Forty-Five Tools, One Slot. Three Questions Remove Most Of Them.
Forty-five tools, nine boxes, five tools in each. Automated editing, animation, professional editing, online editors, all-in-one platforms, free tools, mobile, screen recording, effects. It is a clean grid and the caption is honest about what it is: everything in one picture, sorted by use.
But notice what makes this card different from almost every other tool card. All forty-five of these do the same job. They are not forty-five tools for forty-five tasks – they are forty-five candidates for one task, and that task is a single slot in your workflow.
Nobody edits in two editors. You might open a second one once to try it, and then you will go back to the one your hands know. So the question this card appears to ask – which of these forty-five is best? – is unanswerable, and worse, it is the wrong shape of question.
You cannot compare forty-five things. Nobody can. What you can do is eliminate, and three facts about your own situation – none of them about features – remove most of the list in about a minute.
The card this post is about
Watch the original reel: “45 best tools for video editing”
Nine boxes of five, footed “Features, plans and pricing change often. Check each tool’s official site before you choose.” The tables below reproduce every box as printed.
Three questions, asked before you read a single feature
Each of these is a fact about you, not about the software. You already know all three answers. That is the point – they cost nothing to apply.
Diagram: the elimination order
| Question | Why it comes first | What a “no” removes | What survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Phone or desk? | It is the hardest constraint and the one you cannot work around. A timeline on a phone is a different craft, not a smaller version of the same one | Answer “phone” and six boxes go. Answer “desk” and the whole MOBILE box goes – five tools, straight out | Phone: VideoPad, VidTrim, YouCut, Filmr, Splice, Quik. Desk: everything else |
| 2. Mac, Windows or Linux? | Nothing on this card tells you, and it decides more than any feature does | Not on a Mac? Final Cut Pro, iMovie and ScreenFlow are gone before you read what they do | Cross-platform: DaVinci Resolve, Shotcut, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Blender, Premiere Pro, plus every browser-based tool |
| 3. Are you actually going to pay? | Be honest now rather than at the export screen with a watermark on your video | Answer “no” and Premiere, Final Cut, Camtasia and ScreenFlow go | And the survivor list is not the box marked FREE TOOLS – see below |
| Only now: what do you actually make? | This is the last question, not the first. Three or four candidates are left by this point | — | Long-form talking head, short vertical clips, screen tutorials and animation each point at a different survivor |
Run those three and you are choosing between roughly four tools instead of forty-five. That is a decision a person can actually make. Forty-five is not a decision, it is a reason to close the tab.
This is the same move as treating a sixty-tool card as ten slots with six candidates each – except here it is sharper, because every single entry competes for the same one slot. There is no version of this where you end up using five of them.
The nine boxes, and what each one sorts by
Column 3 is the one worth reading down. The nine boxes are not nine kinds of the same thing – they use five different sorting axes between them, which is why one tool can legitimately belong in four boxes at once.
| Box (card’s label) | The five tools, as printed | What the box sorts by | Our note – checked 9 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automated editing | Synthesia · Pictory · DeepBrain · Magisto · Wisecut | How it works | Synthesia and DeepBrain are avatar generators, not editors – if you publish with them, see the disclosure rules. Magisto’s status is unclear to us: Vimeo bought it in 2019, one reference work lists it as shut down, the app listing still exists, and Vimeo is winding down the operation that built it. Open it before you plan around it |
| Animation | Animoto · Wave.video · Lumen5 · Powtoon · Animaker | What it does | Mostly template-driven motion graphics rather than animation in the drawing sense. Lumen5 and Wave.video are closer to “turn an article into a video” than to animating anything |
| Professional editing | Adobe Premiere Pro · Final Cut Pro · DaVinci Resolve · HitFilm Express · Lightworks | What it does | HitFilm Express was discontinued on 15 January 2025 – Artlist ended all the former FXhome apps. No new licences, no support, last free release 2021.3. Final Cut Pro is Mac only. And DaVinci Resolve has a full free version, which matters for the box below |
| Online video editors | Clipchamp · InVideo · Veed.io · Kapwing · FlexClip | Where it runs | A location, not a function. Every one of these also belongs in two or three other boxes on this card |
| All-in-one platforms | Renderforest · Moody · Biteable · Rocketium · Vyond | How much it does | “All-in-one” is a marketing category, not a capability. Vyond in particular is an animation tool and would sit as comfortably in box 2 |
| Free tools | Shotcut · Blender · Kdenlive · OpenShot · Avidemux | Price | The only box sorted by cost rather than function – see the section below. Also: Blender is a 3D creation suite with a video sequencer attached, not a video editor. Avidemux is a cutting and encoding utility |
| Mobile video editing | VideoPad · VidTrim · YouCut · Filmr · Splice | Where it runs | The most useful box on the card, because “phone” is a hard constraint. VideoPad is also a desktop product |
| Screen recording | Camtasia · iMovie · Quik · VidCutter · ScreenFlow | What it does | Only two of these five record screens. iMovie is Apple’s consumer editor, Quik is GoPro’s mobile app (its desktop version was retired), VidCutter is a trimmer. Camtasia and ScreenFlow are the real answers, and ScreenFlow is Mac only |
| Video effects | Adobe After Effects · Filmora · Movavi · FXhome · VSDC Free | What it does | FXhome is the company behind HitFilm Express in box 3 – the same discontinued product line, listed twice under two names. Filmora and Movavi are general editors rather than effects tools |
The “free tools” box is the one that costs you money
Eight of the nine boxes answer what does this tool do. One answers what does it cost. That single mismatch does more damage than any of the miscategorised entries, and here is why.
Putting five tools in a box marked FREE TOOLS implies something about the other forty: that they are not. A reader scanning for a free editor goes to box six, finds Shotcut, Blender, Kdenlive, OpenShot and Avidemux, and reasonably concludes those are the free options.
But DaVinci Resolve is in box three, under PROFESSIONAL EDITING, and it has a genuinely free version that is more capable than anything in box six. It is the single strongest free answer on the entire card and the price box hides it. Meanwhile Blender, which is in the free box, is a 3D creation suite – free, excellent, and not a video editor in the sense anyone reading this card means.
So the box marked “free” both understates what is free and overstates what is an editor. If you came to this card specifically because you have no budget, the box designed for you is the one most likely to send you wrong.
This is a price axis wearing a function label, and it is a close cousin of something we keep finding: a grid where the labels say where a tool was put rather than what it is. The fix is the same – re-sort on an axis the author did not use, which is exactly what the elimination table above does.
What is actually left, by situation
Run the three questions against the forty-five and this is roughly what survives. Not recommendations – just what is still standing after the constraints you cannot change.
| Your situation | What is still standing | What the card would have sent you to | Why the difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desk, any OS, no budget | DaVinci Resolve (free version), Kdenlive, Shotcut | Box 6, the FREE TOOLS box | The strongest free option is filed under “Professional”, not under “Free” |
| Desk, Mac, will pay | Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro | Box 3 | The card gets this one right. Mac is also the only case where Final Cut and ScreenFlow are even options |
| Desk, Windows or Linux, will pay | Premiere Pro, Resolve Studio, Filmora, Movavi | Box 3, including two Mac-only entries | Final Cut Pro and iMovie are not available to you, and nothing on the card says so |
| Phone only | YouCut, Splice, Filmr, VidTrim | Box 7 | The card gets this right too. One hard constraint, one clean box |
| Screen tutorials | Camtasia, or ScreenFlow if you are on a Mac | Box 8, which contains three tools that do not record screens | Two of the five entries in that box are the answer; the other three are editors and a trimmer |
| Short vertical clips from long video | Not really on this card | — | There is no long-to-short box. That is a whole job this card does not cover – we went through it in the faceless post linked below |
The last row is worth a pause. Repurposing long video into shorts is one of the most common editing jobs a creator has in 2026, and there is no box for it here – the closest the card gets is “automated editing”, which is something else. We mapped that whole pipeline in a post on faceless video tools, where the gap ran in the other direction.
Four honest caveats
The footer is right, and this card needs it more than most. “Features, plans and pricing change often. Check each tool’s official site before you choose.” Video editing is a category where the free tier is the whole decision for a lot of people, and free tiers move. The footer is the most load-bearing sentence on the picture.
One entry is verifiably discontinued, and it is on the card twice. Artlist ended the former FXhome applications – HitFilm and Imerge – on 15 January 2025. No new licences, no support, no updates for new hardware or operating systems. HitFilm Express sits in box 3 and FXhome sits in box 9: the same dead product line under two names. This is the exact failure we have found before, and the cure is the same thirty-second one.
One entry we could not resolve, and we are saying so rather than guessing. Magisto was bought by Vimeo in 2019. One reference work lists its fate as shut down; its app listing still exists under Vimeo; a 2026 write-up says it was relaunched; and Vimeo is reportedly winding down the operation that built it. We do not know which of those is current. Open the link and look before you build a workflow on it.
Our elimination table is about constraints, not quality. Saying Final Cut Pro is Mac-only is a fact. Saying Resolve beats Kdenlive is an opinion, and not one we are making here. The point of eliminating first is that it is done with facts; once you are down to three or four candidates you can argue about quality with a sample size you can actually handle.
The one-line version
Forty-five tools and one slot. You will use exactly one of these, so the job is not to find the best – it is to get down to a number you can decide between.
Phone or desk. Which operating system. Will you actually pay. Three facts you already know, none of them about features, and they take most of the list off the table in about a minute. Only then ask what you make.
And ignore the box marked FREE TOOLS if budget is your constraint. The strongest free editor on the card is filed under “Professional”, and the free box contains a 3D suite. A price label sitting among eight function labels is the one thing on this picture most likely to send you the wrong way.
Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does. Forty-five editors is learning; the first video you finish in one of them is doing – and after that your hands will decide the question for you, permanently.
If you want to be held to that, we run a free challenge at BANI Academy. There is no barrier to entry – you commit a small fee that is refunded when you finish, and the only requirement is that you actually do the work for the length of the challenge.
What are you editing in right now, and did you choose it or did it just happen to you? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.
More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.
One Comment