Free Video Editing Apps for Android and iPhone Anyone Can Use

These days, almost everyone shoots videos on smartphones. You could definitely shoot a video and immediately send it to all your friends, or you could touch it up a little, and add cool effects to make it truly memorable before sharing. There are several apps that let you make your videos better with little or no effort.

We tried out a number of video editing apps, and picked our favourites so your videos don’t look boring or amateurish. With just a few taps, you could add a professional touch to your videos, or add some funny captions to them. Here are our four favourite video editing apps that anyone can use for free.

1. GoPro Quik
GoPro’s Quik app is quite easy to use and is perhaps best suited to those who want to create a quick movie or two at home and share it with friends. We picked a video of a friend’s pet and ran it through Quik.

The filters in the app are quite good and the end result looked great. The app looks at the geotag on the video and the timestamp to add intro text such as “That morning at Nariman Point” to the video. This makes it great for sharing memories.

The best part is that the app is free, has no ads, and lets you edit videos offline. It just adds a GoPro Quik logo at the end of each video.

Download GoPro Quik for iOS | GoPro Quik for Android

2. Magisto
Magisto is an app that makes movies for you. All you have to do is select a few video clips on your smartphone, pick an editing style, and a soundtrack, and Magisto does the rest. We threw in a few of our favourite cat and dog videos in this app and were able to make the app cut the movie down to 55 seconds.

The final edit didn’t cut out any important parts from any of the clips even though the original footage was well over 90 seconds long. The only problem with this app is it uploads all videos to its servers and makes the movie there.

If you have slow or no Internet, this won’t help you much. The app is free to download and use (adds its app logo at the end), but it has a paid subscription starting at Rs. 300 per month that brings in a few additional features, such as removing limits on the number of photos you can use, length of clips, and so on.

Download Magisto for iOS | Magisto for Android

3. Apple Clips
We’ve written at length about Apple’s Clips video editing app. It’s slightly more complex than GoPro Quik, but it adds a few more features for you to play around with as well.

If you record a voiceover while recording a video, Clips can transcribe the text and place it on the video for you, which is a really useful feature to get built into the app. The app also lets you add your own music to videos, which is a big plus point.

There are a couple of small drawbacks though. For one, all videos are reformatted to a square aspect ratio, which can look good, but might not be what you want. The second issue is that the app is exclusive to iOS, and likely to remain that way.

Download Clips for iOS

4. Videorama
Videorama stands out for its ability to let you add effects to your videos. From text fade outs to explosion effects, there is a lot you can do while editing videos in this app. This app is the perfect blend of simplicity and powerful features usually reserved for professional apps.

It is free to download, and is pretty usable from the word go, but if you want to really unlock the full potential of the app, then one in-app purchase of Rs. 500 lets you unlock all sound effects, visual effects, and fonts. The app offers terrific value for money and works very well both on iPhone and iPad.

Download Videorama: iOS

These are our favourite video editing apps that anyone can use. However, if these aren’t good enough for you, there are several advanced video editing apps available on smartphones. You can check out apps such as Adobe Premier Clip, LumaFX, Kinemaster, or even Apple’s iMovie for granular control over clips and music, along with a whole bunch of advanced effects. We liked those apps as well, but overall felt they were too advanced for casual usage, unlike the four we recommended above.

Which are your favourite video editing apps for smartphones and tablets? Let us know via the comments.