Quick answer:
- Kapwing is an online video editor rated 4/5 stars on Trustpilot (1,300+ reviews)
- Kapwing is a versatile, cloud-based video editing platform with AI-powered features
- Key features include auto subtitles, smart cut, video resizing, collaborative editing, and more
- Users praise its ease of use, versatility, and AI tools; some cons are pricing and file size limits
- Offers free, pro ($24/mo), and business ($64/mo) plans with varying usage limits
- Provides extensive written and video tutorials for beginners
Kapwing is an online platform for creating and editing social media content. It offers versatile editing tools and AI-powered features to create everything from videos and images to GIFs and audio. 💪
This cloud-based platform’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone of any skill level to get started. Collaborating with team members is also a breeze with Kapwing’s inbuilt real-time communication tools. ⚡
The versatility of Kapwing makes it an excellent product for creatives of all types:
- Social Media Managers create engaging content to post across different platforms by resizing videos and images to fit any format. 😎
- Educators design engaging video tutorials and lectures by adding subtitles to increase accessibility. 🥇
- Marketers build amazing visuals to draw in their audiences with promotional campaigns. 😎
- Content Creators streamline their video production while adding special effects, GIFs, and memes. 🧡
- Hobbyists make simple edits to their home videos by trimming and cutting content. 😉
Kapwing is so popular with its users because it is accessible and easy to use. As a browser-based platform, anyone with an internet connection can access it anytime. It couldn’t be easier to get started, and they are constantly creating new features so all its users stay up-to-date with the latest content creation trends.
So, without further ado, let’s take a deep dive into exactly why Kapwing is so good, what features it offers, and if there’s anywhere it comes up short. 🤔
Overview of Kapwing's Features
Kapwing is known for its comprehensive feature set but let’s take a deep dive on some of the most useful tools for content creators. 🤝
AI-Powered Auto Subtitles
85% of people watch videos on Facebook without the sound being turned on. This makes it absolutely essential to put captions on your videos to engage the biggest possible audience. Of course, you don’t want to ruin your production efficiency by manually transcribing your video, which is where AI-powered auto subtitles come in. 🧡
At Submagic, we offer an industry-leading accuracy rate of 89.9% on our automatic subtitles, so we know when someone’s doing it right - and Kapwing is a great option for adding subtitles. The subtitles are automatically added with fairly good accuracy, so you’ll only need a few manual edits. 😉
You can also change the font, size, and color to fit your brand perfectly, while emojis and text animations help increase audience engagement. It would be nice to see a few more pre-built viral fonts to choose from, but overall, you are given a good range of fonts. 🤝
Smart Cut – Automatic Silence Removal
If you want an engaged audience that watches your videos to the end, you can’t have long silences. If there are many pauses in your video, people will lose interest and click on another, more entertaining video.
This is particularly true when you are producing short videos for YouTube, Instagram Reels, or TikTok. This format gives you a limited time, so every second counts. If your audience loses interest, even for a moment, they will simply swipe on to the following video.
Kapwing allows you to automatically remove these moments of silence so you have a video that makes the most of every second and maintains the audience's attention throughout. You can choose how sensitive the AI is to pauses to achieve the perfect pace for your video.
This AI-powered silence remover not only saves you time in the production process but also leaves you with highly professional-looking cuts. If you want to take things to the next level, you should look for a tool that automatically removes filler words like “um” and “ahh,” as well as silences in your videos. This feature is offered with Submagic and makes your content even more tightly produced and professional. 😎
Video Resizer with Preset Ratios
Creating high-quality video content people love takes time, skill, and effort. When you put this much effort in, you want to ensure your content is seen across as many platforms as possible. ⚡
This often means changing the aspect ratio of your content to make it perfect for every type of media. For example, when posting long-form videos on YouTube, creators will use a landscape aspect ratio of 16:9. Short-form videos like those seen on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram use the 9:16 vertical video view. For in-feed posts on social media like Instagram and Facebook, you may also need to use a square 1:1 ratio. Kapwing has presets stored for every social media platform, so you can easily reach your audience wherever they view content.
Collaborative Video Editing
Kapwing’s collaboration tools make it easy to work with team members, edit projects, and give feedback in real-time. The built-in comments and approval features allow busy teams to streamline their workflows and get more done together. 🤝
Video to GIF Converter
GIFs are one of the most commonly shared formats of media amongst friends and in chat groups. Making easily accessible GIFs from your content opens the door to people sharing your work for you and going viral. 😉
Kapwing makes it easy to convert videos into GIFs while maintaining high quality and you can use a range of video formats, including MP4, MOV, and WebM.
AI Video Highlights
A powerful AI feature Kapwing offers is the ability to automatically identify the best moments in a video. These highlights can be repurposed into short-form video content, images, or GIFs and shared as promotional content for your long-form videos.
Customizable effects and transitions enhance the final output to grab the audience's attention. Because this process is automated, your video production becomes streamlined, with only simple edits needing to be made manually.
Generative AI for Video Creation
This is a premium feature that generates brand-new videos based on text prompts. It is undoubtedly a cool feature, but the AI technology just isn’t good enough at the moment to reliably produce videos you could use commercially.
It is often obvious that AI created the videos because they contain some surreal elements. This means you can’t rely on them for brand storytelling, but you could use short, simple clips for B-roll footage to fill out your videos. ⚡
Generative AI is always improving. So, now is the perfect time to get comfortable with using it, even if it is more fun than professional at the moment. 💪
Meme Generator
Kapwing’s Meme generator enables users to quickly create images and videos based on current trends using prebuilt templates. Like GIFs, memes are a modern and fun way to repurpose content and engage with your audience in a light-hearted way. As you have the option to use templates or customize your own memes, the possibilities really are endless with how you choose to entertain your audience. 🧡
Pros and Cons of Using Kapwing Based on User Reviews
Kapwing reviews show it to be a highly-rated online editor with four stars on Trustpilot from over 1,300 reviews. Here’s a breakdown of what users love about Kapwing and some of the things they don’t like as much.
Pros
Ease of Use: Reviewers are consistently impressed by Kapwing’s interface. Because it is so simple and intuitive, it makes it easy for beginners to make professional-looking videos for all kinds of social media.
Collaboration: The real-time communication features mean that professional teams can easily work on projects together.
Versatility: Users like the variety of tools offered by Kapwing. They can do everything from making simple edits to taking advantage of high powered AI tools.
AI-Powered Features: Reviewers appreciate AI tools for tasks like automatic subtitling, background removal, and content generation in streamlining their content production.
Accessibility: Kapwing is a browser-based platform that is accessible from any device with an internet connection, making it convenient for anyone to use.
Cons
Pricing: Kapwing offers a free plan to get you started, but this comes with heavy usage limits. The paid plans start at considerably more than other leading AI-powered tools like Submagic.
File Size Limits: Some reviewers mention limitations on file sizes, particularly for the free plan. Some have been angered to find out they'll need to pay to download their video after investing a lot of time into making it.
Occasional Bugs and Glitches: While generally stable, some users report occasional bugs or glitches that have caused them to lose all their work.
Limited Offline Functionality: As a web-based platform, Kapwing requires an internet connection to function, which can be a limitation in areas with poor connectivity.
Customer Support: While Kapwing offers support resources, some reviewers mention that direct customer support can be slow or difficult to reach.
Kapwing Pricing Plans
Kapwing offers three standard pricing plans and an enterprise option for larger organizations that need to create custom plans. The paid plans are a little more expensive than some of the top competitors - Kapwing charges $24 per month to remove the watermark, whereas this starts at $20 with Submagic. The next pricing tier for Kapwing goes up to $64 per month compared to $50 with Submagic.
So, let’s take a look at what is included in each plan to see if they are worth it. 🤔
Free
The free tier of Kapwing helps to get you started using their editing software without any risk but there are heavy usage limitations.
You can only use the auto subtitler for 10 minutes per month, 8 minutes of text-to-speech, and each video export is limited to 4 minutes. You do get unlimited exports, but each of them comes with a watermark and only 720p quality, meaning they are not really suitable for commercial use.
Pro - $24 per user per month ($16 per month when paid annually)
The pro tier unlocks much greater access and usage limits. You can now create videos up to 120 minutes long, 300 minutes of subtitler per month, and generate up to 100 minutes of text-to-speech. The watermark has been removed, and you can export videos of 4K video quality.
With the pro tier, you can now translate videos up to 300 minutes per month, use a collaborative workspace, have unlimited cloud storage, and edit videos 50 times per month using AI features.
Business - $64 per user per month ($50 per month when paid annually)
With the business plan, you get everything in pro, with increased monthly usage limits as follows:
Auto subtitler for 900 minutes.
Translate videos for 900 minutes.
300 minutes of premium text-to-speech.
30 minutes of lip-synced video.
Edit with AI features 150 times.
Clone up to 2 voices for text-to-speech.
Enterprise
If you need usage limits that exceed what is offered by the business plan, get in touch with Kapwing’s sales team directly to arrange a custom plan. 😎
Kapwing Tutorials and Resources
Kapwing offers a range of resources, including written tutorials on its website and an extensive YouTube library of video tutorials.
The articles on the website are broken into six main categories: AI + Video, Video Production, Subtitles & Dubbing, Video Strategy, YouTube Guides, and Instagram Guides.
Here are some of the topics that each area teaches you about.
- AI + Video
This section covers how to translate videos for language learners, incorporate ChatGPT into your workflows, and clone a voice using AI.
- Video Production
How do you add special effects to a transparent video background, how do you fix audio in videos, and how do you create a video with pictures?
- Subtitles & Dubbing
How do you make a custom karaoke video? What are the best fonts for video subtitles? How do you reach a local video audience?
- Video Strategy
What’s the best time to post on LinkedIn? How to make B2B videos and content repurposing.
- YouTube Guides
How long are the new YouTube Shorts? How to automatically add captions on YouTube. How to transcribe a YouTube video.
- Instagram Guides
How to post a photo on Instagram without cropping, add music to Instagram posts, and monetize Instagram Reels.
This quick overview shows that Kapwing has a good range of tutorials to help beginner creators get started and optimize their social media content. They also have a YouTube channel with hundreds of hands-on videos demonstrating exactly how to use the product. ⚡
Kapwing or Submagic?
The choice here is straightforward, but it depends on what you are looking for.
As we’ve seen from this review, Kapwing is a great tool for editing videos, GIFs, and images with some handy AI-powered tools. It is ideal for content creators who want to make use of the clean interface to edit and create entertaining videos for their audience. 💪
Submagic is hyper-focused on making viral content for you and streamlining workflows. Because Submagic harnesses so many high-powered AI tools, it doesn’t really feel like you’re editing at all - everything is done for you. You have the best tools to follow the latest trends right at your fingertips, and you simply need to make the style fit with your brand. 🧡🥇