I’ve been using Premiere Pro for some time now, and I’m 100% satisfied with it. People love saying that it’s industry standard, there are countless professionals that choose it, and I absolutely see why. It’s convenient, super powerful, has all the features you might need, and is integrated into the Adobe ecosystem.

CapCut, on the other hand, is much simpler. It’s trying to be big and modern with all these AI features, but it still lacks the depth that Premiere Pro offers. One of its main advantages, though, is that it has a free version. But is it powerful enough to make you want to switch from Premiere Pro? Let’s discuss.

What I love (or don’t) about Premiere Pro

I decided to start with Premiere Pro because I just have more experience using it.

For context, I’m not editing professional movies or something big like that. It’s mostly fan edits, travel vlogs, family videos, YouTube reviews, and stuff. But I still need such, should I say, more advanced things like background removal, auto captions, noise clean-up, motion tracking, chroma key, etc. I also sometimes like experimenting with a bit of motion graphics and kinetic typography and text animation in general. The thing is, Premiere Pro does it all.

If I’m looking for something more advanced, I go to After Effects instead, but it’s actually another thing I like about Premiere Pro: you can just import its project into AE. The Adobe ecosystem makes it extremely easy and convenient to do such things between all types of their software, and it’s definitely worth mentioning.

Another thing I found incredible when I was just learning Premiere Pro is that if you need a certain tutorial, there’s definitely one somewhere on YouTube because this software is truly popular and has a huge community.

But to be honest I didn’t even need that many tutorials because I personally find Premiere Pro rather intuitive. There are obviously things that are a bit challenging to find at first, but after some time (and after you’ve learned the most common shortcuts), it feels easy.

There are two things I can say about Premiere that are somewhat negative: performance (sometimes) and pricing.

I have a Windows laptop with Intel Core i7 and RTX 4080 (32GB RAM), and even though I know it’s not the most powerful machine in 2026, I think it’s a decent one still. When I do simple stuff like zoom transitions, a bit of animated text, and perhaps a couple of blurs, everything is okay, but when I try to create something more advanced, I gotta be patient. Nothing too terrible, but still noticeable.

Since Adobe are pretty famous guys with pretty awesome products, they know their worth and it feels. Premiere Pro is more expensive than most video editors I know, and their subscription model makes it even worse and even more expensive in the long run.

But what about CapCut?

Speaking about features, CapCut definitely has less to offer than Premiere Pro. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a decent list: the desktop version has multi-track editing, keyframes, speed ramps, auto captions, background removal, filters, transitions, audio tools, stock assets, templates, and a bunch of AI-ish tools. It’s more than enough for a regular user, but might be lacking for those who are into professional editing.

What I absolutely loved about CapCut is how easy it is to use it. I said that Premiere Pro was rather intuitive, but when you launch CapCut, you understand that THIS is intuitive. I swear, I didn’t need a single tutorial (although I kinda thank my editing experience for that) and managed to edit a full video just by clicking around.

On top of that, it’s got a free version, and it’s not like free versions by many developers out there: it is really free. I even thought it would leave a watermark on my video because I’d used their mobile app previously and it did, but the desktop one doesn’t. The free version obviously has some limits (for example, you can’t add auto subs there), but I understand it, they have to make money somehow. Still, even the paid version isn’t as expensive as Premiere Pro and, god forbid, Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription. 

The performance was also better than Premiere on my laptop, but I think it’s mostly because CapCut is just incapable of as many advanced effects as Premiere. Export times were also faster and the preview windows never froze.

However, there’s just something about CapCut that I don’t like. It doesn’t give you as much control as Premiere does. It’s like it wants you to edit with templates and rush to upload your video to TikTok. In Premiere, I can adjust almost everything to be precise and make even the tiniest details look the way I intended them to look. CapCut doesn’t give me that unfortunately.

What’s the verdict?

I personally would say that you should go for CapCut only if money is the issue. Its free version is pretty great for beginners and casual content creators, and by paying about $10 a month, you’ll get all the trendy templates and even some AI features.

But if you don’t mind paying a bit more, I’d say go for Premiere Pro. It’s better in everything, it feels premium, it gives you plenty of control and opportunities. It’s just superior, I’m sorry.