Wondershare Filmora

Who's Filmora for? People who want a video that looks edited, without a film course first.

You drag clips onto a timeline and they snap into place. Titles, transitions, music and effects sit in panels beside it. Pick one, drop it on, done.

It's not a toy, though. There's multi-camera editing, keyframes, motion tracking and proper colour tools. So there's room to grow.

Tutorial makers get a bonus. The built-in recorder captures your screen, camera, mic and computer sound together, and keeps each one separate so you can fix them afterwards.

Captions are handled for you as well. It turns speech into text in 27 languages.

And you don't have to subscribe. There's a pay-once licence, which is getting rare.

The watermark. The free edition lets you do the editing, then stamps Filmora on the video when you export. So it's really a long test drive.

Then there's what the price leaves out. On Basic, the AI tools run on credits you buy separately. The full stock library is its own add-on, free for 7 days and then $19.99 a month.

Watch the checkout as well. The buy page offers money off if you add that 7-day trial, which then renews every month.

The pay-once licence has strings. It covers Windows or Mac, not both, and the next big version costs extra.

Your desktop licence doesn't cover the phone apps either. And the iPhone app has a rough patch in its reviews, with freezes and crashes when a project gets heavy.

One for anyone who sells their videos: Filmora's own FAQ says its AI-made images, stickers and text-to-video clips are for non-commercial use.

Three ways to pay, and it's worth a minute to pick the right one.

Basic is $49.99 a year. No watermark, 4K export, and it works on both Windows and Mac. AI tools are pay-as-you-go.

Advanced is $59.99 a year. For ten dollars more you get 1,000 AI credits a month and 10 GB of cloud storage. Filmora shows that as marked down from $69.99, so it may not stay there.

Perpetual is $79.99, once. You keep Filmora 16 for good. But it's Windows or Mac, not both, and the next major version is a new purchase.

So which? We'd take Advanced if you edit every week, and Perpetual if you edit a few times a year and can't stand subscriptions.

Students and teachers get a discount once they've verified.

A caveat first. The ratings we could read are for the phone app, not the desktop editor: 4.7 on the App Store from about 90,000 ratings.

The fans say it's easy. One wrote that it stopped them feeling bad about never learning Premiere.

The unhappy ones talk about two things. Stability, with freezes and crashes once a project gets busy. And money, with people annoyed at how much sits behind Pro.

Our favourite review is from someone who gave up twice, then had ChatGPT walk them through it step by step, and ended up with their best video yet. So there's a learning curve, just a short one.

Hacker News hardly mentions it. One commenter says Filmora is kept simple on purpose, for people new to editing.