Cutroom vs Captions: a whole editing suite, or one finished vertical from one take

Their own homepage puts it plainly. AI that edits like a professional editor would. You bring footage, up to 60 minutes a file, and it comes back cut.

The AI Edit styles are the mechanism. You pick one from a library of presets and it applies b-roll, transitions and music without you positioning any of it.

That b-roll comes from three places. Your own uploads, which is the option they call the most authentic one. A built-in stock library of photos, video, GIFs and stickers, searchable and free to use. And generated clips, produced across several outside models, with Flux, Imagen, DALL-E, Pika and Ray named in their docs.

There are presenters too. Over two hundred pre-generated avatars, a custom one from a text prompt, or a twin of you built from uploaded footage, a short new recording, or a selfie. Their newest avatar model asks for ten seconds of you. They are explicit that this is not a lip-sync overlay: voice, micro-expressions, eye contact and body language are generated in one pass.

Around all of that sits a suite. Translation into more than a hundred languages. Eye-contact correction, denoise, pause trimming, generated royalty-free music, more than twenty named edit styles. Four output ratios, 9:16, 16:9, 1:1 and 4:5, with an Auto mode that keeps the subject centred as it reframes.

It runs on iOS and Android as well as the web, so the whole loop can happen on the phone that shot the footage. If you use it, none of that should read as grudging. It is a lot of tool.

A style preset is a look. You chose Bloom or Prism Pro or Y2K, and the b-roll, the transitions and the music followed from that choice.

That is a real decision and it saves real minutes. It is not the decision the ad turns on.

The ones it turns on are still yours. Which sentence opens. Which sentence is dead weight and has to go. Which exact phrase needs a picture over it instead of your face. A preset can place a clip beautifully without knowing which nine words in your read were the ones doing the selling.

The second thing left on your desk is the arithmetic. Their plans are sold in credits, not seats and not minutes. What their pricing page publishes today is Max at $24.99 a month for 500 credits, Scale 1x at $69.99 for 1,400, then $139.99 for 2,800 and $279.99 for 5,600, with Enterprise on request. Unused credits roll over and the balance can hold up to three times the monthly allowance.

The number that decides how many finished videos a plan buys is not the plan price. It is what a single action draws from that balance, so check theirs on their own site before you budget against it. Ours is further down this page in full, and it deserves exactly the same treatment.

The third is the free plan, and it deserves saying straight because most comparison pages get it wrong. It exports clean. Nothing is stamped on the file, on free or on paid. But it is fenced by feature instead: their help centre says the free plan suits basic editing and not video generation, automatic editing or AI Editing, and that touching anything else prompts an upgrade.

So the free tier will let you ship a video. It will not let you try the part of the product this page is about.

One talking-head take goes in, up to three minutes. It gets transcribed with word-level timing. Then a full cut gets drafted before you decide anything.

Slack out. Pace set. B-roll already sitting on the phrases that needed showing. A headline drafted on the opening. Captions styled and burned in. What comes out is one 9:16 MP4.

You direct it by reading. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line you do not want and the cut rebuilds around the gap. Change the pace and the machine re-cuts the whole piece.

There is no timeline and no layer stack, because none of those moves is a frame decision. Eleven actions is the entire vocabulary, and every one of them is spoken in the language of the script rather than the language of a playhead.

Clips enter on a cut, whip, punch, glitch or sweep. Captions ship in six packs and the colour, weight, size and position move on all of them. Music is a switch, a track and a level sitting under your read.

Your own footage gets first pick. Upload your product, your premises and your faces once, and the search reaches for those before it reaches for licensed public clips.

One. B-roll lands on the phrase you name. You highlight the words and a clip covers exactly those words, so the picture arrives where the argument needed it rather than where a preset felt a cutaway belonged.

Two. The cut is decided on the transcript. Delete the sentence that hedges and the whole piece re-times around the gap, which means the editing decision is made by reading a paragraph rather than by finding the right two seconds on a playhead.

Three. Your own footage gets first pick. The search reaches for your library before public clips, so the ad shows your product where your product was mentioned instead of a generically stocked stand-in.

Four. The bill is arithmetic you can do before you spend it. A batch is 100 credits and export is 20 credits per output minute, so a one-minute ad is about 120, and Basic carries 2,500 credits a month for $39.99.

Five. Pace is one lever over the whole piece. Move it and coverage moves with it, from 40 percent on chill to 52 on fast, which is a change to the rhythm of the ad rather than a change to twelve clips one at a time.

Now the two that are not differences, because a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Presenters is the first. Both tools can produce one without you filming. Cutroom renders a presenter from a photo you supply plus a voice-over, at 350 credits a minute against 20 to cut a take you filmed yourself. Captions builds a twin from footage, a short recording or a selfie, and says its newest model wants ten seconds.

Bringing your own b-roll is the second. Both accept your uploads. The difference is only the order of preference, which is number three above and a smaller thing than it usually gets sold as. If you have read a page claiming Captions cannot use your footage, that page was wrong.

Buy Captions if the footage you have is long, if you need more than one shape out of it, if you will not be on camera and do not want to be, or if the work has to happen on the phone. Their free plan will also let you ship basic edits without paying anything, which is more than this page offers. Those are not small ifs. They describe most people who make video.

Buy Cutroom if you have a take under three minutes, filmed on purpose to sell something, and the job in front of you is turning that take into one finished vertical without an evening attached to it.

Now the limits, flat, because a buyer needs them stated as facts rather than as apologies. Three minutes is the upload ceiling. One speaker. A 9:16 MP4 comes out and nothing else does. One project produces one finished vertical.

Somebody goes on camera, or the avatar module renders a presenter at 350 credits a minute against 20 to cut a take you filmed. The gap between those two numbers is the product pointing at the path it was built for.

When the draft gets a beat wrong there is no timeline to drop into. You move the highlight, change the pace, or swap the clip. Those three cover almost everything, and editors need about a day to stop reaching for a playhead.

Read their pricing at the source before you decide anything. A number quoted by a rival is a reason to check and never a reason to trust, and that applies to this page too.