus, when it comes to support, if you break something on this—which will be really important in just a second—you cannot get support today on the DJI 360 from DJI. It is not considered a supported product in the US, whereas both GoPro and Insta360 are supported products.

Size and Weight

From a weight standpoint, they’re all within a spread of about 15 grams, all roughly 190 grams plus or minus 10 grams. Here are the exact weights on the screen there. The sizes are different. You can see, of course, the DJI and GoPro have a more squat design, similar to the original GoPro Max, versus Insta360, which keeps its more elongated, taller design. It kind of depends on what you want. If you’re putting something on a helmet, you’re probably going to prefer these two designs here, versus if you’re putting it on a pole, this might fit a little bit better.

It’ll be interesting to see if Insta360 keeps this taller design long-term. I think for a lot of people, these two designs fit better in action scenarios, but again, Insta360 has been very popular with that longer, taller design.

Screen Features

When it comes to screen sizes, here are those on the screen as well. The key difference isn’t so much the screen size—I don’t think any of these really matter from a screen size standpoint—but rather the fact that you can reframe on the screen. Here I can move the camera around, no problem on the screen, but I can’t do that on the GoPro, which is super annoying. You can only do it after the fact. On the DJI, I can also move it around as well, which is handy.

Now, of course, in a 360 scenario, you’re always shooting everything all the time, so technically speaking, it doesn’t matter a ton, but I find it just one of those handy things. Speaking of handy, if you’re finding this video interesting or useful, just simply watch it all the way through—that is the only thing the YouTube gods care about. It really does help with this video and the channel quite a bit.

Lens Protection and Durability

The next most important thing to know here is that user-replaceable lens domes (also abbreviated to user-replaceable lenses) are the lens piece right here, the lens cover technically speaking. They are user-replaceable on the Insta360 and GoPro, but not on the DJI, which is baffling to everyone involved. When I talked to these two companies here, they were like, “How did DJI not do that?”

In any case, in the case of Insta360, it requires some tools—something you’d probably do at home or in a hotel room at night—versus GoPro, where you can just simply pull it off like this, swap it out, and you’re good to go. Now I’ve talked about the durability of these lenses in my GoPro video a little bit here.

In the case of DJI, I’ve already managed to lightly scratch the front of this lens here. I don’t know how. My suspicion is that while mountain biking it hit some light tree branches and got some light scratches on it, whereas these two here have been solid without any problems. For a 360 camera, having scratches on it is a bit of a big deal, and you can’t swap those out. In the case of DJI, I’d have to send it back to them. That takes upwards of a month, they’re saying. Price-wise, the replaceable lenses are all pretty similar, but that’s a pretty big deal. And of course, if you’re in the US, you can’t do that at all—you’re simply out of luck at that point.

Now the next notable thing here is that the Insta360 does support ND filters, whereas the other two have no ND filter option at all.

Water Resistance

Next, let’s talk about water resistance. GoPro is rated down to 5 meters, DJI is 10 meters, and Insta360 is at 15 meters. But here’s the thing: that doesn’t really matter because none of these three cameras work underwater from a clarity standpoint. When you bring all three of these cameras into the water, you’re going to get a fuzzy picture. You can see that right here, that fuzzier look to it. That’s because the lenses need some sort of dive case in order to get a usable picture or video underwater.

Only Insta360 has that today. In the case of GoPro, they promise something in the future, but there are no timelines for that. And DJI hasn’t promised anything at all. So if you need footage underwater, Insta360 is your only option today.

Mounting Options

Next, let’s look at mounts. All three of these actually have relatively similar mount designs. They’ve all got quick releases that you can just pop on and off like that. Very simple. They all have tripod mounts on the underside, so you can go ahead and just use a tripod straight into that. And then they all have a magnetic option that you can basically put on surfaces and just stick it there.

In the case of GoPro though, it also has its dual finger mounts on the bottom. That allows you to go ahead and use any GoPro mount out there. More than likely, if you’re talking about a third-party mount, it’s going to be a GoPro-style mount. Obviously, as you can see here though, there are adapters for all three of them. In the case of Insta360, there’s this little adapter plate there, the same with DJI. So you can still achieve that, but with GoPro, it’s just built in. I’d say at this point, GoPro has the best mount in terms of that third-party compatibility and whatnot. But ultimately, they’re all relatively similar in the grand scheme of things.

Battery Performance and Charging

Now, before we get into video and resolutions and all that kind of stuff, let’s talk batteries, because this is by far my favorite feature of the DJI. It is using the same batteries and battery charging case as their action cameras—basically the normal action cameras—meaning you can swap batteries back and forth. That is a super handy thing. In the case of Insta360, it has a separate battery that takes up the entire side of the case. In the case of GoPro, it uses a new battery for the Max 2, and so that’s kind of a bit of a bummer not to have similarity across the batteries.

When it comes to the battery claimed life, you can see this on the bottom right there. In my testing with a fan—basically removing overheating as a scenario here—all three companies are pretty close to their claims. In the case of Insta360 and GoPro, they exceeded their claims. In the case of DJI, they fell short of their claims.

However, once you look at the overheating side of things—that means removing airflow—all three cameras won’t overheat as long as there’s some airflow going past them in an action scenario. But if you had this inside of a car dashboard, just simply sitting statically right here, I was getting overheating anywhere in the 20- to 30-minute marker before overheat. But I also did another test where I got 27 minutes. So yeah, ultimately overheating isn’t really an issue again when you’re actually moving through airflow. It’s more of a challenge if you have it mounted inside somewhere where there’s no airflow.

The last battery thing to mention here is time to charge. In the case of Insta360 and DJI, they’re charging up to 80% in roughly 20 minutes. In the case of GoPro, they’re charging to 80% in what feels like four business days. It’s absolutely painfully slow. I don’t really know how long exactly—it seems like it’s roughly between an hour and 90 minutes to get to that 80% mark. It takes so long that I get distracted and bored. I really wish GoPro would have spent some time on their batteries here. I know their batteries have great cold weather performance and whatnot, but at the end of the day, it is so painful how slow these batteries charge on all of GoPro’s products, including the Max 2.

Oh, and then here are the milliamp hours on the batteries just in case you need to recharge them with external battery banks.

Sensor Specifications and Resolution

So let’s get into the sensor bits and the resolutions and all that kind of goodness. Here are the sensor sizes there. As I say repeatedly over and over and over again, do not focus on sensor sizes as much in action cameras. Instead, it’s the entire imaging pipeline. Sensor size is only one piece of the puzzle, as you’ll see in just a second.

From a resolution standpoint, all three of these claim 8K resolution, but as we’ve seen over the last 6 months or so, only GoPro actually has true 8K resolution. The other two have resolutions that are realistically about 7K or so. That’s because in the case of Insta360 and DJI, they’re counting the black pixels. If you look at how a 360 image is gathered, there are basically these two lenses, one on each side that you can see right there, and those two images are round. On the outside of that is a bunch of black pixels.

Insta360 and DJI count the black pixels. They’re not of any use in that 8K number, whereas GoPro only counts the actual usable pixels, not even including the stitch area itself. That means that GoPro basically has about 20% more resolution, depending on which comparison you want to use there, compared to the other two. Now for most people, practically speaking, you won’t notice that difference to be very brutally honest. But if you are trying to get every last pixel out of this from a cropping standpoint, etc., then you might notice those differences.

Frame Rates and Video Modes

In the case of Insta360 and GoPro, they’re maxing out at 30 frames per second on the 8K setting. In the case of DJI, it’s going up to 50 frames per second. Now, if we drop down to the roughly 5.7K resolution, both Insta360 and GoPro join DJI at 60 frames per second.

Then we get down to single-lens resolution. That’s handy if you’re going to have it up against yourself like this where you’re just not going to use that back lens—it’s looking at your shirt the entire time. In that scenario, all three are capturing at 4K at 60 frames per second. DJI is claiming 5K at 60 frames per second, but again, the whole black pixel thing means that’s just a bit of a marketing myth there.

But DJI does support up to 120 frames per second, which is essentially double their competitors in single lens. However, Insta360 does have a neat party trick here: they can do the 360 side as well as recording a single flat lens from one of the two lenses. This is handy if you’re primarily going to use 360 footage but may just want that flat file footage from one of the lenses and don’t care a ton about the resolution for whatever reason. You can do that. And this is one of the things if I look at Insta360—they have just a ton of these handy little features that aren’t necessarily always going to be the best possible specs or whatever the case is, but they’re just handy. Sometimes you want those little features there, and they have those and the other two don’t.

Slow Motion Performance

Now, when it comes to 360 slow-mo footage, things get kind of ugly on all three of them. They’re all basically topping out at either 100 or 120 frames per second, but they’re only allowing you to shoot in 4K for the entire sphere. Then from there, you’re going to crop out 1080p out of that. As you see here with this example, side by side, they probably look fine. But when I go to full screen on any one of these three, it’s not awesome at all. The resolution is not good compared to what you would see on traditional action cameras.

For comparison, here’s that same shot on a GoPro Hero 13 Black at 5.7K. Just look at how much sharper and crisper the water droplets are. Everything in that entire scene is just far better in this case than the 360 counterparts. Point being, don’t buy these action cameras for slow motion. They just aren’t great at that. All three of them struggle with that.

Low Light and Night Performance

Speaking of struggles, let’s talk night mode—but not all three struggle. Only GoPro struggles in night mode. GoPro decided not to upgrade the sensor they have in here, saying it would basically increase the size quite a bit more, and they wanted to focus on daytime footage. I think every single reputable reviewer agrees that GoPro’s daytime footage easily beats the other two. But equally, when it comes to nighttime, GoPro just isn’t great here. You can see this side by side. It is very, very dark compared to the other two.

In nighttime footage, I think DJI takes a slight lead over Insta360, but that’s just my preference on nighttime footage, depending on what you want out of it. However, one night area where GoPro wins is actually night effects—things like star trails and whatnot. DJI doesn’t have any of that kind of stuff. Insta360 does have a star trails mode, but it’s really cumbersome to use. You have to basically put it up there. It takes a ton of photos and then you have to use the app to manually stitch all that stuff together, which is sort of cumbersome and slow. Versus GoPro, you just simply stick it up there and it creates these incredible star trail effects. They also have ones for night vehicle light effects and regular light effects, all built in there.

So only you know whether or not you’re going to use your camera for daytime stuff or nighttime stuff. I really wish GoPro were better at night, but I also admit that the vast majority—like 99.9%—of my footage is shot during the day.

Advanced Video Features

Now, when it comes to about 15 seconds of video geekery here, all three of them sport some sort of log format. But GoPro blows away the others when it comes to the highest possible bit rate at 300 megabits per second versus 170 and 180 on the other two cameras. These are things you might care about if you’re grading that footage. If you’re not grading that footage, you probably won’t care at all.

Another quick pro feature to mention here is that both Insta360 and GoPro support time code sync support—external time code devices—but DJI at this point in time doesn’t support that on the Osmo 360.

Photo Mode

From a photo standpoint, all three of them have photo modes. DJI and Insta360 absolutely blow away the photo mode on the GoPro side. As I’ve said in my past videos, I don’t really care about photo modes that much on action cameras. They’re just not great to use, but some of you do, and so that might matter to some of you. For me, most of the time I’m just going to shoot video and then take the still frame out of that video. It’s just way easier, especially if you’re doing fast-moving action, than trying to shoot a single photo.

Audio Performance

Okay, so let’s talk about audio really quickly here. I find all three of these actually pretty similar. I think you could find scenarios where one is slightly better than the other, but all three of them have lots of microphones. In the case of DJI and Insta360, they have four microphones. In the case of GoPro, it has six microphones. They use these microphones both for spatial audio as well as to basically remove wind noise from different scenarios.

This is a very simple audio test comparison into the wind doing about 40 kilometers an hour, 25 mph. Go ahead and switch the cameras around. Now I’m on the screen display side of the camera.

This is a very simple audio test comparison into the wind doing about 40 kilometers an hour, 25 mph. Go ahead and switch the cameras around. Now I’m on the screen display side of the camera.

This is a very simple audio test comparison into the wind doing about 40 kilometers an hour, 25 mph. Go ahead and switch the cameras around. Now I’m on the screen display side of the camera.

Now all three cameras do support Bluetooth microphones. So if you want to connect a pair of AirPods or any sort of wireless headset, you can do that. However, Bluetooth audio isn’t awesome. It’s a good fallback for wireless headsets, but you really want a higher-quality microphone like DJI has—theirs here that I’m using for this video—as well as Insta360 has theirs as well. GoPro doesn’t have anything like that. So you’re going to have to do audio sync later on. Again, for most professional video-type scenarios, it’s not a big deal, but it’s also really handy just to have that baked into the file, like the DJI Osmo Pocket that I have right here I’m shooting this video on. It’s just synced in and I’m good to go right from the beginning.

Apps and Software

So let’s talk about apps. Don’t skip this section because apps are incredibly important when it comes to 360 cameras. That’s because you’re shooting a 360 sphere and 95% of the time you’re going to export that out as a flat video file—a portion of that sphere—to regular YouTube or whatever it may be. Certainly YouTube can do 360 content as well, but almost nobody actually watches that.

From a smartphone app standpoint, all three of them are actually relatively similar. They all have little features the other one doesn’t. But on the desktop side though, vast differences there. Insta360 is the clear leader here in this camp. DJI clearly just copied Insta360’s app. It’s astounding how much they tried to copy it, except they just didn’t do a great job of that. So there are some things that work pretty much the same and other things where you’re like, that’s not how that works. I do find the DJI one is a bit laggy compared to the others in terms of stability and stuff like that. But again, it’s really cumbersome.

And then you have GoPro, which didn’t even try on the desktop side. They have a desktop app, but that app is purely used for essentially framing and recoding stuff. It’s not really used for editing. They stopped the GoPro Quik app a number of years ago, but they do have the GoPro Player app, which is updated constantly. That is again about stabilization and reframing, exporting out, batch processing, etc. And that does work well for what it works for.

But the GoPro desktop app doesn’t have a lot of the AI tracking bits, which are really handy—like you see right here where I want to track that particular cyclist, my wife, and just have it keep her in the frame the whole time in the center of the frame. GoPro doesn’t do that on the desktop side, only on the smartphone side.

Now, the good news though is that you can actually use Insta360 or DJI apps with the GoPro camera to do that AI reframing later on. There’s an extra step to process the footage, but if you just let that bulk export at the end of the day, it’s not a big deal. Still, GoPro has a long way to catch up here on the desktop app in order to make it viable to compete with these two if you’re doing a lot of desktop editing. If you never do desktop editing, then it probably won’t matter a whole lot and all three cameras will be relatively similar.

Data Overlays and GPS

Now, rounding out here with data overlays. In the case of GoPro, they actually have GPS built inside. That means you can do the speed overlays and all that kind of stuff without any sort of third-party accessories. You can see all that data and put those stickers on there.

In the case of DJI and Insta360 though, they don’t have GPS built inside. They both have accessories to be able to pull that data in. And they both support third-party platforms. That means you can pull your data in automatically from something like a Garmin watch or an Apple Watch straight into the platform. Super, super cool. And unfortunately, something that GoPro doesn’t have.

So while GoPro has native support for some of this stuff, you can’t overlay things like cycling power and whatnot like you can do on Insta360, which is great. I wish GoPro would catch up there, which is funny because they bought an entire company dedicated to this stuff and they just have let it languish since, and they should absolutely own this space.

Cloud Backup

Lastly, before we talk about my overall thoughts here, from a cloud backup standpoint, GoPro backs up into the GoPro cloud, and Insta360 has a new cloud platform as well for backing up all of your footage into their cloud platform. But right now that cloud platform only supports their 360 cameras and not yet any of their other cameras. Insta360 says the other cameras are coming, but there are no time frames for that exactly. And then DJI doesn’t have anything quite like that.

Final Recommendations

So what are my recommendations overall? Well, generally speaking, as a rule of thumb—this applies to a lot of different device types—you should stay in the same device ecosystem that you already have. In other words, if you’ve got existing GoPro cameras, go buy the GoPro Max. If you’ve got existing Insta360 action cameras, buy the Insta360 camera. And if you have existing DJI cameras, buy that one.

The one exception, though, is if you live in the US. If you live in the US, I don’t see a good reason to buy this camera here, the DJI one, because of the fact that you’ve got incredibly limited support and that if you damage or scratch these lenses in any way, shape, or form, you have to send that back to DJI and you can’t do that. Actually, you cannot do that from the US. So that’s a bit of a bummer.

Likewise, on the bummer train, the DJI not having replaceable lenses and how easy these lenses have been to scratch compared to the other two means I would skew towards the other two in most cases.

So then we get to a bit of a deciding factor between these two. If you’re a free agent and don’t have any ecosystem, I think it depends on how you use your camera. If you’re talking pure daytime stuff and you’re talking about mounting it to your chest or helmet, I think the GoPro is a better option there from an image quality standpoint and just a general form factor perspective. But if you’re doing a lot of stuff at night, or you want to do a lot of desktop editing, then I think the Insta360 option makes more sense.

Likewise, you want to consider overheating as well. If you’re, for example, fishing and you have a 360 camera on a pole on the boat and it’s just sitting there in a static or maybe no-wind environment, then I would definitely not choose GoPro and I would go with Insta360 or DJI if you’re not too concerned about lens breakage. But on the flip side, if you’re doing fast, high-motion stuff where you want to really jack up the bit rate and get some really high-quality imagery, then I would go more GoPro.

Again, you can do this all day long, and throughout this entire video, I think I’ve given you all the tools that you need to decide which action camera is best for you.

Now, there’s plenty more sports tech coming, including this action camera comparison of the smaller action cameras—all these ones have been announced in the last four weeks or so—that you won’t want to miss out on. So definitely hit subscribe for that. And thanks for watching and reading. Have a good one.