Best video editing software in 2024: free and paid-for tools

The best video editing software is more accessible in 2024 than ever. With tons of different programs aimed at editors of all abilities, the days of edit suites requiring entire buildings to house them are long gone. With a half-decent computer and an internet connection, you have everything you need to be editing video within minutes. One thing that could hold you up, however, is which program to pick. That’s where we come in.

This list consists of the top editing programs available now, as chosen by our expert review team. We haven’t just chosen the professional options though — we have a whole section dedicated to programs that are completely free to download and use, including even some that can work entirely inside your internet browser.

At the bottom of this post is a quick explainer of the key things we look for when picking the best video editing software. For a closer analysis of how the top picks compare, read our breakdown of DaVinci Resolve vs Adobe Premiere Pro: which is the best video editing software – and check out our guides on how to make great video recordings with your camera and the best cameras for vlogging and videography for more advice on improving your video and filmmaking.

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Best video editing software: our quick list

Here’s our quick list of the best video editing programs to download, along with links to take you straight to where you need to go…

Best free video editing programs:

• Best free video editing software for filmmakers: DaVinci Resolve – visit website
• Best free video editing software for Mac: Apple iMovie – visit website
• Best free video editing software for Instagram: Adobe Premiere Rush – visit website
• Best mid-range video editing software: ACDSee Luxea Free Video Editor – visit website
• Best free video editing software for TikTok: CapCut Desktop – visit website
• Best browser-based video editing software: Canva – visit website

Best paid-for video editing software in 2024:

• Best video editing software for beginners: Adobe Premiere Elements – visit website
• Best video editing software with AI tools: CyberLink PowerDirector – visit website
• Best professional video editing software: Adobe Premiere Pro – visit website
• Best subscription-free video editing software: DaVinci Resolve Studio – visit website
• Best professional video editing software for Mac: Apple Final Cut Pro – visit website

Read on to learn more about the pros and cons of each program to figure out which is right for you; our guide to the best video-editing software in 2024…

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Best free video editing software in 2024

These programs can get you started in video editing at no cost, with some ‘freemium’ tools offering an upgrade path to more features, such as a paid upgrade to a full version or, more likely, via a subscription.

Best free video editing software for filmmakers: DaVinci Resolve

• Pricing: Free (DaVinci Resolve Studio is the paid version and costs $295 / £235 – scroll down for more)
• Platforms: Mac and PC
• User level: Intermediate/Professional
• Website: www.blackmagicdesign.com

DaVinci Resolve was one of the best-kept secrets of video editing software, yet more and more people are now adopting it. This is a free version of the professional DaVinci Resolve Studio program that has almost all the features and is entirely free. There are no watermarks, time limits or other restrictions beyond a maximum export resolution of 4K UHD, and 60p frame rate. While we’ve mostly focused on desktop-based programs for this guide, it’s worth noting that there’s also an iPad version, which works pretty well if you have a tablet powerful enough to handle it (an iPad Pro is a good bet), and is also free to download and use.

No other free video editor can even approach DaVinci Resolve’s power, though it does present a steep learning curve. New users will need to spend some time with the training videos to properly get to grips with what it can do. Each new version gets additional features and tools, and there are advanced audio processing options, including options to improve voices.

If you’re an aspiring filmmaker, you need a comprehensive and well-featured video editing tool. You also may have a budget of exactly nothing, given how expensive every aspect of making a film can be. If that’s the case, then DaVinci Resolve is definitely the answer you’ve been looking for. The main thing that DaVinci Resolve requires from you, more so than other programs, is time and patience. Invest some time in learning how to use it – YouTube tutorials can be amazingly helpful – and you’ll have all the tools you need to take your projects from raw footage to final cut. And you won’t have spent a single penny!

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Best free video editing software for Mac: Apple iMovie

• Pricing: Free
• Platforms: Mac and iOS
• User level: Beginner/Intermediate
• Website: www.apple.com

Apple iMovie doesn’t get a lot of respect from ‘serious’ filmmakers, but it should. Though it only supports one video track and a couple of audio tracks, you can add a wide range of titles, captions and motion graphics effects. And, as well as recording voiceovers, you can tune the audio with preset EQ effects.

There are basic but effective colour grading tools – iMovie even offers image stabilisation, which is rare outside of mid-range or professional video editors. iMovie is easy to use, completely free without restriction and comes as standard with Macs and iOS devices. As you might expect, there’s no Windows version, though.

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Best free video editing software for Instagram: Adobe Premiere Rush

• Pricing: Free/$9.99, $35 per annum / £21.98 a month
• Platforms: Mac and PC/mobile
• User level: Beginner
• Website: www.adobe.com

Premiere Rush is a kind of lightweight video editor designed for quick YouTube or social videos rather than serious filmmaking. Nevertheless, it has the tools that beginners and intermediate users should need: with up to three additional video tracks, three additional audio tracks, and a large selection of ready-to-go motion graphics templates and other design resources. It’s a good choice if you need a basic, free editing package for producing content for Instagram or a similar social media platform, as realistically you’re only going to need to create short clips with a few tracks.

You can start with a free plan – all you need is an Adobe ID – and upgrade to a premium plan if you want more cloud storage, more assets, project synchronization across devices, and more. There is a Premiere Rush plan, but it also comes with a Premiere Pro or an Adobe All Apps subscription.

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Best free mid-range video editing software: ACDSee Luxea Free Video Editor

• Pricing: Free (with branding)
• Platforms: PC
• User level: Beginner/intermediate
• Website: www.acdsee.com

Luxea Free Video Editor is a very effective mid-range editor from a company best known for its photo editing software. It offers unlimited tracks, screen capture, free content packs and more. Best of all, it’s free – though there is one drawback, in that the free version adds a branded intro and outro to exported movies.

Luxea Free Video Editor can get you going but for much more control and no watermarked intro/outro, it’s worth considering Luxea Pro Video Editor 7 which costs $49.99 a year; while currently offering $29.95 for a Lifetime Licence (albeit that upgrades need paying for with this package).

Luxea does not offer as much support for beginners as some programs, and it’s not a serious professional tool either. But for Windows users bemoaning the lack of a free iMovie-style program for their platform, Luxea could be the ideal alternative.

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Best free video editing software for TikTok and beginners: CapCut Desktop

• Pricing: Free (Pro version available for $8 per month or $75 per year)
• Platforms: Mac and PC, mobile, web
• User level: Beginner
• Website: www.capcut.com

CapCut is a free video editing tool owned by ByteDance — the Chinese tech company much, much better known for being the people behind all-consuming video-sharing app TikTok. As such, CapCut syncs rather well with TikTok and is an ideal free choice if you’re looking to create video for the platform. Free to download for Windows and Mac, the desktop version offers more advanced functionality than the popular mobile app version that features in our best video editing apps guide.

It’s replete with automated tools designed to make editing smoother and easier, and as such it’s a good free choice for beginners. The auto-transcription functionality is particularly effective, so if you need to do a lot of captioning for your videos, or find which bits you can cut, it could potentially be a real timesaver. As is very common these days, the makers desperately want you to know that the software is stuffed with AI features, including the ability to generate video wholesale, if that’s something you want to do.

CapCut also makes it easy to export video in a variety of aspect ratios for sharing to different platforms, and even has hardware support for modern graphics cards, speeding up the export process. It also has TikTok’s filters and other effects built in, making it the best choice if you want to efficiently create video in TikTok’s ‘house style’. There is a Pro version available for a subscription price that adds a few extra features, but the basic free version has the majority of functionality most editors need.

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Best browser-based video editing software: Canva

• Pricing: Free. Canva Pro costs $15 per month or $120 / £100 one person per year
• Platforms: Mac and PC, mobile, web
• User level: Beginner
• Website: www.canva.com

Canva is not only a video editor. It’s really a tool for creating business or social media visuals of all kinds, with a wide range of ready-to-go templates and assets for quickly building dynamic and professional-looking content. You can combine, trim and re-order multiple video clips in the timeline, and add titles, intros and outros that produce basic but perfectly serviceable videos for YouTube, websites or other social channels.

Although it uses the same basic non-linear editing (NLE) principles as other video editors, Canva uses its own jargon and editing processes, so it can take a little while to work out what it does and how to make it do it. The free Canva plan will get you started, but Canva Pro adds premium templates, a huge stock asset library, social media scheduling, branding, AI editing tools and more – though at $120 / £100 a year, it’s not cheap.

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Best paid-for video editing software in 2024

These are some of the top paid-for video editing programs right now. Video editing skills take a long time to master, and while pro software costs the most, it can save you time (and therefore money) in the long run and can prove a valuable professional qualification.

Best video editing software for beginners: Adobe Premiere Elements

• Pricing: $100 / £87
• Platforms: Mac and PC
• User level: Beginner/Intermediate
• Website: www.adobe.com

Adobe Premiere Elements is to Adobe Premiere what Photoshop Elements is to Photoshop. It takes many of the features of Adobe’s professional video editing software and re-packages them as a simpler video editor for beginners and intermediate users who don’t need professional features.

More significant for many will be the fact that it exists outside the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem so it’s subscription-free and can be purchased with a single one-off payment. Having said that, there’s a version update every year and an upgrade fee that goes with it.

The editing interface follows the usual format, with a timeline/track display at the bottom with preview and content panels above. As with Photoshop Elements, there are Quick, Guided and Expert modes and, as with Elements, these are a great way to get started with learning about video editing, though some may find the ‘family feel’ tedious. There is a 30-day free trial but, annoyingly, it’s watermarked. It’s worth trying the trial before paying for this, to make sure it works properly on your computer.

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Best video editing software with AI tools: CyberLink PowerDirector

• Pricing: Power Director 2025 $140 / £110 perpetual, or Power Director 365 at A now discounted at £47.99 /  a year
• Platforms: Mac and PC, mobile
• User level: Intermediate/Professional
• Website: www.cyberlink.com

PowerDirector delivers a lot of power at a relatively modest cost. It includes some unexpected tools and innovations such as AI Sky Replacement (yes, in video), AI motion tracking and tools for designing masks, titles/motion graphics and picture-in-picture effects.

You get green screen effects, customisable intros/outros and Adobe-style speech-to-text transcription. The audio tools are impressive too, with AI speech enhancement and wind noise removal, a ‘Vocal Transformer’ and Audio Ducking for narration or voiceovers. PowerDirector is not really a professional editing tool in the same vein as Premiere Pro, Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve, but it could be a great choice for enthusiasts and keen experimenters.

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Best professional video editing software: Adobe Premiere Pro

• Pricing: From $20.99 / £21.98 a month
• Platforms: Mac and PC
• User level: Professional
• Website: www.adobe.com

For many professional filmmakers and editors, Adobe Premiere Pro is simply the go-to video editing tool, in the same way that Lightroom and Photoshop are for photographers. It’s one of three pro-level video editors fighting it out at the top end of the market, and while a lot of users still balk at the whole concept of software subscriptions, it does mean that Premiere Pro gets regular updates as part of your subscription, the latest including clever AI-driven tools like automatic transcripts and captioning, automatic reframing for different social channels and more.

Premiere Pro might be a gold standard for pro video editors but at a cost. It’s only available as a single app subscription at $20.99 / £21.98 per month or as part of Adobe’s All Apps plan at a huge $59.99 / £56.98 a month.

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Best subscription-free video editing software: DaVinci Resolve Studio

• Pricing: $295 / £245
• Platforms: Mac and PC
• User level: Professional
• Website: www.blackmagicdesign.com

The free version of DaVinci Resolve is so good that you might not even need the professional version. But what this brings is the ability to work beyond 4K UHD resolution and a 60p frame rate, support for multiple GPUs and GPU processing (vastly improving rendering speeds) – lens corrections (useful given that raw footage won’t be corrected), noise reduction and some more advanced effects.

This does mean paying a hefty $295 / £245 for a license or it may not, because if you buy a Blackmagic controller or camera, a Davinci Resolve Studio license is included. Resolve has its own particular way of working, and its Fusion (effects) and Fairlight (audio) panels don’t have the most obvious names, but this a very powerful professional video editor that’s also a pretty good deal, especially since you might not even have to pay for it. If you do pay for it, you get free upgrades for life!

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Best professional video editing software for Mac: Apple Final Cut Pro

• Pricing: $299.99 / £299.99 outright purchase
• Platforms: Mac, iPad
• User level: Professional
• Website: www.apple.com

In a way, you could think of Final Cut Pro as like ‘iMovie Pro’ in that it uses the same clean and streamlined approach and is typical of the way Apple ‘rethinks’ regular software tools. Its magnetic trackless interface takes a little getting used to at first – it uses ‘lanes’ for multiple audio/video content – but the in situ timeline editing tools are excellent. With AI-powered motion tracking you can match the movement of titles, for example, to subjects in the scene, and with Compound clips you can group related video and audio clips into a single entity for easier organization.

Final Cut Pro is Mac only, of course, and it comes with a pretty stiff one-off license fee. But the cost of ownership over time should prove comparable with Premiere Pro (around $20.99 / £26.49 a month) and Davinci Resolve Studio. Final Cut Pro is a very clever, very powerful professional video editor that every Mac owner should check out – especially since there’s a generous 90-day trial.

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What to look for in the best video editing software

Video editing is a discipline with lots of different moving parts to it, and a good video editing program needs to be able to do more than just put a few clips in order. When we pick the best video editing software, we look at how straightforward and intuitive it is to use the program to perform a number of different video editing tasks, as well as examine the feature-set and interface more broadly. Here, in brief, are the key things we look for a good video editing program to be able to do:

• Cutting, trimming and assembling clips: finished videos/movies will usually be made of a series of clips you assemble in a ’sequence’ or ‘timeline’.
• Audio editing: at the very least you should be able to adjust the volume of your video, but ideally you should be able to add audio tracks or voiceovers and some programs will offer EQ (equalization) settings too.
• Transitions: you can cut straight from one clip to another, but most filmmakers like to use transitions to smooth the, er, transition. You don’t need a thousand flashy effects, just the basics like ‘wipes’ or ‘dissolves’.
• Titles: your movies will usually need titles, perhaps end credits and often captions at different points in the video.
• Tracks: imported video will consist of a video and an audio track combined. More advanced video editors will let you add and combine additional audio and video tracks.
• Grading and effects: colour grading tools are useful for fixing exposure or colour errors, giving all your clips a similar ‘look’. More advanced programs may offer special effects or custom ‘LUTs’ for a specific movie look.
• Codecs and formats: this is harder to pin down because there are so many permutations of video formats, bit depths and colour depths that the only way to be sure a program can work with your specific camera, shooting formats and projects is to check the trial version before you buy. We always recommend this for any software.

FAQ: Will my computer be able to run a video editing software?

There is nothing more infuriating than downloading a software just to find out your computer is not powerful enough to run it or end up constantly crashing. To avoid unpleasant surprises like this check the minimum system requirements for the software you are planning to download. The most important factors are processing power, graphics card and RAM. However note that if you are only editing short videos and use basic software you will likely get away with using your basic PC or laptop

The central processing unit (CPU) or processor is the heart of your computer, Most video editing software will require a processor with at least four cores with 2GHz to run. But higher resolution video files and large projects put more strain your CPU so you will need need more processing power for 4K and 8K videos, an INTEL i5 or higher processor is a good place to start.

A decent graphics card (GPU) is a must as it speeds up video rendering and improves the overall editing performance. An NVIDIA RTX 3050 or GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics card is a good start for basic HD video editing.

As for RAM, the more the better but as a general rule of thumb calculate with minimum 8GB RAM for HD video and 16GB RAM for 4K editing. For professional use and rendering very large files you may need 32GB or even 64GB.

The storage available on your computer will also have an impact on how effortlessly software runs on it, try to have at least 500GB free space. Save your video files on a separate drive or purchase an external hard drive with at least 1TB capacity.

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Text by Rod Lawton, with contributions from Jon Stapley.

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Further reading:

• Best cameras for vlogging and video recording
• How to start monetising your video
• How to make a great video recording with your camera
• Guide to video editing
• Best external camera screens

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