Best clipping software
for PC in 2026.

"Clipping software" is really two different jobs.

Half the tools in this category capture the moment while you play. They sit in the background, keep a rolling buffer, and write a file when something happens. The other half cut footage that already exists: they decide which minute of a long recording is worth posting, crop it to 9:16 and burn in captions. A tool that is excellent at one is usually mediocre at the other, and comparing them on a single "best" axis is how people end up paying for the wrong thing.

So the table below keeps the two jobs in separate rows, and the honest answer for most creators is that you end up running one of each: a capture tool during play, and a cutting tool afterwards on the pile that builds up on your drive.

Seven tools, side by side.

Vendor pricing checked on 14 August 2026 from a European IP, so your currency and amount may differ. Eklipse publishes no pricing page at all, so its rate appears only at checkout after you register. Plans change often, so verify with the vendor before you buy.

What each one is good at, including against us.

• OBS Studio, Replay Buffer. Free, open source, and the only tool here that is community-maintained rather than sold by a vendor. Keep a rolling buffer in memory, press a hotkey, and whatever length you set the buffer to lands on disk. It beats CutBench outright on reach: it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, encodes on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, and costs nothing forever. What it does not do is have an opinion. It has no idea what was worth clipping, so if you forget the hotkey the moment is gone.
• Medal. A capture app with a social layer on top: hotkey clips, a feed, and capture from consoles and phones as well as your desktop. It beats CutBench on everything we deliberately do not do. It records while you play, it works on hardware we refuse to run on, it is free to start, and sharing a clip is one click instead of an export and an upload. It is a capture-and-share product, not a tool that reads a 3-hour file and tells you which four minutes matter. If that last part is the job you came for, the full side-by-side lives on our Medal alternative page, including the cases where Medal is simply the right answer.
• Outplayed. Runs on Overwolf and auto-saves in-game events, so kills and wins get written out without you touching a hotkey. It beats CutBench on immediacy, and on certainty about what happened, because it reads game events directly from supported titles rather than inferring them from pixels and audio. The trade is scope: Windows only, supported games only, and what you get is a folder of raw event clips rather than a ranked, captioned, vertical cut you can post. That folder is exactly where the two tools meet, which is the subject of the Outplayed alternative write-up.
• Eklipse. Point it at a stream VOD and it finds highlights on its servers, in vertical formats with captions. It beats CutBench on convenience for streamers: nothing to install, no GPU requirement, and it pulls from your VOD library instead of your hard drive, so it works from a laptop or a phone. Two things to know before you plan around it. Per Eklipse's own blog, modified 18 July 2026, the free clipping tier ended in June 2026, and there is still no public pricing page, so you cannot see the rate before you create an account. Its free browser utilities, the emote and thumbnail makers and the VOD downloaders, are still free, but those are not clipping. The longer version of that trade, VOD library against local drive, is on the Eklipse alternative page.
• Opus Clip. The general-purpose cutter most people meet first, and the one to pick if your content has a face and a voice in it. It beats CutBench on breadth and on entry cost: it works from a link, on any machine, with filler and silence removal and a real editing UI, at $15 a month on Starter, billed monthly only. There is a free tier too, at 60 credits, but its clips stop being exportable after 3 days, so treat it as a test drive rather than a plan. Check the current tier list against how many minutes you actually push through it before you settle on one. If your footage is gameplay rather than a webcam, that difference is the whole argument on the Opus Clip alternative page.
• StreamLadder. The manual option, and better than everything else here when you want control rather than a verdict. Templates, webcam-over-gameplay layouts, captions and scheduling, all in a browser on any operating system. It beats CutBench any time you already know which moment you want and you care how it is framed. Check the tiers before you buy: the cheapest paid plan is Gold at €15 a month on the monthly toggle, but AI clipping is not included in it. That sits in Gold + ClipGPT at €25.41 a month. The free plan is 720p at 30fps with a 200 MB upload cap, manual editing and default layouts only. Deciding between framing a moment yourself and being handed a verdict is what the StreamLadder alternative comparison is about.
• CutBench. Ours, and narrow on purpose. It takes long gameplay recordings you already have, ranks the moments, cuts them to 9:16 and burns in captions, entirely on your own GPU. Nothing uploads, and it is bought once on Steam at $34.99, with a free demo that runs the same pipeline and watermarks its exports. The costs are real and we would rather you read them here: Windows 10 or 11 only, an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer, no AMD and no Intel Arc, no capture of its own, and a 3-hour session takes roughly 2 to 5 hours on an RTX 3060 class card. It is the wrong choice for anyone who wants a clip in the next 60 seconds. Two longer reads on the same shape: clipping without an FPS drop, which is what falls out of working after the session instead of during it, and how an AI clip maker for gaming decides which minute is worth posting.

Three more that show up in the same search.

These are built for video in general rather than for gameplay, but they surface next to the others often enough to be worth the numbers. Vizard is $29 a month billed monthly, or $14.50 a month billed yearly. Submagic starts at $12 per member a month billed yearly, but clipping long videos is not in that plan. It is a paid add-on on top of Starter, so the real entry price for this job sits above the headline. FragCut is the closest of the three to a gaming tool, at $19.99 a month, with no free tier to try it on first; because it aims at the same footage we do, it gets its own FragCut alternative page.

All three process in the cloud, so the privacy and upload-time trade-offs are the same as for Eklipse, Opus Clip and StreamLadder.

Start from your situation, not from a score.

• You just want to save the last 30 seconds. OBS Replay Buffer. It is free, it is on every platform, and nothing else in this list does that specific job better.
• You keep forgetting to press the hotkey. Outplayed, so the clips get written whether you remember or not. Medal instead if you also want them shareable and off the PC.
• You stream, and you clip from your VOD library. Eklipse, because it works from that library rather than from your drive. Budget for it as a paid product now, not as a free one.
• Your content is a face and a voice. Opus Clip. Filler removal, captions and an editor built for talking heads, on any machine, starting at $15 a month.
• You already know the moment and care about the framing. StreamLadder, and skip the ClipGPT tier unless you actually want it to choose for you.
• You have a drive full of long sessions and no time to scrub them. CutBench, if you are on Windows with an NVIDIA card, want the footage to stay on your machine, and would rather pay once than monthly.
• You are on macOS, an AMD or Intel Arc GPU, or a console. Not us. OBS locally, or any of the browser tools above. CutBench will not install, and we would rather say that here than after you have paid.

PC clipping software FAQ.

Longer write-ups on single tools.

• CutBench vs Eklipse. A cloud subscription against a local one-time app, on the axes a gamer actually cares about.
• CutBench vs Opus Clip. The general-purpose cutter against the gameplay-specific one.
• Powder.gg alternative. Powder was a local desktop clipper and it shut down. What it did, what the team said, and where its users can go now.
• Offline clip maker. What changes when the footage never leaves your PC.
• Clip maker with no subscription. One-time pricing, and what it costs you in return.
• Clipping a 3-hour stream. The actual workflow, start to finish.