Meet Maggie, PCMag'sIf you regularly scroll Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts, you’ve no doubt seen videos with the distinctive CapCut logo watermark. Many social creators turn to the ByteDance-owned video editing app for their work because it's simple, full of AI smarts, and especially well-suited to social projects. But you can also use it for more involved projects; the dedicated desktop app has a straightforward interface, provides a decent set of editing tools, and exports projects quickly. Still, we don't like how much content the app uploads to the company servers. In addition, we've lowered its rating by half a star since our last review to reflect its capabilities relative to other desktop-based video editing apps, not just mobile ones. Our Editors’ Choice winners for the category remain Adobe Premiere for professionals and CyberLink PowerDirector for hobbyists, both of which are more enjoyable to use and technically impressive than CapCut.
A free CapCut account unlocks the basic editing capabilities, but all AI tools, as well as many effects, fonts, transitions, and soundtracks, are off limits. Exports also include watermarks. You won’t find the rates for the premium subscriptions until you create an account.
Paid tiers include Standard ($4.99 per month or $49.99 per year), Pro ($7.99 per month or $74.99 per year), and Ultra ($53 per month or $615 per year), with the first being available only on mobile. A Teams plan costs $24.99 per user per month. Just keep in mind that those prices seem to change often. The Standard plan unlocks expanded templates and watermark-free exports, while the Pro level introduces 4K exports and premium effects. CapCut says the Ultra plan is for professional media creators, but what that means is vague. The Standard tier comes with 600 AI credits; the Pro plan raises that to 1,250 credits; and the Ultra tier takes it up to 8,645 credits. Simple AI actions, such as background removal, cost as little as a single credit, while more advanced tasks, such as video generation, can cost hundreds of credits.
Compared with CyberLink PowerDirector ($139 for a perpetual license, $79.99 for an annual subscription), CapCut’s price is a bit steep. Most of its plans, however, are far more economical than Adobe Premiere, which costs $263.88 per year. If you want to stay with a free program, DaVinci Resolve is a superb (though far more complex) option.
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Like Clipchamp, CapCut is available on the web, meaning you can run it on any device. However, the web version works differently from the downloadable apps for desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android and iOS). It runs natively on Apple silicon and Windows on Arm. The app isn't particularly lightweight, taking up over 3GB and 800MB on desktop and mobile, respectively.
Your projects sync across all platforms via what CapCut calls Spaces. However, when I tried opening a web project in the desktop app during testing, CapCut forced me to use the web interface, even though the project entry appeared in the desktop app.
The desktop version of CapCut starts you out on the Home screen, which shows your previous projects, other ByteDance programs, templates, and various AI feature suggestions. To begin editing, simply click on the big blue Create Project bar at the top.
The editing view uses standard panels: a video preview window at the top center, sources on the left, settings live on the right, and the timeline tracks along the bottom. All the expected tools are available, and you can rely on common keyboard shortcuts (such as the space bar to start and stop playback). Ctrl-Z and Shift-Ctrl-Z reliably undo and redo editing actions. You can easily resize the timeline with pinch gestures or use the Fit button to show your whole project in the available space.
Across the top of the program window are buttons for Media, Audio, Text, Stickers, Effects, Transitions, Captions, Filters, Adjustment, Templates, and AI Avatar. You can’t edit or reorder these buttons. Impressively, however, you can pull out any of the program’s panels, including a full-screen video preview window.
You don’t have to sign in to the desktop app to start editing, but you can do so with your Facebook, Google, or TikTok account. Alternatively, you can sign up with an email address. The mobile and web versions require a login.
When you first start editing, you see an excess of tooltips that explain the program's capabilities. Some pop-ups overlapped others on my screen, but they are helpful overall, especially as you dive into the AI editing tools. One final note about the interface: I couldn't find a way to increase the text size. This is problematic on high-resolution displays.
Adding Clips
You add clips to the timeline simply by dragging them onto it or by tapping a plus-sign icon on their source thumbnails. After you add a clip, the thumbnails get a helpful Added label. By default, adjacent clips snap together, and moving a clip pushes others out of the way, but you can turn off these behaviors. A Linkage option works similarly to Final Cut’s Connected Clips; with this setting active, you can move or delete linked video and audio clips as one. The app gives you excellent control here.
The software needs to provide better help and support. It has nothing aside from the aforementioned tooltips, a list of shortcuts, and a place to provide feedback. The website has some articles and guides, but they aren't easily searchable.
CapCut includes all the standard video editing tools I expect: color, effects, multitrack, speed changing, splitting, transitions, and more. You don't, however, get more advanced editing options such as three-point, slide, and slip editing, which are available in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve.
Color correction in CapCut works well, as long as you have a paid subscription. Those accounts get you the Auto Adjust and Color Match features, as well as a Color Correction slider that works like a more powerful version of Auto Adjust. When I tested Auto Adjust, the most noticeable effect was that it lightened shadows for more even lighting. The Color Correction tool boosted contrast and darkened dark areas.
The Color Match tool lets you choose a frame from your video or a photo to match. I chose two angles I shot of a talking head (mine), one with a very warm, yellowish tone and the other with a cold, reddish tone. CapCut's Color Match did a good job matching the exact shade of the walls, but the face's skin tone remained very different. More advanced color-matching tools do a better job with skin tones.
Effects are naturally one of CapCut's strengths, given its social media bent. It has two left panel buttons for this purpose: Effects and Filters. The former consists of intense overlays and animations, while the latter aligns more closely with the well-known Instagram styles that change a shot's look. As you can see in the screenshot above, some effects are intense, and most have a purple diamond logo (which denotes them as premium content). I like how you can adjust the intensity of both effect types with a slider control on the right panel.
Aside from these effects, you can easily crop and resize your video, as well as create picture-in-picture effects by putting clips on multiple tracks.
CapCut provides advanced keyframe editing tools. I appreciate that you can trim clips in the source panel by dragging in the thumbnail edges, but it's not possible to mark multiple in and out points as you can in PowerDirector.
Motion-tracking features go hand in hand with masking features, and you get a choice of shapes to use. When I tried this tool on a skateboarder clip, it fared quite well, keeping an oval mask on the skater for most of the video. You can helpfully reposition the mask using keyframes.
The program doesn't support multicam editing.
CapCut offers options to speed up, slow down, and reverse video playback. Above the timeline is a simple button that offers freeze-frame and reverse options. The Speed tab on the right-side adjustment panel lets you slow your video down to 0.1x or speed it up to 100x, and adjust the audio pitch accordingly. You also get custom and preset speed curves, along with velocity effects, such as Flash, which require an existing music track.
Stabilization is another tool available only to paying subscribers. It took 42 seconds to work on an 8-second vertical 1080p30 clip. It has three options: Minimum Cut, Most Stable, and Recommend. I tried the last one, and my very shaky video from a car window wasn't completely still. The Most Stable setting worked better, but still not perfectly.
The program provides a broad selection of transitions, clearly organizing them into categories such as 3D, Basic, Blur, and Classic. However, unlike competitors, you can’t add multiple transitions simultaneously. Most of the transitions require a download, too, so make sure to leave some free space on your device. As with most effects, you can designate them as Favorites or search for them by name.
In testing, I encountered a problem with the cross-dissolve transition. The transitions panel shows multiple Dissolve and Fade options, but the one most apps call Cross Dissolve is called Mix in this program. It did at least ask to create frames so that adding the transitions wouldn’t shorten the timeline.
CapCut lets you keep up with your fellow social media posters by including loads of templates with trendy looks and effects. Many of these are available only with a paid subscription, however. Options are available across categories such as Business, Friendship, and Travel, and a handy search bar makes it easy to find one for a specific topic.
AI tools feature prominently in CapCut. Image and video generation is possible via a variety of AI models. The program also includes AI tools for body animation effects, relighting, reframing, removing objects, speech generation, stabilization, text generation, text-based editing, and translation. You can even make your AI-generated characters sing! Note that most of these effects require a trip to ByteDance’s servers, though some actions—including auto-trimming captions, removing backgrounds, and speech-to-text—happen on your local hardware. CapCut can use either your GPU or an NPU on Copilot+ PCs.
The first AI tool you're likely to come across on the desktop app is AI Clipper. It identifies and pulls the best moments in the video clips you add to a project, letting you specify a style and duration for the result.
I tried this feature with a set of videos of Niagara Falls. The tool’s dialog box showed text describing the scenes: “The footage captures a lively scene of people observing and photographing a powerful waterfall cascading over rocks into a shimmering pool.” It organized the clips into chapters, including Introduction (although it didn’t add text), Power of Water, and Riverside Rapids, as well as trimmed the 121 seconds of the original clips down to 40 seconds. The result was acceptable, but I noticed some repeating scenes. You can easily produce a better result in the same amount of time, about 30 seconds. I’ve tried many similar tools before, and none have impressed me, though you still might find it useful.
Next, I turned to the EditPilot AI tool, which lives in the lower-right corner of the interface. This offered the helpful suggestion: “Turn highlights into a cohesive video.” Yes, please! After 20 seconds or so, it said, “Done!" It turned the selected Niagara Falls highlights into a more cohesive, narrative edit with improved rhythm and transitions between scenic moments.” It cut merely 6 seconds from the source media, though it eliminated some repetition and ended with a clip that included speech. However, it failed when I asked it to apply cross-dissolve transitions between all clips.
The program generated accurate captions based on speech in a test video, and I could then style and animate the on-screen text to taste. This tool makes it easy to create the types of social videos in which the words pop into view as the narrator says them. It lets you remove filler words, pauses, or anything else in the captions with the press of a button, cutting the corresponding video simultaneously. Some competitors, including Adobe Premiere and Wondershare Filmora, can’t identify these unwanted moments. CapCut can generate a second caption line in a choice of 23 different languages, as well.
In CapCut, the background removal feature is in the right-hand settings panel. The tool did a serviceable job on a test subject, and thankfully, you can fine-tune your results. Below, you can see my test example:
In the Media tab on the left panel, the Generate option lets you create both images and videos from scratch. Available models include ByteDance’s Dreamina Seedance, Minimax, and Google’s Veo. Notably, Seedance can create videos up to 30 seconds long, which is longer than typical. Adobe Premiere’s Generative Extend feature can manage only 2 seconds, and Google Veo 3 gets you just 8 seconds of extra content.
The Generate tab includes sections for Image to Video, Multi Frames (which supports up to 10 images for reference), Omni Reference (which allows up to 30 images and 10 videos for reference), and Text to Video. Keep in mind that generating content costs AI credits. The cheapest option is the older Seedance 1.0 model, which needed 90 credits for a 10-second 720p video. Meanwhile, an 8-second Veo 3 generation required 416 credits. Seedance’s latest 2.5 model costs even more.
I ran one test using Seedance 2.5 with a fanciful prompt I’ve used before: “A dogsled on a Caribbean beach with hawks flying around.” You’re better off with a more detailed description, but this prompt makes it easier to compare outputs. The result looks pretty good, with everything going in the correct direction and fairly lifelike creatures and movement. I neglected to mention a driver for the dogsled, so the model compliantly produced an empty seat. The result compares favorably with competitors' results—the technology continues to improve quickly.
Right off the bat, I like that CapCut makes it simple to add fade-ins and -outs by grabbing controls right on clips in the timeline. These same controls let you adjust the volume for the whole clip.
Other useful audio tools include the ability to separate the soundtrack from the video track or to fill sound from one track to another. Those tools are free, but paid subscribers can also normalize loudness and reduce noise. The latter feature worked reasonably well, though I wish I could control its strength with a slider.
In addition to translating voices, you can apply different characteristics, such as 1950s Announcer, Deep & Clear, Teenager, and Voice Crisper. Most effects available only to paid subscribers, though free users get a few options.
As for stock music and sound effects, CapCut has hundreds of choices. It groups tracks into 30 categories, such as Birthday, Cute, Disco, and Romantic. Some are highly specific, including Golden Stadium Anthem, Near the Waterfall, and Tropical Getaway House. However, CapCut can’t stretch music to fit your timeline, unlike DaVinci Resolve, Filmora, and PowerDirector. You also don't get a lot of acoustic environments to apply to your audio, such as a concert hall or a stadium.
CapCut’s Speech to Song tool is unique. Free users should be able to change speech into Folk songs, while paid subscribers get Hip-Hop, Jazz, and Reggae choices. Unfortunately, when I tried this option, it merely added background music.
The Export dialog, accessible via a highly visible blue button at the top of the program window, lets you set the bit rate, codec, frame rate, and resolution. I like that it also offers to check for copyright issues, to upload to a CapCut-run online space CapCut supplies, and to export as a GIF.
Once a rendering is complete, you get a second dialog for sharing to TikTok and YouTube. Presumably, Instagram users will use Edits instead. You can set the visibility (public or private), and the dialog even offers a link to TikTok Studio, where you can specify location and schedule posting, among other things. If scheduling posts among all social outputs is important to you, check out Adobe Express, Canva, or CyberLink Promeo.
I didn't run into any slowdowns while using CapCut; everything felt snappy. However, the program did quit unexpectedly at one point. On my output render test, CapCut delivered a very respectable time of 48 seconds on Surface Laptop 3 with an Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and Intel Iris graphics. That’s comparable with tests I’ve done with other video applications on a 3.60 GHz Intel Core i7 desktop. One performance issue that gave me pause was that it used 5% of my CPU while idle.
As with ByteDance’s better-known product, TikTok, CapCut is largely a Chinese product, so it’s been at the center of controversy and threats of government bans. The EU has fined the company after “a four-year investigation found the app’s data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in violation of EU data privacy rules.” The privacy policy states that the company collects and analyzes everything you do in the app, as well as information about you from other online advertisers. It goes on to say that ByteDance can share this info with governments or for marketing and advertising.
On the plus side, the policy says data is stored in servers in Malaysia, Singapore, and the United States. And unlike Adobe Premiere and Wondershare Filmora, it doesn’t run processes on your computer all the time, even when you’re not using the software.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: CapCut)
CapCut
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
CapCut is a competent video editing app with a decent interface across every major platform, all the core editing tools we expect, and good output speed. If you’re big into creating viral videos or using AI tools to create unique content, it could be a sensible choice for your next social media project. Just keep in mind that many options require a paid plan, and that the program openly sends your data to the Chinese government and online marketers. Therefore, the consumer-friendly CyberLink PowerDirector and pro-level Adobe Premiere remain our Editors' Choice winners.
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About Our Expert
I've been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.
I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.
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