Top 20 Free Video Editors

DaVinci Resolve (originally known as da Vinci Resolve) is a color correction and non-linear video editing (NLE) application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, originally developed by da Vinci Systems, and now developed by Blackmagic Design following its acquisition in 2009. In addition to the commercial version of the software (known as DaVinci Resolve Studio), Blackmagic Design also distributes a free edition, with reduced functionality, simply named DaVinci Resolve (formerly known as DaVinci Resolve Lite).

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OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source video editor for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The project was started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective of providing a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor.OpenShot is written in Python, PyQt5, C++ and offers a Python API. OpenShot’s core video editing functionality is implemented in a C++ library, libopenshot. The core audio editing is based on the JUCE library.
Since version 2.0.6 (released in 2016), OpenShot is now a cross-platform application. OpenShot is also available in PortableApps form for Windows since 2020.

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Avid Media Composer is a film and video editing software application or non-linear editing system (NLE) developed by Avid Technology. Initially released in 1989 on Macintosh II as an offline editing system, the application has since evolved to allow for both offline and online editing, including uncompressed standard definition (SD), high definition (HD), 2K and 4K editing and finishing. Since the 1990s, Media Composer has been the dominant non-linear editing system in the film and television industry, first on Macintosh and later on Windows. Avid NewsCutter, aimed at newsrooms, Avid Symphony, aimed at finishing, were all Avid products that were derived from Media Composer and share similar interfacing, as were Avid Xpress Pro (discontinued in 2008) and its predecessor Avid Xpress DV, which were aimed at the lower end of the market.

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VirtualDub is a free and open-source video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee. It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression. It uses AVI container format to store captured video. The first version of VirtualDub, written for Windows 95, to be released on SourceForge was uploaded on August 20, 2000.In 2009, the third-party software print guide Learning VirtualDub referred to VirtualDub as “the leading free Open Source video capture and processing tool”. Due to its “powerful” versatility and usefulness especially in the field of video processing (see below), PC World has referred to VirtualDub as “something of a ‘Photoshop’ for video files”, PC Perspective recommends it for its low overhead, and nextmedia’s PC & Tech Authority particularly praises it for its Direct stream copy feature to avoid generational degradation of video quality when performing simple editing and trimming tasks and the fact that VirtualDub “offers several valuable features that other packages lack, and helps you get quick results without any fuss or patronising wizards”.VirtualDub is recommended for use by professional computer and tech magazines, guides, and reviewers such as PC World, PC & Tech Authority, PC Perspective, technologies guide website MakeTechEasier, freeware and open source software review site Ghacks, Speed Demos Archive, as well as third-party professional video production companies, and the creators of Wine (software).

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Kdenlive (acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor) is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers.With the release of Kdenlive 15.04.0 it became part of the official KDE project.Kdenlive packages are freely available for Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows, and the source code is available under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.

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Avidemux is a free and open-source software for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. The developers intend it as “a simple tool for simple video processing tasks” and to allow users “to do elementary things in a very straightforward way”. It is written in C++ and uses Qt for its graphical user interface, and FFmpeg for its multimedia functions. Starting with version 2.4, Avidemux also offers a command-line interface, and since version 2.6, the original GTK port has not been maintained and is now discontinued. Avidemux is developed for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Unofficial builds are also available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

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VSDC Free Video Editor is a non-linear editing (NLE) application developed by Multilab LLC. The program is capable of processing high-resolution footage including 4K UHD, 3D and VR 360-degree videos. VSDC allows for applying post production effects, live color correction, and motion tracking. It supports VirtualDub plug-ins as well as the ability to capture video from screen, record voice, save multimedia files to numerous formats including those pre-configured for publishing on Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Shotcut is a free and open-source cross-platform video editing application for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows. Started in 2011 by Dan Dennedy, Shotcut is developed on the MLT Multimedia Framework, in development since 2004 by the same author.

Shotcut supports video, audio, and image formats via FFmpeg. It uses a timeline for non-linear video editing of multiple tracks that may be composed of various file formats. Scrubbing and transport control are assisted by OpenGL GPU-based processing and a number of video and audio filters are available.

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HitFilm Express is a video editing program that enables you to create original video content that’s got some seriously professional look to it. With this desktop program, you don’t have to pay the big bucks to make cool CGI effects or do awesome transitions of video shots. On top of that, it gives you a vast expanse of creative possibilities with its numerous tools, so there’s no need to be shy around it at all.

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Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games. Blender’s features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.

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LiVES (LiVES Editing System) is a free video editing software and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions (including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch Linux, Mandriva and Mageia). There are also ports for BSD, and it will run under Solaris and IRIX. It has been compiled under OS X Leopard, but not thoroughly tested on that platform. In early 2019, a version for Microsoft Windows was announced, with a release slated for in the second half of 2019.

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Pitivi (, originally spelled PiTiVi) is a free and open-source non-linear video editor for Linux, developed by various contributors from free software community and the GNOME project, with support also available from Collabora. Pitivi is designed to be the default video editing software for the GNOME desktop environment. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

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Olive is a free and open-source cross-platform video editing application for Linux, Windows and macOS. It is currently in alpha.It is released under GNU General Public License version 3. It is written in C++ and uses Qt for its graphical user interface, FFmpeg for its multimedia functions, OpenImageIO library, OpenColorIO for color management and CMake build system for configuring.The plan of the development team is to combine complete color management, a fast and high-fidelity half-float/float-based render pipeline, node-based compositing and audio mixing, and a highly efficient automated disk cache all together in the one program. According to the development team, this batch of features is one “no other NLE – not even commercial – has tried to do”.

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Lightworks is a non-linear editing system (NLE) for editing and mastering digital video. It was an early developer of computer-based non-linear editing systems, and has been in development since 1989 and won a 2017 EMMY Award for pioneering digital nonlinear editing. Lightworks has millions of adopters worldwide due to the software being available across three platforms in Windows, Mac and Linux. The development of an open-source version was announced on April 11, 2010. No source code of the program has yet been released. In July 2020, a Lightworks product manager confirmed that they “Still hope to announce something in the future” about it becoming open source.

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Cinelerra is a video editing and composition program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for the Linux operating system. It is free software distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. In addition to editing, it supports advanced composition operations such as keying and mattes, including a title generator, many effects to edit video and audio, keyframe automation, and many other professional functions depending on the variant. It processes audio in 64 floating-point form. Video is processed in RGBA or YUVA color spaces, in 16-bit integer or floating-point form. It is resolution and image refresh rate independent, which means it can support video of any speed and size; this applies to the HV variant, the GG variant can support up to 8K video. The GG variant can also create DVDs and Blu-rays.

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LosslessCut is a free, platform independent Video editing software, which supports numerous audio, video and container formats. Basically, LosslessCut is a graphical user interface, in particular useable under MacOS, Windows and Linux, for the Multimedia Framework FFmpeg. Thereby it supports all formats supported by FFmpeg. The software focusses on the lossless editing of the video files. By copying the selected image sequences without transcoding or re-rendering it achieves very fast creation of the target file in comparison to tools that re-encode frames.

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Flowblade Movie Editor is a free and open-source video editing software for Linux. The project was started by lead developer Janne Liljeblad in 2009 and has been active since. The source code is currently hosted on Github. Flowblade employs a film-style insert editing model as workflow with similar design approach as Avid. In insert editing clips are generally placed tightly after other clips when they are inserted on the Timeline. Edits are fine tuned by trimming in and out points of clips or by cutting and deleting parts of clips. Flowblade builds most of its functionality using media framework MLT. Other MLT video editors are KDEnlive and Shotcut.
Other used libraries include Frei0r effects and LADSPA. Flowblade supports all of the formats supported by FFmpeg or libav (such as QuickTime, AVI, WMV, MPEG, and Flash Video, among others), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV and AVCHD.

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Natron is a free and open-source node-based compositing application. It has been influenced by digital compositing software such as Avid Media Illusion, Apple Shake, Blackmagic Fusion, Autodesk Flame and Nuke, from which its user interface and many of its concepts are derived. Natron supports plugins following the OpenFX 1.4 API. Most open-source and commercial OpenFX plug-ins are supported.

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iMovie is a video editing software application developed by Apple Inc. for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS devices. It was originally released in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-enabled consumer Mac model – the iMac DV. Since version 3, iMovie has been a macOS-only application included with the iLife suite of Mac applications. iMovie was included for free with the purchase of a new Mac or iOS device in late 2013 and has been free to all users since early 2017.

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VideoPad Video Editor (or simply VideoPad) is a video editing application developed by NCH Software. It is complemented by the VirtualDub plug-ins that work with the software. VideoPad integrates WavePad, a sound-editing program; MixPad, a sound-mixing program; and PhotoPad, an image editor. VideoPad supports frequently used file formats including Audio Video Interleave (AVI), Windows Media Video (WMV), 3GP, and DivX. It supports direct video uploads to YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook.

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