Although Adobe is famed for being the best in the creative software space, its video editor, Premiere Pro, has fierce competition with newcomer CapCut. How long can Premiere Pro stay at the top? And is it the best video editor for your needs, or will CapCut be the better choice? Here’s a comparison between these two powerful video editing tools.

Price

You can subscribe to the Premiere Pro solo plan from $23 per month (for a year) and it comes with Adobe Express Premium. Premiere Pro is also part of the Adobe All Apps plan which starts from $60 per month for an annual plan. This plan includes over 20 Adobe apps, including After Effects. New Adobe users can get a 7-day free trial.

CapCut is a freemium software, so on the surface, it’s free of charge. Although you can use many tools and features for free, it’s advantageous to subscribe to CapCut Pro from $12 for one month of access, $8 for a monthly subscription, or $90 for one year. There’s a 7-day free trial included for Pro subscriptions.

Platform availability

Adobe Premiere Pro is only for desktop use and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. There’s a similar mobile version of Premiere — Premiere Rush — which is a pared down version of the powerful desktop software.

You can get CapCut as a desktop app, a mobile app, and it’s also available via web browser. CapCut for desktop is available on Windows, Mac, and with Linux options. For video-editing on-the-go, CapCut is on iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices for cross-platform use.

Interface and learning curve

Which UI is the easiest for new users to learn?

Premiere Pro’s workspace is overwhelming and confusing for first-time users. While it’s full of tools that can take your video editing to new heights, they’re difficult to discover and learn. You need to spend a while getting a grip on Premiere Pro’s menus, nestled tools, and tucked away features. You can customize the user interface to your liking by moving or resizing internal windows.

Most tools in Premiere Pro require multiple steps to achieve results. Therefore, as you search through menus and tools, you'll learn more as you go. Premiere Pro has a relatively steep learning curve, but, due to that, you’ll learn more intensive video editing techniques through the process.

CapCut’s desktop interface is simple, with easily labeled features and minimal nested tools. There’s limited hunting or complex strings of actions required to create your desires. Many CapCut features are preset tools, like transitions and speed-ramping templates, giving you fast results which typically would require typically complex techniques to accomplish.

CapCut’s mobile app has a different interface, so if you wish to switch between the desktop and mobile versions, there’s a different interface to learn. The mobile app is suitably labeled and non-complex though.

Transitions and video effects

If using a video editing tool, you’ll want to transition between footage and viewpoints, add effects to your video, and potentially animate individual elements too. Here's an overview of how each program handles these effects.

Transitions

Premiere Pro’s native transitions are outdated, deeming them unprofessional in most instances.

You’ll find simple transitions like iris, cross dissolve, chroma leak, wipe, and zoom, which are all fine for hobby video editing, but don’t provide very professional effects.

CapCut has a huge transitions library of premade effects. Although the free transitions are often overused, there’s a wide variety of interesting categories and transitions, including black fade, white flash, blur, color glitch, and shake. Pro tier transitions are more complex, with options such as exposure & panning, elastic & glowing, shrink, and rainbow twist.

Video effects

Video effects in CapCut are premade templates with two categories: video effects and body effects. The latter enables you to apply VFX while masking any human bodies within the footage, letting the effect be applied only to the body or excluding the body in the effect. Video effects apply to the entire selected clip, irrespective of the people in it.

CapCut effects include vignetting, blur types, color effects, animated overlays, and more. Body effects include electric shock lines, ghost effects, aura, and hand drawn doodles.

Premiere Pro’s video effects are similar, with effects such as inverting color, blurring effects, posterizing, strobe lighting, and adding metadata and timecodes. Due to Premiere Pro’s more complex tools compared to CapCut, you can customize the effects, such as the size, opacity, time, animation on the screen, and more.

Premiere Pro and CapCut both offer minimal animation tools, adding motion to text and graphical elements. You can add shaking or pulsing effects, or change the scale and opacity of any element.

External plugins

External tools improve software

Premiere Pro really shines with its plugins. There are extensive tools within the software, but the native effects are lacking. With plugins — available from third-party developers approved by Adobe, as well as independent developers — you can transform your videos into professionally edited masterpieces.

CapCut doesn’t offer plugins; however, creators can make their templates available for others to use by combining fresh content with their signature effects. It’s not as powerful as Premiere Pro’s plugin options, but it can help you edit videos in new ways.

Audio tools

Sound quality is important for video editing

CapCut offers a TikTok-licensed audio library, allowing you to search for and apply trending audio to your videos for TikTok. For other purposes, you should use CapCut’s other audio offerings (which are copyright-free) or use your own tracks for videos you aren't uploading to TikTok.

CapCut Pro’s audio editing tools are unmatched. The vocal isolation feature expertly cuts out distracting background sound to isolate a voice.

Both CapCut and Premiere Pro offer transcript-based editing, allowing you to follow a script and edit based on the words said within the video. CapCut also offers a filler-word identifier and removal tool to ensure your speech is confident and timely.

Premiere Pro’s audio tools have a lot to offer but can be overwhelming for new users. There are audio mixers as well as audio effects you can apply, such as amplitude and compression, delay and echo, reverb, mute, pitch and crossfade. There are also background noise removal tools, but they’re not as successful as CapCut’s vocal isolation feature.

AI features

Futuristic tools to save you time for great results

With AI features springing up in every software, you can’t expect to escape them in Premiere Pro nor CapCut. Part of Adobe’s introduction of AI tools in 2023 included many within Premiere Pro. It offers auto-captioning, which saves a bunch of time when creating accessible captions. There’s also a generative AI feature that creates B-roll, allowing you to focus on the main areas of your video when filming and editing.

CapCut offers a bunch of AI features, although they’re not all available from the desktop version. They’re accessible from both the mobile app and the browser versions, with a handful appearing on the desktop version. Most AI tools are in the Pro account, but you’d be surprised by how many are available for free users, such as the AI smart ads generator (mobile only), AI expand, AI remove, and identifying and removal of filler words. CapCut’s paid AI tools are super helpful.

Depending on your region, some tools may appear under the Pro plan or the Free plan, as CapCut doesn’t offer the same ranges globally.

CapCut is better for novice video editors

Premiere Pro offers so much and is famed in the video editing world. It’s a professional software with a huge learning curve, which might scare off hobbyists or newbies. For everything you need to learn in Premiere Pro, you can get essentially the same results — or sometimes even better — in CapCut. The tools are easier to find, and typically a one-click step to use, rather than trawling through menus and changing settings. While there’s slightly less customization in CapCut, if you’re not looking to get overwhelmed and are focused on video editing purely for the output and not for what you learn, CapCut helps you reach your goal quicker.

• Adobe Premiere Pro

  $23/mo. at Adobe

• Capcut

  See at CapCut