Which alternative fits depends on which job you are handing off. The tools that come up in this search do fairly different things: cut a rough assembly from a transcript, find a specific moment inside hours of footage, catalog and store the material, or generate new video. Those are separate problems with separate failure modes, and something built for one of them tends to be a weak answer for another. Work out which job you are replacing and most of the list rules itself out before you book a call.
The reason you are switching narrows the field
A team setting up infrastructure at the start of a documentary, while the funding is still being pitched, wants something different from a podcast producer sitting on several hundred episodes with clean, human-corrected transcripts that still cannot be searched as a set. The first team is buying for footage that does not exist yet. The second is buying for an archive that already exists and grows every week. Same category, opposite constraints.
So write down what broke. Did the volume outgrow the tool, did the material end up somewhere the tool cannot reach, or did the job change from cutting one project to finding things across everything you have ever shot?
Route one: the editing software you already own
Several editing suites can search the transcript of media inside an open project, and for one interview that is often enough. The cost is that this search knows only about the project in front of it. Nothing shot two years ago is in scope, and neither is footage nobody has imported yet. It is the cheapest thing to try and the first thing to outgrow.
Route two: build it yourself
Run every file through an open transcription model, put the output into text files or a small database, and grep it. This works, and some people run archives this way happily for years. The costs are honest ones: someone has to keep the job running on new files, someone owns it when it breaks, and the results are text only, so anything that was never said out loud stays invisible.
A lighter version of the same idea is publishing transcripts on your own site and searching them with a site: query on a search engine. That gets further than people expect. It also covers only what you made public, and it points at a page rather than a timecode, so you still open the episode and hunt.
Route three: transcript-first editing tools
This is the shape most people mean when they search for an alternative here. You read the transcript, delete what you do not want, and the timeline follows. It suits interview and dialogue work and it is fast for people who think in words. It is bounded in two ways worth knowing in advance: the edit is only as good as the transcript underneath it, and material with no speech in it is close to invisible.
Route four: a search layer over the footage you already have
This shape does not open a project at all. It indexes material where it lives and answers a question with a point inside a file, so asking for the moment someone explains the funding structure gets you the file and the time it happens. Vivu is one implementation of it, and it indexes each piece of footage once when the footage lands in your storage, which is why material that arrives in month four of a shoot is searchable without anyone rebuilding a project database. It does not cut anything for you, and the paper edit is still yours to write.
The cost of this route is that it stops at selection. It narrows hours down to minutes and then hands you back to your editor.
When you do not need any of this
If the project is one shoot, under a few hours, and the person editing was in the room, the fastest tool is memory plus a scrub through. The same is true when selection is not the slow part. Plenty of edits run long because of grading, revisions, or waiting on an approval, and no amount of search speed moves any of those.
What to test before you commit
Take two questions you asked last month and could not answer quickly, and run them through whichever candidate you like. Then add a file the tool has never seen and ask again. The difference between a demo and a working system shows up on new material, not on the sample library.
If you are replacing a way of cutting, look at the tools that cut and ignore how they search. If you are replacing a way of finding, the editing features are decoration. The awkward case is a setup where you liked that both lived in the same window, because splitting them across two tools is a real loss, and only you can judge whether the archive you now have is big enough to be worth paying it.