Since its release in 2020, CapCut has taken the short-form video world by storm. The fact it’s owned by ByteDance Ltd, the same company which also owns TikTok, might have helped in that regard. 

Starting life on iPhone and Android devices, it quickly became one of the best video editing apps out there, adding a web-based editor, and most recently, a desktop video editor for both Mac and Windows. For this review, we’re looking at where it all began: mobile video editing.  

CapCut: Pricing & plans

• It’s free for most tools, but some advanced features are locked behind a subscription

The basic CapCut editor is free, although this might make you think you don’t get much for nothing. Quite the contrary: CapCut is a very capable and feature-rich editor, as we’ll explore further below. You don’t even need to create an account in order to start using it: just launch the app, import some footage and away you go.

There is however a ‘Pro’ version of this video editor, but to explore its capabilities, you need to register. Pro offers you 100GB of online storage, and grants you access to a variety of advanced features, such as improving the quality of old photographs, upscaling video, removing flicker, image noise, and a bunch of transitions.

You can get all of this through an ongoing annual or monthly subscription - but it’s not especially cheap. Considering LumaFusion offers you a pro-level mobile video editing experience for a one-off price of $30, maybe CapCut are relying on their market penetration to convince people to subscribe to their business model.

• Pricing & plans: 3/5

CapCut: Shortcuts

• A useful list of ready-made templates and actions to help you speed up the creation process… but why does CapCut demand access to our entire Photos library to allow you to do this?

When you first launch CapCut you’ll find the interface filled with icons to take you to commonly performed actions, such as Ad Maker, Product Photo and Retouch. The Ad Maker grants you access to templates you can use to create adverts in seconds, applying your own clips on top of the chosen template. It lets the software do a lot of the work for you, but there is a puzzling request.

Usually, you can instruct apps to gain access to all your Photos library, or choose the select few it can view. All pretty straightforward, and leaves the user in full control of what the software can see. Here, although you can manage the shots you wish CapCut to use, this only applies when creating a project from scratch. 

If you want to use one of these shortcuts, CapCut puzzlingly needs to see your entire library. Now this might concern only a handful of people, but we thought it worthwhile for the privacy-conscious among you, to know those shortcuts and templates may be worth avoiding. There is no technical reason for this request, and it makes us wonder what else the software might do with your photographs and video clips. 

• Shortcuts: 2/5