<aside> 📌 As I write this article, apparently Funimation has mostly overhauled their website. The opinions stated here are mostly based upon the old Funimation website (though not a ton has changed), but there will be a section at the end to go over the updated website.
</aside>
Update: I found the Glassdoor for both Funimation and Crunchyroll (you need to log in to read reviews). It's unfortunate that both companies suffer from things like a toxic work culture, upper management that doesn't care, and other things. Though, it's interesting how much of that is relayed through their products, since it seems I hit the mark on the overall platforms, and especially CR's video quality (as mentioned in this reddit post).
About a decade ago, I became a weeb. In that time I have used a host of websites, but above all, most of my time was spent on Funimation and Crunchyroll
I enjoyed my time on Funimation with shows such as Spice and Wolf, Welcome to the NHK, Eden of the East, and Samurai Champloo. I especially liked the Samurai Champloo and SaW English Dubs because they didn't try to use Japanese intonation or tone in their voices and just spoke like normal English people instead.
However, after quite some time I found so much frustration in the user experience that I moved over to Crunchyroll. While I don't specifically use Crunchyroll today (instead, using better methods 😉), I would still recommend them to anyone for the reasons stated in this article.
On top of this, it's why I have such a strong opinion about exclusive licensing and why it needs to change. Though, that's for another article.
Today, Sony announced that they finalized their acquisition of Crunchyroll. More specifically, Funimation now owns Crunchyroll and CR will be a child company of Funimation.
Basically, this article is a rant of why I very much hate Funimation and Sony. Be prepared for and understand that there is some bias here.
In the past, I've made a lot of comments about this type of stuff and comparing the services, which I will mention here. But here's the three things that I care about:
Crunchyroll's software (for the most part) has been very responsive and user friendly in my experience. This has been a culmination of using both products for the better part of nearly the last decade.
Crunchyroll has been able to consistently stream anime to my devices while maintaining a very good web UI and UX. Also, their UI/UX for mobile was pretty good, especially when they were developing VRV.
Even Crunchyroll's newer, beta website is very responsive, and while it is a little more spacious, you can see everything very easily and understand it. It also uses placeholder components! Very cool!