10 of the Best Adobe Premiere Alternatives in 2024

Adobe Premiere may be the king of professional video editors but here we check out 10 of the best free Adobe Premiere Alternatives.

Adobe Premiere may be the king of professional video editors, but there are many free and open-source alternatives available to the beginner and enthusiastic cinematographer. Here we check out 10 of the best free alternatives to Adobe Premiere.

Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is the official video editor developed by Microsoft and is aimed at the home user. Windows Movie Maker provides many video effects that can be easily applied and has a preview option to check, in real-time, changes made to the video. One of the standout features of Windows Movie Maker is that it supports importing music and synchronizing it with video. The software also supports video cropping and rotating.

Although Windows Essentials 2012 is now no longer supported and Microsoft has deleted all download links and references to the downloads, you still can find the offline installer on the Internet Archive links below.

Download Windows Essentials 2012 and Windows Movie Maker

Windows Essentials latest version 16.4.3528.0331:

1. English (United Kingdom)
   Internet Archive 
2. English (United States)
   Internet Archive 

Shotcut

Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. Major features include support for a wide range of formats; no import required meaning native timeline editing; Blackmagic Design support for input and preview monitoring; and resolution support to 4k.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It is primarily aimed at the GNU/Linux platform but also works on BSD and MacOS. It is currently being ported to Windows as a GSOC project.

Non-linear video editing is much more powerful than beginners' (linear) editors, hence it requires a bit more organization before starting. However, it is not reserved for specialists and can be used for small personal projects.

Apple iMovie

With a streamlined design and intuitive editing features, iMovie lets you enjoy your videos and tell stories like never before. Browse your video library, share favourite moments, and create beautiful movies that you can edit at resolutions up to 4K. You can even start editing movies on an iPhone or iPad, and finish them on a Mac. And when your movie is ready for its big premiere, you can enjoy it on all your devices in iMovie Theater.

Blender

Although it is mostly known for animation, Blender includes a non-linear video editing system. The Video Editor allows you to perform basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking. Some of its features include live preview, luma waveform, chroma vectorscope and histogram displays, audio mixing, syncing, scrubbing and waveform visualization.

Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a free and open-source video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee. It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression. It uses AVI container format to store captured video.

It lacks the sheer editing power of Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video, so if all you need is a few basic tools to edit video this is a good option. It also has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.

Cinelerra

Behind every YouTube star is a video editor. 20 years ago, editing video was a hobby done with exotic software, but today this humble piece of software is essential for all communication & the fortunes of billions.

Cinelerra is intended to be useful and fast, representing the essential features from 20 years of editing, but not compare in eye candy to the leading commercial editors. By modern standards, it's very minimalist but quick to boot up.

ffDiaporama

ffDiaporama is an application for creating video sequences consisting of titles, fixed or animated, images or photos, movie clips and music. These sequences are assembled into a slide show using transitions to produce complete videos.

PhotoFilmStrip

PhotoFilmStrip creates movies out of your pictures in just 3 steps. First, select your photos, customize the motion path and render the video. There are several output possibilities for VCD, SVCD, DVD up to FULL-HD.

The effect of the slideshow is known as "Ken Burns". Comments on the pictures are generated into a subtitle file. Furthermore, an audio file can be specified to set up the background music for the slideshow.

Kinovea

Kinovea is a free video player that has been created especially for sports professionals and their trainers. Users can upload videos of them practising different sports so that they can analyse their sports moves and gain the insight that they need to push their performance to the next level.

The action can be slowed down so that certain moves can be analysed very easily. There are numerous helpful features such as the opportunity to compare two sporting videos at the same time graphs and tracking to show the exact angles and measurements of various types of movements.