The short version. Descript at $24 a month, or $16 billed annually, is the only one whose AI changed how editing works rather than decorating it. Clipchamp exports 1080p with no watermark for free, and its Premium tier comes bundled with a Microsoft 365 subscription you may already be paying for. Kapwing at $24 does the same job as Descript for the same price, which tells you something. OpusClip at $15 does one thing, which is finding the good bits of long video. Riverside at $29 is about recording well enough that the editing gets easier.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 16 August 2026.
Making video without a video department? Our directory keeps shortlists for marketing teams making video, reviewed on a schedule.
The AI here does two things well, and a long list of things badly
Every tool on this page advertises AI, and almost all of it is the same set of features: background removal, auto captions, a stock library, filler word detection. Useful, commoditised, and not worth choosing on.
Two capabilities are genuinely different from what existed five years ago, and both are worth money.
Editing the video by editing the transcript. Delete a sentence from a document and the sentence disappears from the footage. This is not a faster timeline, it is a different mental model, and it means a person who cannot edit video can produce something watchable in an afternoon. Descript built the category and still does it best.
Finding the clips inside long footage. Feed an hour of a webinar in, get back the eight moments that stand on their own, already cropped and captioned. That is a task that used to cost an afternoon of scrubbing and now costs a few minutes of review.
So we ranked on those two, on total cost including the export limits people discover after they have edited something, and on whether the free tier is usable or is a demo with a watermark on it.
1. Descript, because editing text instead of video is the actual advance
Free with 1 seat and 60 minutes of transcription a month, plus 100 one-time AI credits. Hobbyist is $24 a person a month, or $16 billed annually, with 600 minutes. Creator is $35, or $24 annually, with 1,800 minutes and up to 3 seats. Business is $65, or $50 annually, with 2,400 minutes and up to 5 seats. Enterprise is quoted. Verified 16 August 2026.
If one person on a marketing team has to produce video regularly and does not come from a video background, this is the tool. Record, get a transcript, delete the bad sentences, and the footage follows. Everything else it does is secondary to that.
Watch the transcription minutes rather than the seat price, because that is the limit you will actually hit. Hobbyist’s 600 minutes is ten hours of raw footage a month, and raw footage is always several times the length of what you publish. A weekly twenty-minute video with two takes and some overshoot eats it.
Its overdub and voice cloning features are impressive and are worth a policy conversation before anyone uses them on a colleague’s voice. That is not a hypothetical concern in a company where people leave.
Who it is wrong for: anything driven by visuals rather than speech. If there is no talking, the transcript is empty and the whole advantage vanishes. A product montage or an animated explainer belongs in a normal timeline editor.
2. Clipchamp is free, exports clean, and you might already own the paid version
The free plan exports up to 1080p with watermark-free exports and includes the screen, camera and voice recorder plus free stock assets. The Premium tier is not sold standalone on the pricing page; it comes with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and raises exports to 4K with premium assets and a brand kit. Verified 16 August 2026.
This ranks second on economics that are hard to argue with. Watermark-free 1080p exports at no cost undercuts every free tier on this page, and Kapwing’s free plan by a wide margin.
The part people miss is the bundling. If your household or your company already pays for Microsoft 365, the Premium editor is included, and a meaningful number of people shopping for a $24 a month video editor are already paying for one they have not opened.
It is a competent, ordinary timeline editor with AI features attached, and there is nothing here that will impress a video professional. That is fine. Most marketing video does not need impressing, it needs finishing.
Who it is wrong for: teams that need collaboration, shared brand templates across many people, or the transcript-editing model. It is a single-person tool wearing a suite’s badge, and the Premium path runs through a Microsoft subscription rather than a plan you can just buy.
3. Kapwing charges exactly what Descript charges
Free with unlimited exports carrying a watermark and a 4 minute export length. Pro is $24 a month, or $16 a month billed annually at $192 a year, with 120 minute exports and no watermark. Business is $64 a month, or $50 a month billed annually at $600 a year. Enterprise is custom. Verified 16 August 2026.
Look at those numbers next to Descript’s. Twenty-four dollars monthly, sixteen annually, and a business tier within a dollar of each other. When two competitors converge on identical pricing it usually means the feature sets have converged too, and here they roughly have.
Kapwing’s advantage is that it is browser-based and immediately obvious. Subtitles, resizing for different platforms, and quick social edits are its natural work, and a colleague who has never edited anything can be useful in it within an hour.
Its free tier is the weakest kind: unlimited exports, but watermarked and capped at four minutes, which makes it a trial rather than a plan. Compare that to Clipchamp giving away clean 1080p and the ranking explains itself.
Who it is wrong for: long-form video and anyone evaluating on the free tier, which will mislead you about the product. Also anyone who wanted the transcript-editing model, which Descript does more thoroughly.
4. OpusClip does one job and does not pretend otherwise
Free at $0. Starter is $15 a month. Pro is $29 a month. Business is custom. The pricing page does not state monthly minute or credit allowances per plan, and lists no annual option. Verified 16 August 2026.
Feed it a long recording and it returns the clips worth posting, cropped vertical and captioned. That is the entire product, and if you run a podcast, a webinar series or a YouTube channel, it removes a genuinely tedious recurring afternoon.
Its judgement about which moments matter is decent and not good. Expect to discard half of what it produces, which is still a large saving over finding them yourself, and expect to review every clip before posting, because a clip taken out of context is exactly the failure mode this category produces.
We would rank it higher if the pricing page said what you get. It does not publish minute or credit allowances per tier, which for a usage-based product is the number that decides whether $15 is cheap, and we do not estimate figures a vendor has chosen not to print.
Who it is wrong for: anyone without a library of long recordings. It has nothing to clip, and there is no editing here in the ordinary sense.
5. Riverside, for fixing the problem before the edit
Free with 2 hours of multi-track recording as a one-off, 720p and a watermark. Pro is $29 a month, or $24 billed annually at $288, with 5 hours of recording a month. Grow is $39, or $34 annually at $408, with 15 hours. Webinar is $99, or $79 annually, with unlimited recording. Business is quoted. Verified 16 August 2026.
Half of what makes marketing video hard to edit is that it was recorded over a video call and looks it. Riverside records each participant locally at full quality and uploads afterwards, so a wobbly connection stops being a permanent property of the footage.
For remote interviews, customer stories and podcasts this is the difference between material worth editing and material you apologise for. It is the least AI-driven tool here and it removes more editing time than most of the AI does.
Five hours a month on the $29 plan is the constraint to check. Multi-track recording burns hours faster than you expect, because a two-person interview consumes two tracks.
Who it is wrong for: screen recordings, product demos and anything not involving a remote human. There is nothing to gain here, and a screen recorder plus one of the four above will cost you less.
Where this ranking does not apply
Brand film and anything with a budget. If you are paying a crew, you are paying an editor too, and they will use Premiere or Resolve.
Motion graphics and animation. A different discipline with different software, and none of these come close.
High volume localisation. Dozens of language versions is a workflow problem, not an editing one, and needs purpose-built dubbing infrastructure.
Anyone whose real problem is that nobody watches the videos. Faster editing produces more unwatched video. If the last six got no views, a better editor is not the intervention.
Looked at, not ranked
VEED. A direct Kapwing competitor and a reasonable product. Its pricing page did not render for us on 16 August 2026, so we have not ranked it on numbers we could not read.
CapCut. Very capable and very popular, and its pricing page returned a 429 to us on 16 August 2026. Worth checking yourself, particularly if your output is short-form social.
DaVinci Resolve. Free, professional, and genuinely one of the best editors in existence. Also a real learning curve, which is why it is not the answer for a marketing generalist with a video due Thursday.
Canva. Fine for simple assembly and already installed at most companies. If the video is three clips and a title card, do not buy anything.
Questions teams ask us
Which of these is genuinely free?
Clipchamp, with watermark-free 1080p exports. Kapwing’s free tier watermarks everything and caps exports at four minutes, and Descript’s gives you 60 minutes of transcription a month. Only one of the three is a plan rather than a trial.
Is Descript worth $24 over Kapwing at $24?
They cost the same, so the question is which model fits. If your video is people talking, Descript’s transcript editing is a different way of working and it wins clearly. If your video is clips, captions and resizing for social, Kapwing is faster and friendlier.
What limit will I actually hit first?
Transcription minutes on Descript, at 600 a month on Hobbyist. Export length on Kapwing’s free plan, at four minutes. Recording hours on Riverside Pro, at five a month. None of these are the number in the headline.
Can AI editing replace an editor?
For internal video, demos and social clips, largely yes. For anything a customer will judge you on, it produces a competent first pass and a person still decides what stays. The saving is real and it is in the tedious middle, not in the taste.
Should I pay for OpusClip or use my editor’s clipping features?
If you produce long recordings weekly, the dedicated tool is better at finding the moments and it is the cheapest paid option here at $15. If you produce one a month, the clipping features bundled with the tool you already pay for are enough.
Do I need a separate recorder?
Only for remote human conversations. Local recording is why interviews from Riverside look better than the same interview from a meeting tool, and that quality gap survives editing. For screen recordings, no.
Our maintained directory picks for in-house video cover the rest of the workflow, including demo automation and keeping a video library accurate after the product changes.
Last reviewed: 16 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. OpusClip does not publish per-plan minute allowances and we have said so rather than estimating. VEED and CapCut are unranked because their pricing pages did not return to us. We review this page quarterly.
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