Submagic is a paid tool for one job: turning talking-head footage into shorts. Captions are the center of it, with 35+ animated caption templates, and it adds emojis, B-roll, zooms and sound effects around them. Our tool also puts captions on short videos, but it's plainer. You get word-timed captions with a highlight on the spoken word, and that's it.
Who should stay with Submagic, and who should switch
Stay with Submagic if you post several shorts a week and the edit is the product. Picking a template, letting it add B-roll and publishing straight to your accounts saves a lot of clicking. Every paid plan also cuts silences and bad takes and cleans the audio, and Pro adds auto zooms. None of that exists here.
Switch if the captions are the part you actually use and you usually turn the extras off. Then paying for a monthly video quota with a 2- or 5-minute length cap doesn't buy much.
Submagic next to our tool
At the time of writing (October 2026), from Submagic's pricing page, its SRT generator page and its help center.
| Submagic | Auto Captions | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Free trial: 3 short videos | Yes, the whole tool |
| Watermark | On trial downloads, none on paid plans | No |
| Video length | 2 min (Starter), 5 min (Pro), 30 min (Business) | 30 min |
| Volume | 15, 40 or 100 videos a month by plan | 20 min of transcription a day |
| Where it processes | Submagic's cloud (you upload the video) | Your browser. Only the audio goes out for transcription |
| Languages | 123, by Submagic's count | 50+ with auto-detect |
| Subtitle files | SRT (other formats not stated) | SRT, VTT, TXT |
| Burned-in export | 1080p at 30 fps; 4K at 60 fps on Business | MP4 at original size, or scaled to 1080p/720p |
| Translation | Yes, on all paid plans | No |
| Styles | 35+ animated templates, emojis, B-roll, zooms | 4 presets, 3 with a spoken-word highlight |
| Price | $19, $39 or $69 a month ($12, $23 or $41 billed yearly) | Free |
What Submagic does better
Style, mostly. The templates animate words in ways we don't (bounces, fades, emphasis on key words), and it can drop in emojis and B-roll for you, with Storyblocks footage on Pro and Business. Magic Clips cuts several shorts out of one long video, it writes hook titles, and it publishes to your social accounts. Pro and Business let you save custom templates and add your own logos, and Business exports 4K at 60 fps.
It also translates captions and lists 123 transcription languages to our 50+. If you run a channel in two languages, that alone may justify the subscription.
What you get from a free Submagic alternative
The caption itself. Whisper large-v3 turbo gives every word its own start and end time. In the Karaoke preset a yellow box sits behind each word as it's spoken; Boxed and Bold pop turn the spoken word yellow instead. On a vertical video, lines are kept to about 22 characters so they read on a phone, and you can fix any word the model misheard. Our guide to word-by-word captions goes deeper on sizing and pacing.
One thing to adjust for TikTok and Reels: Karaoke sits at about 86% of the frame height, which is where those apps draw their own caption and buttons. Drag the position slider up, or switch to Bold pop, which uses large uppercase text at about 70% of the height. The TikTok captions guide shows where things land.
The MP4 is rendered on your own device, so there's no render queue, and a 60-second clip doesn't spend a slot in a monthly quota.
Is there a free Submagic?
Not really. The trial is for testing: 3 short videos, with a watermark on downloads. After that, the cheapest plan is $19 a month at the time of writing. Tools that are free all the way through, like ours or WithSubtitles, cover the caption part but not the rest of Submagic's editing. We compare those free options on our alternatives page.
How to move your captions over
- Export an SRT from Submagic if you've already corrected the text, and keep the original video file.
- Open the burn-in tool, drop both files in, and pick a preset. Your timing is kept. An SRT only times whole lines, so the highlight steps through each line at an even pace instead of landing exactly on each word.
- Raise the position for vertical video and export.
For new clips, drop the video on the auto captions page instead. Transcribing here gives every word its own timestamp, so the highlight lands on each word as it is said.
Our view: if the emojis and B-roll are why your videos perform, keep paying. If it's the words on screen that do the work, you can stop paying for them.