I replaced Premiere Pro with a free video editor, and I haven't missed the subscription once

Published Aug 27, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Adobe has spent years making Premiere Pro feel like the default option for editing videos and films, and that's kind of true; it's top-tier software. The pricing also reflects that confidence, at around $23 a month, indefinitely, whether you're cutting a wedding video or a full documentary. The problem isn't even the price on its own, it's that the "just get Adobe" has seeped into workflows that really don't even need what Adobe is charging for. There's a free NLE with a longer Hollywood resume than Premiere itself, and I reckon it's worth trying before renewing your subscription… Lightworks is older than Premiere and still cutting real movies The pedigree here goes pretty far Lightworks has been around since the early 1990s, built as a non-linear editor for cutting long-form footage. It's changed hands a few times over the decades and is now developed by LWKS Software, a UK outfit founded in 2020 by members of the original dev team. The website got a full rebrand recently with a new prism logo and modern black-and-purple styling, which took me a second to reconcile with the old red shark icon still shipping with the app itself. Same software, though. The pedigree is impressive. Thelma Schoonmaker has been cutting Martin Scorsese's films on Lightworks for years, including The Wolf of Wall Street, and she's said she prefers it because it retains some of the qualities of flatbed editing. Pulp Fiction was cut on it too. That's a longer feature-film resume than most free tools ever build up. On pricing, the free version gives you the full editing engine and you don't have to worry about watermarks. There are paid tiers, with Create at $14 a month and Pro at $28, and both are available as perpetual licenses so you can actually own a version outright. Premiere Pro will never let you do that. Feature-film DNA shows up in the small things Lightworks was designed for people assembling long timelines from a lot of source footage, and you can see that show up in how the app behaves. The Mark In / Mark Out workflow is probably the standout, you define the exact portion of a source clip you want without cutting it up, then drop just that segment onto the timeline. That sounds minor, but it changes the pace of assembly editing quite a bit once you get used to the workflow. Multicam editing with unlimited sources is available in the free tier, which is genuinely rare. Most free NLEs either cap you at a couple of angles or lock the whole feature behind a paywall. Source/Record three-point editing is also included - this is the keyboard-driven pro workflow that makes Lightworks feel faster than Premiere Pro (again, once you get used to the workflow, but it is overall more intuitive). Proxy generation works in the free version too, so if you're on a modest machine you can edit smoothly with lower-res stand-ins while the full-res render happens in the background. Background rendering across the board means you keep editing while exports and effects process, which Premiere technically does but never quite as gracefully. I remember back in the day at one point I couldn't get a single editing session out of Premiere without my PC crashing anymore, but now I have a stronger build which could handle it, ironically, now that I'm not subscribed anymore. Speaking of performance, when it comes to speed, Lightworks stays lean, the whole installer is under 100MB and it runs on hardware Adobe would consider outdated. And none of that makes it feel lackluster, it's still the same editing engine paid users get. I think the workspace philosophy of Lightworks is also worth a mention. Instead of Premiere's everything-at-once panel setup, Lightworks splits work into dedicated Edit, VFX, and Audio workspaces, roughly the way DaVinci Resolve organizes itself. The 2023 update also added Custom Layout Creation, so if the default arrangement doesn't fit your brain you can rearrange panels and save your own templates. There is a catch It's everyone's complaint, but you might be able to live with it The one real limitation of the free tier is that exports max out at 720p in MP4/H.264, and yes, this is the thing every review flags first. I think the obvious counter is "just use DaVinci Resolve free, it exports higher," and that's a completely fair argument to make. But Resolve is famously heavy on system requirements and has a steeper learning curve, so the trade isn't purely about export resolution. Given what most people actually use desktop editors for, like social media posts or client review cuts, or just messing around with footage, 720p is either the platform's own display cap or close enough that nobody's going to notice. If you're building a YouTube channel that competes on production quality, then sure, you're probably going to have to pay for software - and if you're going to pay north of $20 anyway, you can pick the best of the best, whichever tool that may be. My case here is for the free version of Lightworks, and I think the 720p is a fine compromise. Cancelling Premiere didn't cost me anything I miss Ever since canceling my Adobe subscriptions, I've managed to find viable replacements because there are so many options out there. The only thing that's not entirely replaceable, in my opinion, is After Effects. But you're probably not a VFX artist and just someone looking for free high-quality editing tools. And Lightworks is one I think is worth checking out. Lightworks