The free clipping tool that still does the work for you

The short version

If you have a Windows PC with a graphics card and you clip regularly, Clips Kitty costs nothing and nothing is metered. If you clip from a phone, a Mac or a borrowed laptop, one of the web tools below is the right answer and it is not close. If you would rather cut by hand and keep total control, CapCut is free and excellent at that.

All seven compared, row by row

Prices checked on 17 September 2026, each on that company's own pricing page: opus.pro, klap.app, vizard.ai, quso.ai, ssemble.com and descript.com. CapCut publishes no pricing page we could read, so no price is quoted for it here. Plans change and this table does not update itself. Only the columns above were checked: a blank is something we did not verify rather than something a tool lacks.

CapCut: free, and you do the work

CapCut is the answer almost everyone gives when somebody asks for a free clipping tool, and it deserves it: the editor is good, it costs nothing to use, and the desktop version edits on your own machine. What it does not do is watch a two hour stream and hand you the moments worth posting. You scrub the timeline, find the moments, cut them, crop them to vertical and keep the speaker in frame yourself. On a long stream that is most of an evening.

Use CapCut if you want hands-on control of every cut, or you work from a phone, a Mac or a Chromebook. Use Clips Kitty if you want that first pass done for you and you would still rather not pay: it is also free, and the finding, cropping and captioning are the parts it automates.

Opus Clip: the one everyone compares against

Opus Clip defined this category and is still the smoothest version of it. The free tier watermarks your captions, caps exports at 1080p and deletes them after three days, which makes it a preview rather than a deliverable. Starter is $15 a month and Pro is $29.

Use Opus Clip if you clip occasionally, from any device, and you would rather pay than own hardware. There is a full Opus Clip comparison here, with the year-one cost worked out.

Klap: paste a link, get clips

Klap is the simplest of the paid tools. You give it a URL and it returns clips, with very little to configure. You get one video free, then it is $29 a month billed monthly, or $14 a month on Basic billed yearly for 100 clips a month.

Use Klap if you want zero setup and a fixed clip allowance suits how much you post.

Vizard: the most generous free tier

Vizard is the only one of these with a recurring free tier that is genuinely usable: 60 credits a month, one credit per minute of video. Free exports are watermarked and capped at 720p, so the free tier is for trying rather than posting. Creator is $29 a month, or $14.50 billed yearly.

Use Vizard if you want the most minutes per dollar and you are happy on a metered plan.

quso.ai: clipping plus scheduling

quso.ai does the clipping and then adds the parts that come after it: an editor, a social scheduler and analytics. The free tier is 75 credits a month at 720p, and paid plans run $29, $39 and $49 a month.

Use quso.ai if you want the analytics and the scheduling queue in the same subscription as the clipping, on any machine.

Clips Kitty posts as well, to nine platforms at once, through WoopSocial or Upload-Post on your own account. The difference is that the posting is a service you connect and pay for separately rather than part of one bundled price, and there are no analytics.

Affiliate link - Clips Kitty may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you.

Ssemble: the cheapest subscription

Ssemble is the lowest monthly bill of the metered tools: $15 a month for Pro billed monthly, or $6 billed yearly, with one credit covering a twenty minute video.

Use Ssemble if your volume is low and predictable and you want the smallest possible subscription.

Descript: editing by editing text

Descript is a different kind of tool. It transcribes your video and lets you edit the video by editing the transcript, which is a genuinely better way to cut a podcast. Clip finding exists but is not the point of the product. The free tier is 60 minutes a month at 720p with a watermark, and paid plans are $16, $24 and $50.

Use Descript if your work is podcast-shaped and you want to edit words rather than waveforms.

Clips Kitty: free because it runs on your PC

Clips Kitty transcribes, scores the moments, crops to 9:16 with the speaker kept in frame, burns in word-synced captions and writes the titles, on your own machine. There is no account, no upload, no clip cap, no watermark and no paid tier, because there is no server bill to pass on. It reads Twitch and Kick VODs and YouTube links as well as local files, and it keeps working with the internet off once it is set up.

The trade is real and worth saying plainly: it needs Windows 10 or 11, 16 GB of RAM, and it is much happier with an NVIDIA graphics card. There is no phone version and no Mac version.

Questions people ask

What is the best free alternative to Opus Clip?

It depends on whether you want the tool to do the work. CapCut is free and is a full editor, but you find every moment and crop every clip by hand. Clips Kitty is free, has no paid tier, and still does the finding, the vertical cropping and the captions for you, because it runs on your own PC instead of somebody's servers. Vizard and quso.ai have recurring free tiers, but both cap you at 720p and meter your minutes.

Is there an open-source alternative to Opus Clip?

Clips Kitty is open source under AGPL-3.0. Opus Clip, Klap, Vizard, quso.ai, Ssemble, Descript and CapCut are all closed source. You can read every line of Clips Kitty, including every line that touches the network, change how clips are scored, or fork it. Because the licence cannot be revoked, the copy you have today keeps working whatever happens to the project.

Is there a free alternative to Klap?

Klap lets you make one video free, then costs $29 a month billed monthly, or $14 a month on Basic billed yearly for 100 clips a month. Clips Kitty does the same job with no plan, no clip allowance and no account, on your own Windows PC.

Is Vizard free?

Vizard has a recurring free tier of 60 credits a month, one credit per minute of video, and those exports are watermarked and capped at 720p. Removing the watermark means the Creator plan at $29 a month, or $14.50 billed yearly.

Is CapCut free, and does it find clips for you?

CapCut is free to use and it is a genuinely good editor, but it is manual: you scrub the video, pick the moments, cut them and crop them to vertical yourself. It does not watch a two hour stream and hand you the fifteen moments worth posting. That is the difference with Clips Kitty, which is also free and does that part for you.

What is the cheapest way to turn long videos into short clips?

Cheapest overall is a tool that runs on hardware you already own, because there is no monthly bill at all: Clips Kitty costs the electricity. Among the subscription tools, Ssemble starts at $15 a month billed monthly or $6 billed yearly, and Vizard and Klap come to about $14 a month on yearly billing. The catch with the local option is that it needs a Windows PC with 16 GB of RAM.

Do these tools upload my video?

Opus Clip, Klap, Vizard, quso.ai, Ssemble and Descript are web services, so the video goes up to their servers before anything happens, and you wait for the upload before you wait for the processing. CapCut's desktop app edits locally. Clips Kitty reads the file where it already sits and never uploads it, which is also why it works with no internet connection once it is set up.

Try it on one stream

The honest test is your own footage. Run one VOD through it and see whether the moments it picks are the ones you would have picked.

Opus Clip, Klap, Vizard, quso.ai, Ssemble, Descript and CapCut are trademarks of their respective owners. Clips Kitty is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any of them. Everything above is offered as fact, with the date it was checked and a link to the page it came from, so you can verify it yourself.