OpusClip finds the best minute of a recording. Cutroom builds the minute nobody recorded.

Hand it a long recording and it reads the whole thing. Back comes a set of candidate clips, each one a passage that stands on its own.

That is genuinely the hard part. Nobody wants to scrub ninety minutes looking for the sixty seconds worth posting, and a machine sorting them beats a person doing it at eleven at night.

It also takes the input a clipper needs. Their docs put a local upload at up to ten gigabytes and up to ten hours. It imports from YouTube, Google Drive, Vimeo, Zoom, Rumble and StreamYard too, so a webinar host never touches an export file.

On the way out it reframes and captions, offers 9:16, 1:1, 16:9 and 4:5 in its editor, and posts straight to YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram.

Pro adds a virality score on each clip, clip-length bands, and an XML hand-off into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. If you have an archive and an editor, that is a serious workflow and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

There is also a free plan, forever, at 60 processing minutes a month. Watermarked, but you can see the output before spending anything.

This is a boundary rather than a flaw. The method is a search over what was recorded. If the line was never said, no model quality puts it there.

So what comes back is a passage in the register it was recorded in. A conversation opens mid-thought, because the speaker was mid-thought. A paid placement gives you about three seconds and rewards opening on a claim.

The metering is worth reading before you buy. Their published allowance is a number of processing minutes a month: 60 on Free, 150 on Starter, 300 on Pro. What a processing minute counts is theirs to define, so check their own docs against the length of the recordings you actually have.

B-roll is metered separately and thinly. Their pricing page gives Starter three AI-image clips and three stock clips a month, lists the same three-clips-a-month figures on Pro, and gives the free plan none at all.

The free plan also stamps the export, caps it at 1080p and expires the files after three days. Exporting without that stamp starts at Starter.

None of that stops you posting clips. It stops the clip being an ad. What is still on your desk afterwards is the hook, the footage sitting on the claim, and the decision about what should have been said in the first place.

You film the thing on purpose. Forty seconds against a kettle is a normal input. Upload one take of up to three minutes and it comes back transcribed and already drafted into a full cut.

The draft is not a rough pass. Slack removed, pace set, footage sitting on the phrases that need showing, an opening headline written from your own words, captions styled and burned in.

Then 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 whole piece re-cuts.

There is no timeline and no layer stack. Eleven moves is the whole vocabulary and every one of them is on the transcript. The compiler works out each boundary in time.

Music is one of those moves. Turn it on, pick the track, set how loud it sits under the read. A generated track starts at 50 credits and is priced by length.

One project produces one finished vertical file: a 9:16 MP4 with the captions rendered into the picture.

1. Coverage lands on the words you name. Highlight a phrase in the transcript and a clip is cut to exactly those words, and swapping it afterwards costs nothing. OpusClip generates b-roll automatically and can do it per sentence, but its published allowance is three AI-image clips and three stock clips a month, so the count becomes the thing you manage.

2. Your own footage is what gets searched first. Both tools take footage you supply, and OpusClip documents custom uploads alongside its Pexels stock. Here your library is searched against the words you said before any public clip is considered, which is the difference between your product being in the ad and a stock kitchen being in it.

3. A presenter can come from a photo. If nobody will film, a photo you supply plus a voice-over becomes a lip-synced presenter at 350 credits a minute of render. OpusClip has avatars too, on a separate product line called Agent Opus, built from reference video of you or from a stock library, and gated behind its paid tiers.

4. Nothing is printed over a Cutroom export, on any plan. There is no such layer in the renderer, so the file you export during the trial is the file a paid month produces. OpusClip stamps its free-plan exports, and its free caption templates are labelled as carrying that stamp.

Every one of those is about the ad. If the real problem is that ninety minutes of good talking is sitting on a drive unpublished, none of the four matters and the clipper is the correct purchase.

Buy OpusClip if there is a recording. A podcast, a webinar, a stream, a talk. It turns something you already paid for into more surface area, and its free plan lets you see the output first.

Buy Cutroom if the ad has to be built rather than found. That means somebody films. The take has to be under three minutes, one speaker, shot vertical.

The facts a buyer needs, flatly. Cutroom will not ingest a long recording, will not find the moment for you, does not reframe horizontal footage and does not post anywhere. You download a file and upload it yourself.

A one-minute ad is about 120 credits: 100 to cut it, 20 to export the finished minute. Basic is 2,500 credits a month for $39.99. Three finished videos are free in your first seven days, with no card.

Read OpusClip's own pricing page for their figures. A number quoted by a rival is a reason to check, never a reason to trust, and that applies to this page as well.

Mostly these two are not substitutes. With an archive and an ad account, the honest split is that the archive feeds organic and a filmed take feeds paid.