If $0 plus a timeline is the brief, keep Clipchamp. Cutroom is for when the hours are the bill.

Clipchamp is Microsoft's browser editor. A real timeline, trim and crop and rotate, screen and camera recording, animated text, stock assets, and 1080p exports with nothing stamped on them, all at $0 (per clipchamp.com's pricing page, August 2026).

The premium tier is not sold on its own. It comes bundled with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family and unlocks 4K exports, premium stock and a brand kit, per the same page.

For a student, an occasional editor, or a household already paying for Microsoft 365, it is simply the rational default.

It runs in a browser tab with no install. For screen-recorded tutorials and one-off cuts it is hard to argue against.

So the price argument is over, and Clipchamp won it. What is left is the time argument.

A timeline hands you every decision. Where each cut lands. When each caption appears and disappears. Which frame the zoom starts on. Where the music dips.

Each decision is small. An ad is a few hundred of them, and they arrive one at a time, in an evening that was supposed to be something else.

That cost never appears on a pricing page, which is why it is the cost people forget to count.

At one video a month, the trade is fine. The tool is $0 and the evening is occasional.

At ten ads a month it is ten evenings, and the $0 tool has quietly become the most expensive thing in the stack.

Cutroom charges $19.99 a month precisely to delete those evenings. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on your count, which is why this page keeps saying count.

You upload one spoken take, up to three minutes. Cutroom transcribes every word, decides the cut, places b-roll on exactly the words that need showing, writes the hook headline, times and styles the captions, and returns a finished 9:16 MP4 in about four minutes.

Then you direct on the transcript. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds. Change the pace and the whole piece re-cuts.

Emphasise a word so it pops in the captions. Fix a mis-heard word and the burned-in text follows. Trim the opening or the ending.

Choose how each clip enters: cut, whip, punch, glitch or sweep. Six caption styles, including the two-word DuoStack and moving captions.

There is no timeline underneath, on purpose. The compiler owns every frame boundary, which is why nothing you do can leave a caption hanging over a cut.

Clipchamp edits any footage into any shape. Cutroom edits one spoken take into one shape, 9:16 vertical. No landscape, no square, no exceptions.

Clipchamp records your screen and camera. Cutroom records nothing. You film on a phone and upload the file.

Clipchamp will assemble a montage, a slideshow, a gaming clip, a wedding video. Cutroom will not. If nobody talks, there is nothing for it to cut.

Clipchamp is $0 for as long as you want it. Cutroom's $0 runs out: three finished videos free in your first seven days, no card, with a Cutroom mark across the middle, and after that Lite is $19.99 a month with the mark gone. A timeline you can keep using at $0 and a free week are not the same offer, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

If any of those four rows is your dealbreaker, keep Clipchamp and lose nothing.

Winners run at 5 to 8 percent of creatives, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads. Between one in thirteen and one in twenty. The account that finds a winner is usually the one that shipped the most attempts.

At $0 per tool and an evening per attempt, attempts are rationed by evenings. That is how an account ends up shipping three creatives a month and reading dashboards for the other twenty-seven days.

On Lite, 1,250 credits is about ten finished one-minute ads a month, at roughly 120 credits each: 100 for the batch, 20 per exported minute.

The honest way to decide: count the ads you actually shipped last month in Clipchamp. If the number is where you want it, stay. If the number was capped by evenings, the $19.99 is buying evenings, not software.