Free Software Like Adobe Premiere

7 alternative video editing programs than Adobe Premiere Pro which are completely free. In this tutorial we take a look at professional video editing softwares like Lightworks, Resolve, Shotcut, HitFilm, Filmora, Kdenlive and Avid Media Composer. Featuring the brand new Omen 15 and AMD Ryzen 7.

Adobe Premiere Pro Alternatives

We've been editing on Adobe Premiere Pro for a couple of years now and we kind of have a love-hate relationship with it. It has a lot of features but also a lot of crashes unfortunately. We decided it was time to look for some alternatives. We came across 7 of them and the best thing is that they are all free.

Shotcut

Shotcut is a completely free editing software, it's familiar to Lightworks. However, making animation using keyframes is actually way more intuitive. It has some color grading tools and is a very lightweight program with barely any stability isssues. It does have a lot of trouble playing back 4K footage.

Kdenlive

This is a completely free and open source program. It has a lot of the professional features an editing software needs. We can make animations using keyframes, it has a bunch of effects (not a lot but the essentials) and it has color grading tools. It has masking abilities and there's even a motion tracker. It feels a little bit old fashion but the playback goes pretty smooth, it does take some time when importing footage but once in the timeline it all goes fine.

Lightworks

Lightworks is a super lightweight editing program. It has a quick start-up and playback & editing in general goes very smooth. That's because it has a slim feature set. If you mostly just want to edit and apply basic effects this is an ideal program. It even has some very nice color correction and grading tools.

Avid Media Composer First

I recommend changing to Avid when you have almost no experience with any other editing programs. It's a super stable software and is very responsive, even more than Premiere Pro but it's such a pain in the ass to work with. You need to click a thousand times in order to get a desired effect, it's super illogical to work with if you have any experience with other editing programs and has it's limitations when it comes to vfx. Now I can totally blame myself for not understanding how this program works since it's actually the first time I work with it. Now Avid Media Composer First is a free version but if you want the full Avid Media Composer you do have to pay quite a lot of money.

Filmora Pro

Filmora isn't actually free. There is a free version that has all the features but it creates a watermark when exporting. The price for the software is only $150 so definitely a worthy competitor to Premiere Pro. It comes with all professional features like animations with keyframes, a motion blur option, color correction tools, scopes, masking tools and even a motion tracker. The interface looks familiar to both Premiere Pro and Hitfilm Express.

Hitfilm Express

Hitfilm is a very popular program and it looks almost exactly like Premiere Pro when it comes to interface. Applying keyframes to animations goes really well and you can even apply motion blur to the animation. It has a similar toolbar like Premiere and it even has a motion tracker, which Premiere doesn't have. The only downside is the fact that 4K footage isn't playing back smoothly like in Avid or Resolve. But if you're working with HD footage, I really recommend Hitfilm Express!

DaVinci Resolve

This is probably the best and most popular one on the list. Resolve has different workspaces for editing, vfx (which is called fusion), colorgrading and even sound mixing. Within every workspace you will get everything a professional video editor needs. It has a pretty big effects library, applying keyframes goes really smooth and everything is node based which is kind of a difficult step in the beginning but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty useful.

Omen 15

We've been trying all of these programs on the brand new Omen 15, which is a beast of a laptop from Omen. It's very affordable but comes with some compromises. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor, 16GBs of RAM and 1TB of storage. So an ideal laptop for editing at home. It's powerful but quite bulky, weighing up to almost 2 kilograms or 5 pounds.