It's official: TikTok has gone dark. TikTok shut itself down for U.S. users on Saturday just hours before the long-contested was set to go into effect. Several other ByteDance-owned apps have followed suit, including the popular video editing app CapCut. With the app suddenly unavailability, many content creators have been left scrambling for alternatives while the future of their digital workflows remains up in the air.
"Sorry, CapCut isn't available right now," reads an error message that users across America woke up to on January 19. "A law banning CapCut has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use CapCut for now. Rest assured, we're working to restore our service in the U.S. Please stay tuned!"
On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban passed by Congress and signed into law by the outgoing Biden administration, leaving ByteDance with few options for how to proceed. The company can either sell TikTok, CapCut, and its other popular apps, shut them down, or struggle along long enough for President-elect Donald Trump to reverse the ban or offer an extension. To learn more about TikTok's ban, check out our timeline of everything that's happened so far.
This disruption has caused all kinds of headaches for content creators in the U.S. who rely on CapCut's user-friendly interface and extensive features for video editing. President-elect Donald Trump has said he will consider giving TikTok an extension once he takes office on Monday, January 20, but as of now there's no telling how long it could be out of commission. If you're looking for other apps to handle your video editing needs in the meantime, here are the best CapCut alternatives we've found as well as how they compare.
Adobe Premiere Rush
Ranked among the best video editing apps, Adobe Premiere Rush is a cross-media, all-in-one app that links desktop with mobile. Designed to be more beginner-friendly than Adobe staples like Premiere Pro, it operates via drag and drop for handling photos and videos on the timeline, housing a clip-editing menu in the lower left of the screen while refinement tools appear in menus at the upper right.
The app offers a full suite of audio and visual adjustments based on Adobe’s Sensei artificial intelligence engine and packs professionally designed motion graphics templates, giving you the option to change color, size and fonts. Best of all, everything is saved to the cloud, so you can start an edit on your phone or on your desktop and pick up your project later on your iPad, or vice versa.
Just like CapCut, it has a free tier as well as a paid tier for $9.99 per month that gets you access to all its premium features like exporting 4K video, auto reframing, and more. It's available for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows 10.
Download Adobe Premiere Rush: Android | iOS
DaVinci Resolve
While more difficult to master than CapCut, DaVinci Resolve offers an impressive suite of video editing tools that's great for bigger projects. It also streamlines one of CapCut's biggest downsides: multi-track editing. DaVinci Resolve lets you trim all layers simultaneously, which makes editing a breeze.
DaVinci Resolve offers some of the most advanced color correction capabilities in the business, and its sound editing features blow CapCut out of the water. It also has no limits for free users for 4K video exports, unlike CapCut. Where DaVinci Resolve really stumbles is automatic captioning, which is behind a paywall. Instead of a monthly fee, the paid tier DaVinci Resolve Studio costs $295 for a lifetime license.
If you can get over the initial learning curve, DaVinci Resolve is a great option for more experienced video editors. Unfortunately, it's not particularly mobile friendly as DaVinci Resolve is only available on macOS, Windows, Linux and iPadOS.
Filmora
The closest one-to-one substitute for CapCut would have to be Filmora. Available on mobile as well as desktop, it has a user interface that's visually very similar to CapCut, making it perfect for beginners. Tools are easy to find, and there are plenty of effects, templates, and filters to play around with. Granted, Filmora caters more to the professional crowd with features that get into the nitty gritty of video editing like keyframing and color correction, so it may be a bit overkill depending on your needs.
I've also found it to be kind of spammy with the way it pushes you to buy its tiered version, though it does come in cheaper than CapCut at $49 annually or a one-time payment of $79 for lifetime access. That gets you a much more powerful program packed with handy features like AI-based tools and smooth integration with stock media.
Download Filmora: Android | iOS
More from Tom's Guide
- How to get around the US TikTok ban
- The US TikTok ban – a full timeline
- How to watch Fox News + Fox Sports live anywhere for Donald Trump's inauguration
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