If you don't want to invest a lot of money and effort into your video editing exploits, you have several free options. Our top pick for free video editing is DaVinci Resolve. The free download is popular among YouTubers and gamers because it gives you a large subset of the program's features without the pro-level capabilities you don’t need. The free version is surprisingly robust, with standard editing and cutting, effects, motion graphics, color correction, and audio editing.

For Windows users, the free Clipchamp gets you all the basics along with some nifty effects, though some of its more appealing features (like exporting to 4K) require a paid subscription. A very cool feature is its text-to-speech voiceover capability. The app is the same on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it's a Progressive Web App with a multitrack timeline that outputs videos suitable for social media sharing.

If you use a Mac, the excellent iMovie app comes with your computer. It, too, features impressive AI editing tools and is especially useful for iPhone-shot content, though it allows only two timeline tracks.

Free video editing software sometimes comes with legal and technical limitations, however. Some widely used codecs require licensing fees, meaning makers can't offer free software to handle these standard file formats. That said, the impressive open-source Shotcut does many of the same things as the paid applications in this roundup, including chroma-keying and picture-in-picture. Shotcut is completely open-source and free, as are the also surprisingly powerful Kdenlive and Openshot applications. Lightworks offers a free version that limits output resolution to 720p, but paid editions remove this restriction. Kdenlive, Lightworks, Openshot, and Shotcut all run on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.

Although macOS users may not have as many software choices as PC users, Apple fans interested in editing video are well served by video editing software for Macs. At the beginner level, the surprisingly capable and enjoyable-to-use iMovie comes free with every Mac made since at least 2011. iMovie allows you to use only two video tracks, but it does a good job with chroma keying. Its Trailers and Storyboard features help you create slick, Hollywood-style productions, showing you which shots to include (such as close-ups, group shots, and so on).

In the midrange, Adobe Premiere Elements works on both macOS and Windows. It has a lot more features than iMovie and provides help with creating effects. Joining that program in the Apple world is a macOS version of PCMag's Editors' Choice enthusiast-level video editing program, CyberLink PowerDirector. The Mac version now features nearly all the same capabilities as its Windows counterpart.

Professionals and prosumers have powerful options in DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro. Final Cut is a deceptively simple application that resembles iMovie in its interface and ease of use, but it's massively capable, and many third-party apps integrate with it for even more power. Premiere Pro utilizes a more traditional timeline and benefits from a large ecosystem of companion apps and plug-ins. It also excels in collaboration features and plays well with ancillary Adobe software such as After Effects and Photoshop. For more details, see our comparison of Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro.

Support for 4K video source content has become fairly standard in video editing software, and professional software already supports resolutions of up to 8K and sometimes even higher. However, this isn't really practical unless you're running a full-size movie theater. That said, even smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra can now shoot in 8K.

Support for 4K and higher formats varies among the consumer products. For example, some, but not all, applications can import Sony XAVC and XAVC-S formats, which are used by Sony's popular DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, camcorders, and professional video cameras. The same is true for the H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Most of the applications here now can import and export HEVC, but there are still a few holdouts.

If you plan to work with 4K or higher video content, ensure you select a video editing application that can render output files efficiently (see the section on speed testing below).

Support for newer formats, such as the open-source AV1 and the even more efficient H.266 (VVC—Versatile Video Coding), is currently very limited. Furthermore, none of the apps here supports H.266. Happily, several of them do support importing Google's WebM format.