Editing is two jobs stacked on top of each other. One is deciding what goes in the cut. The other is assembling it. Almost every tool that promises easy editing is making the second job easier, and it has genuinely gotten easier over the last decade. The first job has not moved much. So before you buy anything, work out which half is eating your hours, because the answer changes what you should buy.
The half that got easier
Assembly is now close to a solved problem for ordinary work. Templates, auto levelling, one-click captions, and export presets for every aspect ratio have taken a lot of fiddly craft out of the middle of the process. A person with no training can put a watchable cut together in an afternoon. If your complaint is that the software is intimidating or that captions take too long, a friendlier editor really will fix it, and you can stop reading here.
The half that didn't
The other half is selection. You shot four hours, or you have a folder of past shoots, and you need the eleven seconds where the bride's father says the thing, or the moment in the webinar where the customer explains the problem in their own words. That work is not editing in any craft sense. It is watching, scrubbing, remembering, and watching again. People who cut their own video regularly will tell you the selection pass takes longer than the cutting pass, and it gets worse every year because the archive keeps growing while your memory of it does not.
There is a second version of this problem that looks similar but is not the same. Sometimes you already know roughly where the moment is and the work is reviewing candidates to pick the best one. Sorting out which of the two you have is worth ten minutes of honest thought, because the tools that help with finding are not the tools that help with judging.
The honest set of routes
Manual, with discipline. Name files consistently at ingest, keep a text log of what happened on which card, and scrub. This is free and it works, up to a point. Small teams underrate it.
Transcript-first editing. Get a transcript, read instead of watch, cut by deleting text. This collapses selection and assembly into one motion and is a real improvement for interview and dialogue work. It falls down when the moment you want has no words attached to it, and it usually operates one file at a time rather than across everything you own.
Automatic clipping. Point a tool at a long recording and let it propose short pieces. Fine for volume. You are accepting someone else's taste about what matters, and you still have to watch the proposals.
A search layer over the footage you already have. This does not make a cut. It answers the question of where the moment is so that the editing tool you already use has something to work on. Vivu is one of these: footage indexes itself as it lands, so an archive that keeps growing stays searchable without anyone tending it, and a query comes back as time points with the context around them. That is aimed squarely at the selection pass and does nothing whatsoever for the assembly.
When you do not need any of this
If you shoot for a project and finish it, and the footage never gets touched again, you do not have a findability problem. You have a normal editing job, and the answer is a normal editor plus a decent file naming habit. The same is true if your whole archive is small enough that you can hold it in your head, or if you are the only person who ever touches it. These tools start to matter when the library outlives the memory of the person who shot it, or when someone who was not on the shoot needs something out of it.
Which half is eating your hours is not a question anyone can answer from a comparison page. Look at where last month's time actually went, and buy for that half.