CapCut caps free captions. Overcaption doesn't.

The honest version

Overcaption is not a video editor. There are no clips, transitions or effect templates, and there won't be. The one cutting tool it has is the rough cut: trim the ends or drop a flub from the finished video, and the subtitles retime themselves. If you edit full videos in CapCut and the subscription earns its keep, keep it.

What Overcaption replaces is the caption part of the workflow, without the cloud: transcribe on your own machine, fix the text in a fast editor, style it, translate it, then either burn the subtitles into the video or export an SRT or VTT file that any editor can import. Your footage never gets uploaded, and nothing gets a watermark.

And so there is no bait and switch: the captions themselves, the editor, every export format and burn-in up to 1080p are free with no time limit. The social finishing extras, the animated word-by-word styles, the full title suite, batch processing for many videos at once, video cuts, vertical crops and 4K, are Overcaption Pro at $99 a year or $19 a month, free to try for 14 days. The pricing page has the exact line.

What changed with CapCut captions

Auto captions used to be the free feature that made CapCut the default answer. Since the 2025 restructure they are metered: the free plan allows caption generation a limited number of times, with many users through 2025 and 2026 reporting it at roughly once a month; SRT export sits on the paid plans; and Pro-marked templates and effects stamp a watermark on the export. Cloud processing costs real money, so none of this is a scandal. It does mean that if captions are the only CapCut feature you use, you are now paying a video-editor subscription for a subtitle job.

That job is what Overcaption does, free, on your own machine.

What you get instead

• Captions, included. Accurate automatic subtitles with word-level timing, generated on your own hardware in a few minutes or less for a typical video. No plan, no caps.
• The word-by-word highlight look. Fill, spotlight and paint-on styles with real per-word timing and keyword emphasis, the style social video runs on, burned in exactly as previewed. Part of Pro, free to try for 14 days.
• Vertical and square, natively. Any aspect ratio opens and burns in as-is, free. Pro adds recropping horizontal footage to 9:16, 1:1 and 4:5 with per-platform safe-area guides, so captions land clear of the app chrome.
• Titles and lower thirds. Name straps, title cards and animated callouts, dragged into place on the video. Part of Pro, free to try for 14 days.
• No watermark, no resolution ceiling. Burn-in renders with your machine's hardware encoder and nothing is stamped on your video.
• SRT export included. Take your captions to CapCut, Premiere, Resolve or anywhere else as SRT or VTT.
• Private by design. No uploads, no account, works on a plane. Your client footage stays on your disk.

When to stick with CapCut

• You edit whole videos there and use its effects, templates and stock library.
• Your captions are one small step in a workflow that already lives inside it.

Also compare: Submagic · Subtitle Edit · Aegisub · MacWhisper