"AI powered video editor" covers at least four different products. Some cut video by letting you delete words from a transcript. Some take a long recording and return short clips on their own. Some are AI features built into a normal timeline, like silence removal, auto reframe, and caption generation. Some generate footage from a text prompt, which is not editing at all. Before comparing tools, work out which of those four jobs you have, because the categories barely compete with each other.
Editing by transcript
You get a text document of everything said. Delete a sentence, the video loses that sentence. For interviews, podcasts, webinars, and anything else where the words carry the piece, this is the fastest route from raw file to rough cut available right now. It falls apart when the footage is mostly visual. A transcript of a wedding ceremony or a b-roll card tells you almost nothing about what is in the frame.
Automatic clipping
Feed in a long recording, get back short cuts with captions burned in. The tool is guessing which parts are worth keeping, usually from speech patterns and pauses. That works when you need volume and any decent moment will do. It does not work when you need one specific moment, because the tool has no idea which one you meant.
AI inside the editor you already have
Most timeline software has shipped some of this already: speech to text, silence detection, auto reframe, shot matching. If you already work in one of these, check what arrived in the last two updates before buying a separate tool. A fair amount of what gets marketed as a new AI editor is a feature you own.
Generative video
Text goes in, footage that never existed comes out. Useful for filler and concepts. It is a different job from editing your own material, and mixing the two in one comparison is how people end up paying for something that never touches their actual problem.
The part none of them do
There is a gap that shows up once you have used any of the above. Assembly is often not what eats the day. Selection is. Someone cutting a ten minute wedding film has hours of cards to get through, and most of the work is deciding which take to use, not dragging it into the timeline. Cutting faster helps less than you would hope when the slow part is the looking.
The tools built for that half are not editors at all. Vivu searches the cards you already shot by content and comes back with timestamps and the context around them, so the hours in the selection pass go into choosing rather than into hunting. It never touches the timeline. The honest arrangement is two tools with one job each, which is also why putting them in the same comparison table tells you nothing.
When you do not need any of this
If your projects are short, if you shoot to a plan and know your material, or if the archive is small enough to scrub through from memory, skip the category. Manual works. The tools carry real overhead: an indexing pass to sit through, another login, another system for somebody to own. The threshold is roughly the point where you stop being able to remember what you have.