CapCut

There is only one thing to count: what you edit on.

Who it is for. For those who cut short videos on a phone for Shorts: the app installs free from the App Store and Google Play, manual edits export with no watermark, auto-subtitles and background removal are at hand.

Who else. For those who want to try video generation without a separate service: Seedance 2.5 and Nano Banana Pro images live inside the editor, and the free attempts show whether it is worth paying.

Good fit: section 3 takes you from installation to your first video. If you are choosing between it and Filmora, see the choice in section 7.

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Three layers: regular editing, trend templates, and generators on top. Free access ends at the second.

Editing. Tracks, keyframes, slow motion, chroma key, and stabilization are available on phone, desktop, and browser. A manually assembled video exports without a watermark. Two help articles disagree on 4K and 60 frames per second: one explains availability by hardware, while the other shows these desktop options as Pro.

Templates. A library of ready-made edits for short videos: add your footage and get a finished result. Templates specifically add a branded ending to the video, and the vendor specifically disables them by region. Template search is available on phone and in the browser, but not on desktop.

Captions and voice. Auto-captions from speech, text-to-speech with two hundred voices, translation and dubbing in selected regions, noise reduction.

Generators. Video Studio creates a video from a description with the Seedance 2.5 model: clips up to 30 seconds, up to 50 image, video, and sound references, and edits to a specific moment without rebuilding. Nano Banana Pro by Google generates images; the other models and modes are listed in the questions below. Generation using real faces is prohibited, and results receive an invisible watermark.

What the vendor itself shows. A CapCut official-channel video about Design Studio 2.0 from May 27, 2026 shows the CapCut Web design editor: a poster changes text through the translation menu, recolors from a prompt, and is laid out across mockups. Site footage shows the AI video maker window with a script, scenes, and avatars, while the desktop home screen shows projects; the App Store listing shows templates, transitions, background removal, and auto-captions on a phone. The vendor has no official video showing a complete timeline window, and we did not test CapCut for this task ourselves.

Step 1. Install the app from the App Store, where it is published by ByteDance, or from Google Play. "CapCut Pro Mod" builds from file-sharing sites have nothing to do with the vendor.

Step 2. Assemble a video manually or from a template, add captions with the button, and export. Your first video can be edited without a card. The ending mark comes from the template: remove the branded ending on the track or assemble the project without a template, and the file will export clean.

Desktop and browser. The site capcut.comcarries the web editor and the CapCut Desktop download page. The desktop app runs on Windows 7 and newer and on macOS 10.14 and newer, and it is not in the Mac App Store.

Steps verified Sep 5, 2026 against the App Store and Google Play listings and the capcut.com help center

CapCut has a larger audience than any nearby competitor, but there is no way to measure editing quality.

Downloads and revenue. 334 million downloads in 2025, eighth among all apps worldwide behind ChatGPT, TikTok, and messaging apps. In-app purchases totaled $815 million that year, first among photo and video apps with a fivefold lead over second place (Business of Apps using Appfigures and AppMagic data; tracker estimates, not reporting). The Google Play counter passed 1 billion installs.

Ratings. App Store gives it 4.6 from 1.1 million ratings in the US, while Google Play is harsher: 3.6 in the US listing from 12.7 million reviews (Sep 5, 2026). The only review in major media, TechRadar, praises the free tier, background removal, and captions, and criticizes privacy and Pro pricing.

. CapCut's place among video tools is shown under the card title, and the whole tool ranking lives on the shared page.

CapCut prices are personalized: the site does not publish them, and the payment screen shows each account its own figure.

Free. Editing, templates without a branded ending, captions, and watermark-free export. Free AI features run on an attempt counter: two or three for heavy ones, up to ten for lighter ones, then either Pro or wait for renewals. Free cloud storage is gone; the vendor gives new spaces 0 GB.

Standard and Pro. The app has two tiers: Standard for $9.99 and Pro for $19.99 per month in the US App Store storefront. Standard works only on phone; Pro unlocks desktop and browser, 1 TB of cloud storage, commercial assets, and all generation. From 2022–2024, Pro cost $9.99 a month according to the storefront and billing archive; the same name now belongs to a tier twice as expensive without announcement, while the annual app subscription is shown as $89.99 without specifying the tier.

Credits. Generation uses a separate currency: one credit equals one cent, and Pro provides 1,200 credits per month. A five-second Seedance clip cost users 60 credits (measurement Aug 10, 2026), so a month covers about twenty such clips or three half-minute videos. Credits cannot pay for the plan itself, and cannot be refunded or transferred.

The site is cheaper. Site billing shows Pro at $19.99 per month or $53.99 per year, cheaper than the annual app price. According to the same billing archive, the monthly price doubled from $9.99 in June 2024, while the annual price fell from $89.99 to $53.99. Vendor data does not reveal what is sold under the annual web plan, the new Pro or the previous one.

Three questions: whose video is it, what does the vendor do with the data, and what is happening to the company in court.

Whose video. The vendor says «we do not own your content», and that is true, but its terms grant it a perpetual free license to use, modify, and distribute uploaded material, as well as your name and likeness «including in sponsored content». In June 2025, this wording triggered a wave of «CapCut takes rights to your face and voice» claims; the vendor replied that the section had not changed for years and still keeps an explanation in the site's main menu. The license text has remained the same since then.

Commercial use. The vendor's templates, stickers, and music are suitable for advertising only when marked «Commercial Use», and commercial music is permitted only within CapCut and TikTok. You can sell your own video made from your own footage.

Data. The US policy allows collecting prompts, generation results and uploads even before you press "save", reading the clipboard for some features and detecting the position of a face in the frame for effects, without identifying the person. All of this, by the text, also goes to training models.

Court cases. Since 2023, a class action over collecting biometrics without consent has been ongoing in Illinois: on Aug 29, 2025, the court allowed it to proceed, and on Jun 3, 2026 ordered ByteDance to provide plaintiffs with the agreement for the sale of the business and the CapCut app. Seedance 2.0, which generates video inside the editor, received claims from Disney, Paramount, and the Motion Picture Association in February 2026 over videos with other parties' characters, and arrived in CapCut with a ban on real faces and a watermark.

Who owns it. The app is published by ByteDance’s Singapore subsidiary, and U.S. CapCut has been run since Jan 23, 2026 by a joint venture with Oracle and Silver Lake, in which ByteDance holds 19.9 %. The agreement for Americans is with this venture under California law.

The choice is not about editing quality, but where you edit: on a phone or at a computer.

For generation and editing in a single browser project, compare it with the Kapwing editor. It has separate Kai and Studio modes.

Different checkout. CapCut is free to start: editing, captions, and export without a watermark cost nothing; you pay for templates, cloud storage, and generation. Filmora is sold by subscription from $49.99 per year or perpetually for $79.99, while its free version puts a watermark on every export (checked Sep 7, 2026).

Different home. CapCut was born on the phone and lives on templates for short videos, its desktop and browser versions are secondary. Filmora has been growing since 2010 as a desktop editor for Windows and macOS with phone apps on the side, and version 15 in November 2025 brought the same auto-subtitles, background removal and noise removal.

Who else is nearby. The VEED video editor edits in the browser and offers its own Fabric model alongside external generators, Captions cuts short clips with an agent from a text prompt, and the Dreamina generator from the same vendor creates images and videos. The full card covers photo editing, pricing and the terms for using the output. Editors without AI are collected in the questions below.

Over seven years, the editor for Douyin became the world's eighth-most downloaded app, survived a shutdown in the US, and moved under an American joint venture.