A CapCut alternative that keeps the footage on your machine
No account, no watermark, no upload. Transcribe, caption, cut, animate and export an MP4, in a browser tab, on the computer the footage is already on.
The things people actually use CapCut for
- Captions from speech
- Whisper runs in the tab, in many languages, two model sizes. Captions are a track on the timeline with their own look, and leave as an .srt.
- Cut by the words
- Strike a sentence in the transcript and the picture and the sound go with it.
- Dead air removed
- Silence is found and proposed as cuts, drawn on the timeline before any of them are made.
- Text with movement
- Titles that kern properly, animated by letter, by word or by block, in, during and out.
- Transitions
- 33 of them, from a dissolve to a whip pan, a film burn or a glitch.
- Speed, reverse, freeze
- Any rate, backwards, looped, boomeranged, or held on a frame the tool has already found for you.
- Music under a voice
- Auto-ducking writes the dip as keyframes that can then be moved by hand.
- Record straight in
- Screen, screen with camera, camera, or voice alone, into the bin without leaving the page.
What is different
CapCut is an account and a service: the footage goes up, the work lives there, and the terms can change under it. cutvid is a page. The project and the media are in the browser’s storage on the machine that opened them, the render happens in the tab, and nothing is sent anywhere, which also means it keeps working with the network off.
The other difference is depth. Under the captions and the transitions there is a real timeline: nested sequences, keyframes on an anchor, chroma key, LUT grading, a per-clip audio chain, and an export that copies untouched clips through as their own packets rather than re-encoding them.
cutvid and CapCut, side by side
| cutvid | CapCut | |
|---|---|---|
| Account | None | Required |
| Upload | Never | Yes, for the web and cloud projects |
| Watermark | None | On some templates and effects |
| Captions from speech | In the tab, many languages | Yes, on their servers |
| Stock and templates | None | Large library |
| Works offline | Yes, once installed | Desktop app only |
| Timeline depth | Nests, keyframes, chroma key, LUTs | Growing, template-led |
| Scriptable | window.editorAgent, documented | No |
Where CapCut wins
Templates and trends, a stock library, effects with a following, phone-first editing, and one project that follows an account from a phone to a laptop. None of that is here, and none of it is planned.
The rest of what cutvid does not do:
- Export is H.264 video and AAC audio in an MP4, or the sound alone as .m4a. No ProRes, no DNxHD, no H.265 out, no image sequences.
- No team features: no cloud project, no review link, no comments, no shared library. A project lives in one browser, and moves as a file.
- No stock library and nothing generative: no stock clips, no music bed, no AI b-roll, no generative fill.
- No third-party plugins. No OpenFX, no VST, no motion-graphics templates from another app.
- Colour is LUTs and the effect rail, not scopes, curves and secondaries. A .cube grades a clip; there is no vectorscope to grade against.
- Built and checked in Chromium browsers, which is where WebCodecs is furthest along. Other browsers vary by codec and by version.
- It runs in a tab, on one machine. A long 4K timeline is heavier here than in a native application on the same computer.
Questions
- Does it put a watermark on the export?
- No.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is no sign-up at all.
- Where do my projects live?
- In this browser’s storage, on this machine. A project can be exported as one .cutvid file with every original it uses, and restored anywhere.
- Can it caption automatically?
- Yes. Transcription runs in the tab with Whisper, and the captions become a track on the timeline that can be styled and merged into sentences.
- Is it good for vertical video?
- Yes. The sequence size is yours to set, and an export can be any size and rate.
Open it and cut something.
No account, no install, nothing uploaded. The first edit takes as long as a page load.