# What is the best video editing software? Four questions that decide it > There is no best video editing software, and the honest version of this answer is a set of questions rather than a winner. Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/what-is-the-best-video-editing-software There is no best video editing software, and the honest version of this answer is a set of questions rather than a winner. The main options people are choosing between are Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer at the professional end, CapCut, Clipchamp and iMovie at the consumer end, Descript in the transcript-driven category, Camtasia and ScreenFlow for screen recording work, and Kdenlive, Shotcut and OpenShot among the open-source editors. Which of those is right for you is settled by four things that have nothing to do with feature counts. ## Who else touches the project This is the question that decides it most often and gets asked least. If you hand projects to freelancers, an agency or a post house, your choice is largely made for you by what they can open. If nobody else ever touches your projects, you are free to pick on preference, and the switching cost is yours alone. The related question is what happens when the person who owns the project leaves. Broadcast and daily-turnaround teams tend to standardise hard on one editor for this reason, because a project nobody can open is worse than a project built in software you dislike. ## What you are delivering, and how often it changes A one-off long piece and a weekly stream of short vertical cuts are different jobs. The tools built for volume assume the same source material gets recut repeatedly, and the tools built for craft assume one timeline gets refined. Choosing for the wrong cadence hurts in a specific way: you either do repetitive work in software that has no shortcut for it, or you do delicate work in software that wants to finish for you. Revision load belongs in this question too. If your work goes through named reviewers who ask for specific changes, weight anything that makes small targeted edits cheap and weight down anything that regenerates the whole output. ## Whether the AI features are the reason you are switching Most of these applications have added automatic captioning, silence removal and reframing, and there are also standalone tools that do only those things. Before switching software for them, check whether the standalone route solves it, because [the automated parts of an edit](https://vivu.ai/guide/ai-powered-video-editing-software) can usually be bolted onto the editor you already use. The same applies to [a prompt-driven cutting tool](https://vivu.ai/guide/chatcut-alternative), which is a different category of thing from an NLE and can sit alongside one. ## Whether the editor is your bottleneck at all This is the question that saves the most money, because a surprising share of "we need better editing software" turns out to be "we cannot find the footage." An editor operates on a clip you have already located. If the painful part of your week is opening old project folders looking for a shot you remember shooting, a faster timeline changes nothing about that, and [locating material you already have](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-find-old-marketing-videos) is a separate problem with separate tools. [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/platform) works on that side of the line and stays out of the edit entirely: it searches inside the footage a team has uploaded and returns the time ranges that match, which you then pull up in whichever editor you picked. ## When the cheapest answer is the right one If you cut short pieces occasionally, shoot on a phone, and deliver to social platforms, the editor bundled with your operating system or the one built into your phone will do the job, and moving to a professional application will slow you down for months. Complexity has a real cost, paid in the weeks where you cannot remember how to do something you used to do quickly. ## How to decide Write down the last ten things you delivered and mark which step took longest. If it was building the timeline, pick on interface and on what your collaborators use. If it was revisions, pick on how cheaply you can change one thing. If it was hunting for source material, then the software you are comparing is not the software you need, and any of these editors will do until you fix that. ## FAQ ### Which video editing software do professional editors actually use? Professional work is spread across Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro, and which one dominates depends on the corner of the industry. Scripted television and film post has a different default from broadcast news, which has a different default from social and branded content teams. The practical implication is that "what professionals use" is the wrong question to ask in the abstract. Ask what the people you actually hand work to are using, because interchange between these applications is the friction you will feel every week. ### How long does it take to switch video editing software? Longer than the trial period suggests. Learning where the commands live takes a few days. Getting back to your previous speed takes considerably longer, because editing speed is muscle memory more than knowledge, and rebuilding project templates, export presets and shared conventions is a separate chunk of work. The sensible way to test is to cut one real, deadline-free deliverable end to end in the new software rather than following a tutorial. That surfaces the specific thing that will annoy you daily. ### Do I need separate software for vertical social video? No, all of the major editors handle vertical formats. The reason people end up with a second tool is throughput rather than capability: cutting fifty short vertical pieces a month in an application designed for careful long-form work is slow, and the dedicated short-form tools remove steps that only matter at that volume. If you are producing a handful of vertical pieces a month, adding a second tool adds an export path to maintain and is rarely worth it. ### What matters more, the software or the computer it runs on? For most people, neither is the limit. Hardware becomes the deciding factor at specific points: high-resolution multi-camera work, heavy colour work, and long-form projects with many effects layers. Below those thresholds, an ordinary recent machine will edit ordinary footage. If your current setup is slow, check whether the footage format is the cause before replacing either the software or the machine. Working from lightweight proxy files instead of camera originals fixes a surprising number of performance complaints without spending anything.