Comparison
Captions AI vs Opus Clip: which one fits your video?
By the KeyMo team · Updated
Captions AI is an editor for iOS, Android and web whose Clips feature, for long videos, sits on its Max plan ($24.99 a month on its pricing page). Opus Clip is built around long-video clipping and starts at $15 a month. Choose Captions to polish one talking-head clip, Opus Clip to cut a long episode, and KeyMo if you want fixed source minutes with no watermark.
Captions vs Opus Clip: two different starting points
Both Captions and Opus Clip put animated captions on short vertical video, but they start from different places. Captions is available on iOS, Android and web, and its own pages describe an editor: captions, eye contact correction, background music, AI Edit and a chat-based editor. Long-video clipping is one feature inside it, called Clips, and the pricing page puts it on the Max plan and above.
Opus Clip starts the other way round. You import a long video, as a file or a link, and it returns clips. Its help centre gives the maximum supported video length as 10 hours. If your raw material is a 60-minute recording, that is the job Opus Clip is built for. If your raw material is a 45-second selfie video, Captions is the closer fit.
The table below puts both next to KeyMo. Every competitor cell was read from the vendor's own pricing, feature or help pages on 11 October 2026, and the sources are listed at the bottom.
Side-by-side: price, limits, captions and watermark
| Captions | Opus Clip | KeyMo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Editor on iOS, Android and web; Clips feature for long video | Long-video clipper | Long-video clipper |
| Free plan | Yes: basic editing tools and one caption template; AI features need a paid plan to export | Yes: 60 credits a month, watermark, no editing, clips stop being exportable after 3 days | No free plan, no trial |
| Entry price | Basic $9.99 (help centre only); Max $24.99 (pricing page) | Starter $15, monthly only | Starter $12 |
| Next tier | Frontier $69.99 | Pro $29, or $14.50 a month billed yearly ($174) | Pro $29 |
| Monthly allowance | Basic 200 credits, Max 500 credits; the credit cost of a Clips run is not published | Starter 150 credits, Pro 300 per pack; 1 credit per minute of source video | Starter 300 source minutes, Pro 900 |
| Longest source video | Clips: 3 hours and 10 GB. General import: 60 minutes per file. Same-language captions: 10 minutes (5 on Android) | 10 hours; local files up to 10 GB (Free, Starter) or 30 GB (Pro) per the pricing page, 10 GB per the help centre | 180 minutes and 10 GB; minimum 5 minutes |
| Clips returned | Up to 30+ per run, ranked by a virality score | Guidance of 5-21 clips from 10-30 minutes and 23-32 from 30-60 minutes; Virality Score 0-99 on Starter and Pro | Up to 15 per video, each scored out of 10; only 7 or higher are kept |
| Output shapes | 9:16, 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 | 9:16 only on Free and Starter; 9:16, 1:1, 16:9 on Pro | 9:16, 1080x1920 |
| Caption options | 100+ styles on Max and up, word-by-word animation | AI captions on every plan; animated captions in 20+ languages from Starter; font, colour, stroke and position editable | 12 styles plus none, word-by-word |
| Watermark | Help centre: none on Free or paid plans, except Basic users who use Max-only features | Free plan and free trial exports carry one; Starter and Pro remove it | None on any plan |
What to know about Captions before you pay
Captions' pricing page shows Free, Max at $24.99 a month, Frontier at $69.99 (its help centre also lists 2x and 4x Frontier tiers) and Enterprise, with a footnote that prices reflect iOS plans only. The help centre also lists a Basic plan at $9.99 a month with 200 credits and an Android-only Lite plan at $4.99. So the cheapest paid plan depends on which page you believe and which device you buy on. The yearly discount is mentioned but no yearly figure is given.
Credits are spent by AI features. The help centre lists Prompt to Video at 16 credits every 6 seconds, AI Edit at 10 to 40 credits depending on the video, and chat-based editing at 2 credits per message plus 1 per action. The credit cost of a Clips run is not in that table, so you cannot work out in advance how many long videos Max covers. Unused credits roll over on Basic and above, capped at three times the monthly allowance, and single credits cannot be bought on standard plans.
Input limits also differ by feature. Clips accepts a YouTube link or a file up to 3 hours and 10 GB. The general import page says 60 minutes per file, and the Add Captions help page gives 10 minutes for same-language captions on iOS and desktop and 5 minutes on Android. These probably describe different tools inside the app, but the pages do not reconcile them.
What to know about Opus Clip before you pay
Opus Clip counts one credit per minute of the video you import, so a 45-minute episode uses 45 credits. On Starter's 150 credits that is three such episodes a month, and Pro's 300 credits cover six. Under one minute rounds up to one credit and partial minutes round down. Monthly credits expire after 60 days, so they roll over for one extra month.
Link imports go well beyond YouTube: Google Drive, Vimeo, Zoom, Rumble, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Dropbox, Riverside and more, with the longer list unlocking on Pro. Local uploads fail for videos with non-integer frame rates, and the help centre's workaround is to upload to YouTube first and import the link. Output is cropped rather than compressed, so a 1080p source cropped to 9:16 comes out at 608 by 1080, and 4K export needs a genuinely 4K source on the Pro plan.
New users get a 7-day trial of Pro with 90 minutes of processing, according to the homepage FAQ. Trial exports carry the watermark, and the help centre lists several things trial users cannot do, including bulk download and posting to social media.
Where each one is stronger
- Captions is built as an editor. It has 100+ caption styles on Max, four output ratios, a free tier for basic trimming, and an app for iOS and Android.
- Captions' Free plan lets you edit and export without AI features, and its help centre lists no watermark on it. Opus Clip's Free plan is watermarked and its clips stop being exportable after 3 days.
- Opus Clip is built only for clipping. It accepts up to 10 hours of source video and takes links from many more sites.
- Opus Clip publishes how credits are spent (one per source minute). Captions does not publish the cost of a Clips run.
- Opus Clip's Pro plan adds a social scheduler and export to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, which KeyMo's feature list does not include.
- On Opus Clip, Starter is limited to 9:16 output and is sold monthly only. Pro is the plan with 1:1 and 16:9.
Where KeyMo fits as the third option
KeyMo does one job: it takes a podcast or long video of 5 to 180 minutes and returns up to 15 scored vertical clips with captions and face-tracked reframing. It has no free plan and no trial, so you pay $12 or $29 a month before you see a result. In exchange, you get a flat 300 or 900 source minutes, no watermark on any plan, and an editor where you tell KeyMo in chat what to change. A 60-minute episode uses 60 of Starter's 300 minutes, so five such episodes fit in a month.
It will not replace Captions for editing a clip you shot on your phone, because a source under 5 minutes is below its minimum. It also lacks the extras Opus Clip lists on Pro. If you are weighing KeyMo against Opus Clip alone, the KeyMo vs Opus Clip page goes through that pair in detail.
Which one should you choose?
- You film a minute or two on your phone and want styled captions fast: Captions. Start on the Free plan and see if the basic tools are enough.
- You have a 30 to 120 minute recording and want a batch of clips: Opus Clip or KeyMo, not Captions' general editor.
- You want to know the monthly cost in advance: Opus Clip (1 credit per minute) or KeyMo (fixed source minutes). Captions' Clips cost is not published.
- You need 1:1 or 16:9 as well as 9:16: Captions, or Opus Clip on Pro. KeyMo exports 9:16 only.
- You never want a watermark and are fine paying from day one: KeyMo, or a paid Opus Clip plan.
If you are still weighing cost, the Opus Clip pricing breakdown and the Captions pricing breakdown go through every plan on its own.
Sources: Captions pricing (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: understanding credits (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: subscriptions and plans (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: watermark on exported video (checked 11 October 2026); Captions Clips feature page (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: import and upload (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: add captions (checked 11 October 2026); Captions help: scale and format (checked 11 October 2026); Captions caption feature page (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip pricing (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip homepage (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: how credits are consumed (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: video length (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: supported video sources (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: how many clips (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: virality score (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: features not included in free trial (checked 11 October 2026); Opus Clip help: clip output sizes (checked 11 October 2026).