Comparison
5 Reasons Cutroom Is The Better Alternative To Captions
Captions is an app for putting subtitles on a video. Cutroom edits the whole video. This page is about that difference, and about four things its own users keep writing down.
- longest video it takes
- 3 min
- per finished minute, shown before you export
- 20 CR
- finished videos free, no card
- 3 in 7 days
Their users aren't complaining about the money. They're complaining about losing work.
Captions puts words on the screen. Cutroom cuts the video: b-roll on the words you said, the cuts, and the captions on top of all of it. That is the first difference, and it is the biggest.
The second one is in their own reviews: the app crashes, the export hangs, the paywall arrives after three hours of work, and features you already paid for move to a plan you are not on.
So if you are looking for more than subtitles, here are five reasons.
What their users write, and what Cutroom does instead
The left column is drawn from public reviews of their app. The right column is what happens here today.
| What their users write | What Cutroom does instead | |
|---|---|---|
| The paywall | Paywall appears after the work is done | The price sits next to the Export button |
| When it breaks | App crashes, work is gone | It runs in the browser, and if saving a video goes wrong the credits come back |
| Your plan | Features moved to a different plan | One product, one editor |
| Your device | Different features on Android than iOS | Same thing on every device |
| The job it does | It does subtitles | It does the edit: b-roll and cuts too, with music one tap away |
It's not subtitles. It's the edit.
This is the real difference and it is worth being blunt about. Captions puts words on the screen. Cutroom cuts the video: it finds b-roll, puts each clip on the words that need it, makes the cuts, with music one tap away. Subtitles are one of the five things it does, not the thing it does.
You say "our warehouse in New York" and a warehouse shot covers those five words. Not the sentence before it, not the one after. If you disagree, you drag it onto different words.
Your own footage gets used first. Upload it once and Cutroom labels what is in each clip, so "back in my workshop" gets your workshop. The free library covers the rest.
Five words, one shot, landing exactly there
Five words get one shot. This is the part a subtitle app does not do at all.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
You see the price before you do the work
The loudest complaint in their reviews is not that it costs money. It is finding that out at the end, after the recording, the editing and the waiting, at the moment you press download.
Their Google Play reviews describe the same evening twice. One reviewer uploads a two-minute video, gets captions on part of it, finishes the rest by hand, and meets a payment screen at the download button. Another describes three hours of work thrown away for the same reason.
Exporting costs 20 credits per minute of finished video, and that number sits beside the Export button before you press it, not after. And if you did not mean to be billed at all, you have seven days to get the first charge back in full.
Before you click Export
The number sits next to the button. It is the number you get charged.
Your work doesn't disappear
The second stack of complaints is the app itself. It crashes, the export hangs, and the hours you put in go with it. That is not a pricing problem, it is the worst thing software can do to you.
Their reviewers describe recording and editing, then the app crashing again and again on a paid subscription. Another describes an export stuck in a loading cycle with no way to download the file.
Cutroom runs in the browser, and your project lives on our side rather than on your device. Close the tab and it is still there.
When an export does fail, and it happens, the credits it used come back by themselves. You don't have to spot it, and you don't have to ask.
When an export dies
The credits come back on their own. You do not have to notice, or ask.
One product, not one per device
Their users describe paying for Pro and then finding that the phone has features the tablet doesn't, that Android is behind iOS, and that an account got moved onto a smaller plan with things removed from it.
One reviewer is leaving because the Android app does not carry the same features as iOS and desktop. Another signed in to run an update and found the account had become a smaller tier, with the features they had signed up for no longer available.
Cutroom is one editor in a browser tab. There is no app to be behind, no second version for a different phone, and nothing that works on a laptop but not on a tablet.
The whole edit comes back, not a caption track
Six caption styles, and you pick where they sit on the frame. But they arrive on top of an edit that is already made. The cuts and the transitions are done before you look at it.
Captions follow your voice word for word and are burned into the file, so they show up wherever you post it. The timing comes from the audio, not from a model guessing.
Transitions between shots: a whip pan, a punch-in, a glitch, a light sweep. Music is one tap away, and it starts off on purpose so you hear your own voice first. The ums come out and the long silences get shorter.
You didn't set any of that up.
- Clean: one line in a pill. Out of the way.
- Bold: huge condensed caps with a hard shadow.
- Karaoke: a marker box on the word you are saying.
- Meme: white outlined text, top and bottom.
Bold: huge condensed caps with a hard shadow
One of six caption packs. You pick the pack, the colour, the weight, the size and where it sits on the frame.
Side by side, in one table
Everything in the Cutroom column works today. The Captions column is drawn from what their own users describe in public reviews.
Captions and Cutroom, row by row
Two rows go to them and one is a draw. A table where one column is all ticks reads as an advert and gets believed by nobody.
| Captions | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Shooting, editing and posting from a phone | Their app is built for exactly that | Works on a phone, but you upload something already filmed |
| Longest video you can upload | Depends on your plan | Three minutes, enforced at upload |
| Burned-in captions, timed to your voice | The job the app is built for | Six packs, word-level timing |
| Puts b-roll on the words you said | Subtitles, not shot placement | Highlight a phrase, a clip lands |
| Cuts, transitions and music | Not what the app is for | Five transitions, music one tap away |
| Price shown before you export | Reviewers meet it at the download button | 20 credits a finished minute, on the button |
| Same features on every device | Reviewers report Android behind iOS | One browser editor, nothing to install |
| Money back if you change your mind | Their reviewers describe it case by case | First charge back in full for 7 days |
What Captions does better
If you shoot, edit and post entirely from your phone, their app is built for that and ours is not. Cutroom runs in a browser and expects you to upload something you already filmed.
And here is our limit, said plainly: up to three minutes goes in, and one upright phone-shaped video comes out at 1080p, which is full HD. That is the only size we make. There is no sharper 4K version, and no dearer plan that exports a bigger one.
Questions people ask
- If I make an ad, can I actually download it, or is there a paywall at the end?
- You download it. Exporting costs credits, and the price sits on the Export button before you press it, so nothing about the bill turns up at the end. The free plan gives you three videos, and those three carry the Cutroom mark across the middle. On Basic and Premium there is nothing of ours on the file. There is no card at the front door, and you get seven days to walk through it: the free tier is three finished videos, with 600 credits, which covers those three edits and re-exporting them after you change a caption.
- Will it work with my kind of video?
- Cutroom takes one upright video of a person talking, up to three minutes, with sound on it. You get back one upright video at 1080 by 1920. Landscape footage is refused at upload, before a single credit is charged. A wide take inside an upright frame is a strip between black bars, and we would rather stop you than sell you that. A video with no sound is refused for the same reason. There is no widescreen export and no 4K; a 4K upload comes back at 1080p, the same as everyone else's. If you shoot horizontal, or your videos run twenty minutes, this is not your tool yet, and we would rather you knew that here than after paying.
- If something breaks, do I get a real person or a chatbot?
- A person. There is no support bot, nothing in the product answers you automatically. Support is a live chat inside the app: if somebody is at the desk your reply lands while you are still sitting there, and if nobody is, it comes back by email and stays in the same thread so it cannot get lost. You can also just reply to any email we send.
- Does this work in my language, or only English?
- Eight languages today, by name: English (US), English (UK), Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French, Dutch and Italian. You pick yours from a list when you upload. If your language is not one of those eight, Cutroom will not do a good job for you yet. We would rather write that down than sell you a subscription and let you find out.
- If I want out, can I do it myself, and does the charging actually stop?
- Yourself, without emailing or calling anyone. In Settings, then Billing, you press Cancel subscription, a screen tells you exactly what that does, and you finish in Stripe's own billing portal, so the cancellation sits on the biller's books rather than on our word. Your plan then runs to the end of the period you already paid for and stops. Nothing is charged after that. There is no fee and we do not ask why.
- How many videos do I actually get for this?
- Two charges make an ad, and you see both before you spend them. Cutting one upload is 100 credits: that is writing out what you said, the edit itself, and the b-roll search. Exporting is 20 credits for every finished minute, charged for the length you actually export, so a thirty-second ad is 10. That makes a thirty-second ad 110 credits from upload to finished file. Basic gives 2,500 credits a month, which is about twenty finished ads, and Premium gives 5,000. The free plan is three videos rather than a credit balance. Everything between those two charges is free: editing, previewing, undoing, searching for clips, uploading your own footage, changing your mind. Exporting the same cut again unchanged is free too. Credits you do not use stay in the account.
- Can I post what comes out, or will I still be in there for an hour?
- Two things make the difference, and both are structural rather than a promise about quality. First, Cutroom does not pick which parts of your video to keep. Your whole take stays in, in order. It tightens the dead air and drops the ums, and it only ever cuts where a sentence ends, never mid-word. Second, when it gets something wrong you fix it by pointing, not by editing. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around it. Correct a word it misheard and every caption of that word changes. All of it is free, all of it is undoable, and there is no timeline to learn.
- If I cancel, do I keep what I already made?
- Yes. Cancelling moves you to the free plan. Your projects stay, your exported videos stay, and credits already in your balance stay spendable. Nothing is deleted because you stopped paying. Files only go when you delete a project yourself, or when you ask us to close the account, and then everything goes within 30 days.
- If it turns out not to be what I thought, do I get my money back?
- Your first charge: yes, in full, if you tell us within seven days that you did not mean to be billed. No argument. Later charges: we refund unused subscription time when something went wrong on our side, and we say so plainly when we think it did not. Credits already spent on finished videos are not refundable. That video was made and the machines were paid at the moment it ran. There is one case where we say no, and it is written on the refunds page rather than discovered by you. And if an export fails on our side, you do not need to ask at all: the credits come back on their own.
- Does this work on my phone, or do I need a computer?
- It works on a phone. Cutroom is a website, not an app. There is no iPhone version and no Android version, so there is no feature that lives on one device and not the other. A big screen is more comfortable for marking up your words, and the app says so once, but nothing is locked away.
- My last tool charged me for exports that failed. What happens here?
- Nothing. A failed export hands the credits straight back, automatically, without a ticket. If the job stalls instead of failing, a sweeper finds it and does the same.
- Will the price go up, or will features quietly leave the plan I'm on?
- If we change the price of a plan you are on, you get an email at least 30 days before it applies, and you can leave before it does. A price you have already paid is never changed afterwards.
- The last tool put the one thing I needed in the tier above. What is gated here?
- The editor is the whole product and it is on every plan, including the free one. What the plans change is credits and the tools sitting in the same room as the editor. The free plan gives you three videos, editor only, carrying the Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite at $19.99 takes the mark off; Basic at $39.99 adds avatars and generated music, with 2,500 credits a month. Premium at $79.99 adds the animation tool and product shots, with 5,000. Both paid plans export at the same size and render in the same queue at the same speed.
One of these puts words on the screen. The other hands back the edit underneath them, cut, covered and captioned, with the price on the button before you press it.