1. Best overall
2. Best free
3. Best on a budget
4. Best for business
5. Honorable mention
FAQs
The best AI video editors provide a new form of functionality that could not have been imagined a few years ago. To edit footage in the old days meant cutting, splicing, and generally messing around far too much. Now the editing process is so much more automated. Not only tweaking existing material, but adding entirely new content on demand.
We’ve tested the best video editing software and the best AI tools, and now we’re bringing those together to compare and review video editors powered by AI - with video samples for you to check out.
AI video editing offers businesses huge benefits. Sales and marketing teams can quickly communicate new ideas, pitches, and even create digital avatars, without the need for additional tools and personnel. In the past that would mean employing a large array of services, audio and video editors, copywriters, design specialists and more. Now, a simple prompt and some well placed templates can create a serviceable sales video in less time than you can say ‘just do it’.
But with an explosion in artificial intelligence, which AI video editor is best for you? We put the top tools to the test, from prompt accuracy and the editing experience to export speeds and video quality.
For more AI content creation apps, we compared best AI image generators and best AI art generators.
Best AI video editor overall
For us, Fliki is the best AI video editor you can get right now. It offers by far the fastest and easiest to use video generation and editing service on the market. The user interface is a joy to operate compared to its rivals, and the speed of generation and download is truly astonishing. The only compromise is the lack of access to avatar functionality on the base paid plan.
There are six main options on the start menu. Idea to video, as well as blog, PPT, Tweet, Avatar and Product to video. There are also useful features like translation, voice over and voice cloning available, but for most users the first stop is likely to be the AI auto-generated Idea to Video or the URL to Video.
I did a number of tests, but started with the URL to Video feature. Having named the project, selected the category, language and aspect ratio, I entered the URL of my blog post. With Idea to Video, the URL box is replaced with a text prompt (e.g. ‘create a video about cat health’). The service then parsed the webpage I gave, and asked me to choose whether I wanted the AI to use stock media or generate digital AI art media. I chose stock, because the AI art seemed a little cheesy for my needs, and I had lots of stored photos to use.
I then chose a template, but because I was only on the Standard $28 a month plan there was no option for an avatar. You need to spend $88 a month on the Premium plan for an avatar or voice cloning. Which is a shame. There’s a final Submit button step, and a wait while the AI does its magic. In a matter of seconds, rarely more than 90, up pops the outline for the content.
At that point most of the heavy lifting has been done. The script is auto-generated, the media has been selected and linked, and all that’s needed is to polish the script, adjust things like subtitles, audio, font design and background music if wanted. It’s super easy to do all this, which makes editing and polishing no chore at all.
Once you’re happy with the final edits, it’s time to download the finished video file in resolutions up to 1080p. Again the processing and download is impressively fast, no more than a minute or so.
Best free AI video editor
On its free plan, Synthesia provides 36 minutes of video production per year, using any of 6 AI avatars. 60 templates and 120 languages/voices. But to take advantage of the essential AI Assistant, which will help you create videos quickly and easily, you’ll need to upgrade to the Starter Plan. That also gives 10 minutes of video each month, as well as Getty images access.
Still, it’s at least good enough to get an idea of what the best AI video editors can do. To start, select from three options, New Video, AI Video Assistant or Import PowerPoint. Unless you’re a complete masochist, most people will choose the AI assistant since it takes all the drudge out of the creation process. Once selected, you move through template choices which are mostly pretty generic corporate styles, and either upload your choice of PDF, Word or text file or paste in a URL to create a video directly from the webpage.
The system will then generate the script and slides for the video, along with your choice of tone, audience, language and avatar. Once the initial format is delivered, you’ll need to spend time fixing errors and tweaking the content, and there will be a lot of fixing needed. For some reason the AI seems more artificial than intelligent.
In one test I prompted for a video guide to baking a black forest gateau, and while the introduction worked well, the recipe was almost non-existent and none of the recommended images or clips were even close.
The whole point of an AI assistant should be to save time and effort, so I was a bit bemused. My second attempt at a video went slightly better. I asked for a webpage conversion, which turned out to be reasonable. While I still had to change almost every background element, the premium voices and avatar were excellent. The lip-synch function is among the best in the business, which really makes the video pop. Such a shame that the rest of the experience is somewhat lackadaisical.
Once you’ve finished editing, pressing the Generate button will create the end result. It’s not fast, our short 90 sec video took around 30 minutes to render, which is not ideal for iteration and testing. The whole process from start to finish took around two hours.
The company is promising a version 2.0 in a few weeks, so we’ll circle back and see if the experience has improved. Until then we’ve got to deduct points for a definitely sub-standard AI implementation.
Best budget AI video editor
HeyGen offers some valuable tools for manipulating source video to take all the drudgery out of producing different content types. This is very useful for social media applications, or other places where you might need short snappy video content. The main function though is the AI Studio which lets you create a video from a prompt or from an imported document.
The actual video production is good, but not as simple as it could be. The platform uses ChatGPT to help create a script from a text prompt, and it works really well. Unfortunately the script is not automatically added to the slide content sections, so you have to go through and manually paste the results in yourself. It’s a shame because it spoils what is otherwise a nice creative flow.
However I found that once you got the hang of the timing of the script, it was fairly straightforward to edit the whole thing and make it sync up properly. But really this should be the job of an AI process. Maybe the next version.
There are three main plans. The Free version offers 1 minute of video a month, as opposed to 15 minutes with the $29 a month Creator Plan. The Creator level also provides 1080p video, as well as faster video generation, no watermark and voice cloning. Users can also create three personal video avatars, which is a nice touch. But for some strange reason you can’t upload documents on this paid plan, only on the $149 a month Team plan.
Where HeyGen really shines is in the results. Even the default avatars and voices on the lowest Plan offer great results. They’re animated and the voices are varied and decent. The movements also deliver the kind of feel you need to increase engagement. When you add in the ability to easily create your own personal photo or moving avatars, the whole paid package starts to shine with potential.
One great new option is the new URL to Video feature. Drop your product page URL into the box and within a few minutes you receive a great looking 38 sec promo video short which you can use on TikTok, or other social platforms. You get to set your preferred audience tags and the language, and the AI lets you select from a set of scripts covering audience needs. It’s super clever, and you even get multiple avatars and environments to choose from. A big win in my book.
Overall HeyGen offers a great selection of tools for video and avatar creation. It’s a shame that the AI is not used as well on general videos as it is on the shorts ad feature, but hopefully that will change.
Best AI video editor for business
Pictory was one of the first AI powered applications on the market, offering a range of plans starting at $25 a month. Like a number of other AI video generator services, Pictory uses material from the Storyblocks and Getty stock assets library for its AI function.
In that regard it’s really more like stitching together material than generating it. The Starter Plan gives access to the Storyblocks stock library, 34 digital voices and up to 10 minutes of text to video a month. There’s also access to 5000 audio tracks, transcription services and a branding kit.
There are four basic functions on offer. Script to video, article to video, editing video using text and visuals to video (mainly used to make presentations). These base tools can be used to mix and match any sort of content you need, from social media to product promo clips or audio voice overs. There’s no AI generated material on offer, the AI is instead used to stitch together various stock clips and captions to create the finished result.
The first thing you notice is the simple dashboard once you sign in. I tested by using one of my older TechRadar articles to create a video, by simply importing the URL. The process was super easy. The AI scanned the web page, worked out what the piece was about, and converted my text into a script for the video.
The first thing to note is the resulting script, although good, still needed quite a bit of work to make it properly reflect the original. The AI is not yet clever enough to fully differentiate between generic web page text and the story itself, so there’s around 20 to 30% work needed to clean everything up. The same goes for the images and video clips the application chooses. Some of them were spot on, but around half needed changing.
Thankfully the process of swapping out assets is really easy, click and the job’s done. It still takes time though. If you pay for the more expensive Professional Plan at $49 a month, you’re given a choice of 48 super realistic voices from ElevenLabs, otherwise you’ll only be able to use some basic generic voice-overs.
You also only have access to the Getty images in the Pro plan, but that’s probably not so bad. Since you can upload your own material to add to the AI curated content. You can even record your own voice over on the basic plan, but there’s no auto sync, so you have to do it scene by scene which is again not a trivial task.
I found that creating a simple two minute video from my post took around 90 minutes from start, which is a lot faster than it would be if I had to do everything manually, and record or upload a narration. So it’s definitely a big time saver. It’s always going to look like a stock video because of the lack of any decent editing features like transitions, but for someone who just needs something for their Facebook feed, it’s perfectly good enough.
Best AI video editor: Honorable mention
DeepBrain AI Studios is proof that 18 months is a lifetime in the world of AI. The platform offers a wealth of very solid features, including social media video editing, URL to video and a variety of avatars. But in practice it all seems to be just a little bit old-fashioned. If you want to get a feel for AI video generation and editing for free - it's a fair place to start, but you're unlikely to want to stay with this tool for any length of time.
I went through a number of tests, testing avatars, checking out how well the AI functioned, and seeing if the ease of use matched rivals in the market.
My main test was again URL to video, as this is a good way to see if the AI models in use are up to the task of recreating web content. The best tools grab all the elements on a webpage, including images and text, the worst don’t. In the case of AI Studios, I found that it did everything it should do, to a degree. My suspicion is that the AI powering the system is perhaps a generation back from the current levels of AI sophistication.
The two main tests worked well to generate a script, although neither managed to grab and import the images on the blog post, which is a pretty fundamental requirement. The other quirk is the strangely tiny Options drop-down when starting the project. Blink and you miss it, but in fact accessing it has a huge impact on the type and quality of the generated video. It’s a very strange UI choice.
Apart from that, the results are workmanlike. As I said, if this was 2023 it would be amazing. But times have moved on, and any service that offers this average level of avatar voicing and slow generation times is definitely lagging the market. There are some nice additional features you can’t find anywhere else, like avatar gestures (triggering hand movements during the video), and team avatars engaged in conversations, but they’re all locked behind the $89 a month Team plan, which puts them out of reach of most individuals.
It’s a pity that the company has decided to focus the platform so heavily on the corporate buying budget, by locking most of the better features behind the top tier plans, but that’s their decision to make. However, if you’re looking to create enterprise training and marketing videos on a regular basis, then the AI Studios product is definitely worth a look.
Best AI video editor: FAQs
What is an AI video editor?
These are software platforms that let you create, edit and manage video production using AI technology. They often operate like the best video makers we've tested - lightweight, online-based tools capable of generating content without the need for the best video editing PCs or best laptops for video editing.
It’s worth noting that AI Video Editing is slightly different from AI Video Generation. The former acts mainly as a curator of different stock and AI media types, while the latter is primarily designed to produce artificial video content using a neural network setup.
What is an avatar?
An avatar is a digital on-screen depiction of a spokesperson, which is coded so it can accept any text and convert it into a) a suitable voice and language and b) deliver the audio in a human-like manner with the appropriate lip movements and hand/arm gestures. The best versions deliver a very human performance.
What are the key features to look for in the best AI video editors?
There are three main requirements. First, the best AI video editor should use a competent AI engine to drive the whole process. It should be able to generate an accurate script, scan and grab the right assets to go with the script and put everything together in an elegant package ready for publishing. Second, the platform should be extremely easy to use. If the inevitable editing function is complex or buggy, it becomes a chore. Finally, it should be fast. The finished product should arrive as quickly as possible.
Just starting out? We tested, reviewed, and rated the best video editing software for beginners.
