Cutroom vs Submagic: one finishes the footage you chose, one decides the cut

Their homepage states the job in one line: edit shorts 10x faster with AI. The subhead is the same promise in their words, from raw footage to viral shorts in 1 click.

You hand it an mp4 or a mov, up to 4K. Captions come back styled, and caption coverage is marketed at 123 languages, which is their published claim rather than one we have tested.

The auto-edit does the tidying: cutting, trimming, silence removal. Magic B-rolls reads the transcript and inserts relevant footage without you picking shots.

Those b-rolls come from three places. A stock library, visuals generated by AI from a written prompt, and clips you import yourself and save to your own library.

Then there is everything around the edit. Auto-zoom, sound effects, background music, transitions, translation, social scheduling and publishing, and export up to 4K 60fps.

Aspect ratio is a setting rather than a constraint. 9:16, 16:9, 1:1 and 4:5, picked under the preview player. If your work is not vertical only, that fact alone may decide this page.

That is a boundary rather than a flaw. An editor exists to execute decisions. Which sentence opens, which claim carries the ad, which forty seconds of a rambling read deserve to exist: those arrive with you and leave with you.

Magic Clips is the closest thing to a machine making that call, and it is selection rather than writing. It scans a long video and pulls out the moments it rates. It is also a paid add-on rather than part of the subscription, at plus $19 a month, or plus $12 on annual billing.

The subscription itself is per member per month. Starter is $19 for 15 videos with a two minute ceiling on each. Pro is $39 for 40 videos at five minutes. Business with API access is $69 for 100 videos at thirty minutes. Annual billing is advertised at 41 percent off, so $12, $23 and $41.

The free plan is real and small: three videos a month, capped at a minute and a half each, with starter templates and free stock media. Their own pricing page lists a Submagic watermark as part of that free offering. All three paid tiers are listed as watermark-free.

So what is left on your desk after a Submagic session is the same thing that was on it before. The decision about what the ad says. That is the part Cutroom starts with.

Upload one talking-head take of up to three minutes. It gets transcribed to the word. Then a full cut is drafted before you decide anything at all.

Slack removed. Pace set. B-roll already sitting on the phrases that need showing. A headline drafted on the opening from your own read. Captions styled and burned in.

You direct it by reading. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around the gap. Change the pace and the whole piece re-cuts.

There is no timeline and no layer stack. A talking-head ad is decided by words rather than pixels, so the interface is the transcript and the compiler works out every boundary in time.

Eleven moves is the whole vocabulary. Emphasise the word the claim turns on. Trim the opening. Swap a clip, or search millions of free ones. Fix a mis-heard word. Turn music on and set how loud it sits under the voice.

One project produces one finished vertical MP4, captions burned in. Not a set, not a batch of variants. One take in, one file out.

1. You name the words a clip covers. Both tools read the transcript and place footage on their own, and Submagic's feature page describes that as one action, with the AI inserting relevant footage without you picking shots. In Cutroom the same placement is also yours to aim. Highlight a phrase and the clip lands over exactly those words, so a cutaway in the wrong place is a highlight you move.

2. Your own footage is a first-class source in both, and it is worth saying so plainly. Submagic lets you import clips and save them to a library for reuse. In Cutroom your own footage sits in the workspace library and gets first pick over licensed public clips, which matters when the line is about your product and no stock shot of it exists.

3. A presenter can come from a photo you already own. Cutroom's avatar module takes a photo you supply plus a voice-over and returns a lip-synced presenter, which then goes through the same cutting pipeline as a filmed take. It is 350 credits a minute to render and 70 for the voice-over, against 20 to export a take you filmed, and that gap is the product telling you which path it was built for.

4. What you can try before paying is shaped differently. Submagic's pricing page lists a free plan of three videos a month, capped at a minute and a half, carrying a Submagic watermark, with all three paid tiers listed as watermark-free. Three finished videos are free in your first seven days, with no card.

5. The next version costs the export. Change the pace or move the opening and the machine re-cuts the whole thing, then you pay 20 credits per output minute for the new file. Testing a different opening stops being a budget conversation and becomes an afternoon.

Submagic is the right purchase if any of these is true. Your source is longer than three minutes. You need the same recording in 16:9 or 1:1 as well as vertical. You want several shorts out of one long recording. You need the ad in a second language, which is translation and Cutroom does not do it. Or you want scheduling and publishing in the same tab.

Cutroom is the right purchase when the footage is fine and the cut is the problem. A hook that arrives eight seconds late. Fourteen seconds of hedging in the middle. Footage that needs to land on named phrases rather than wherever a machine thought best.

A one-minute ad here is about 120 credits. 100 for the batch, 20 for the export. Basic carries 2,500 credits a month for $39.99, so roughly twenty finished ads.

Check their pricing at the source before you decide. Numbers move, and a figure quoted by a rival is a reason to verify rather than a reason to trust. That applies to this page as much as any other.