Clipping software for PC,
the best of it 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.

Ten tools, side by side.

Vendor pricing checked on 30 October 2026 from a European IP, so your currency and amount may differ. Eklipse has no pricing page of its own; its prices are in its help center. FragCut checked again on 11 November 2026. 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.
• NVIDIA app, Instant Replay. The one most people already have and never switched on. It replaced GeForce Experience, keeps a rolling buffer encoded on NVENC, and writes the last few minutes to disk on a hotkey. On the exact hardware CutBench requires it is a free download from NVIDIA, which makes it the cheapest capture path here. The encode sits on a dedicated block rather than the shader cores, so the cost to your frame rate is small — small is not zero, and we go through where it actually comes from on our clipping without an FPS drop page. Like every buffer on this list it saves what you tell it to save, and holds no view on which of those saves was worth posting.
• Xbox Game Bar. Already installed on the machine you are reading this on. Once background recording is on in Windows Settings, Win+Alt+G writes out the last stretch of play, and the file lands in your Captures folder as a plain MP4. Nothing here is faster to start using and nothing is cheaper. What you give up is control and reliability: the quality options are thin, it does not attach to every game, and it is the tool people most often find was silently not recording. It beats CutBench at the only thing it sets out to do, which is being there already.
• Medal. A capture app with a social layer on top: hotkey clips, a feed, capture on your desktop and phone, and console clips imported. It beats CutBench on everything we deliberately do not do. It records while you play, it works well on AMD and Intel graphics, where we are slow, 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. Its help center lists Premium at $24.99 a month or $179.99 a year. 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 Starter at €15 a month on the monthly toggle, but AI clipping is not included in it. That sits in the Creator plan at €27 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.
• Allstar.gg. The closest thing on this list to what we do, and the one we were missing: it watches gameplay and cuts the moments out for you rather than asking you to find them. The difference is where the knowledge lives. Allstar reads events inside specific titles, so on CS2, League or Fortnite it knows a kill or an ace happened with a certainty nothing working from the picture and the sound can match. Outside that list there is nothing for it to read. It also runs on their servers. If the games you play are on its list, that certainty is worth more than any inference; if they are not, only a tool that needs no list will do anything with that footage.
• 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 computer. Nothing is uploaded for processing, and it is bought once on Steam at $24.99. 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 (on AMD or Intel Arc it runs on the processor, tens of times slower), no capture of its own, and a 3-hour session takes about 2 to 3.5 hours on an RTX 3080. 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.

Two of 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 that plan takes videos up to 2 minutes long and Business up to 30, so a 3-hour session has to be cut down before either can take it. FragCut is the one built for gameplay, at $19.99 a month for 30 matches, and it analyzes a first match free with its top highlight as a clip; 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.

Clipping software for gaming, split by what you mean by clip.

Game clipping software is where this list gets asked about most, and the question splits along the same seam as section 01. Decide which half you are shopping for before you compare anything, because the two halves do not overlap.

• If clip means "save what just happened". OBS Replay Buffer is the default answer and costs nothing on any GPU or operating system. Outplayed if the hotkey is the part you keep missing and your game is on its supported list, since it writes the file for you. Medal if you also want the clip off the PC and shareable without an export step.
• If clip means "turn last night's three hours into something postable". That is the cutting half: Eklipse if the source is your stream VOD library, Opus Clip or StreamLadder or Vizard or Submagic in a browser, FragCut and CutBench aimed specifically at gameplay footage. Nothing in this half records anything; they all start from a file or a VOD that already exists.
• The test that actually separates the cutting half. Most of that category was built around footage of someone talking to a camera, where the good moment gets announced out loud. Gameplay is often played in silence. So take one of your own sessions containing a highlight you know you played without saying a word, run it through whatever you are evaluating, and check whether that specific moment comes back in the top few. It takes ten minutes and it tells you more than any feature grid, this one included.
• What we can honestly claim for ours. CutBench never asks which game is on screen, and it does not need to: what makes a moment worth posting is the same whatever the recording is of, something builds and then it pays off or it doesn't, and that shape is what it looks for. There is no supported-games list, so there is nothing for your game to be absent from, and no game waiting its turn on a roadmap. Two honest limits: a quiet, talky session where little is heard and little changes on screen is thin material, so the ranked list comes back short; and the 9:16 crop is taken from the centre of the frame rather than following the action. Where a tool does know for certain what happened, it is reading the game's own events on supported titles, which is Outplayed's route rather than ours. The costs stay the same as everywhere else on this page: Windows plus an NVIDIA card, no capture of its own, and hours rather than minutes.

Free clipping software, and when free is the whole answer.

Worth saying plainly on a page written by a company that sells one of these tools: for a lot of people the free options are not a compromise, they are the right answer. If you clip a handful of moments a week and you already know which ones they are, nothing here beats OBS, and you should not pay us or anyone else.

• Free with no ceiling on it. OBS Studio is $0, open source and community-maintained, on Windows, macOS and Linux, encoding on AMD, Intel or NVIDIA. Set the replay buffer, press the hotkey, done. There is no tier above it to be upsold into.
• Free to install, with a business model behind it. Medal is free to install and adds a feed and cross-device capture, with an optional paid tier. Outplayed is free on Overwolf, carries ads, auto-saves in-game events on supported titles, and has a Premium tier whose price it does not publish. Both are capture tools, so what you get is the moment you noticed.
• Free tiers on the cutting side come with strings. Checked 30 October 2026: Opus Clip's free tier is 60 credits and its clips stop being exportable after 3 days. StreamLadder's free plan is 720p at 30fps with a 200 MB upload cap, manual editing and default layouts only. Per Eklipse's own blog, modified 18 July 2026, its free clipping tier ended in June 2026; the emote maker, thumbnail maker and VOD downloaders are still free, but those are not clipping.
• We are not on the free end of this list. CutBench is a one-time $24.99 purchase on Steam and there is no free tier of it. If the tools above already cover what you clip, they are the right answer; the one case they do not cover is the next bullet.
• Where free actually runs out. One place only: a drive full of long recordings nobody has watched. A free capture tool saves the moment you noticed at the time; none of them will tell you what is sitting in the three hours you did not rewatch. If that pile is not your problem, stay on the free tools and spend the money on something else.

NVIDIA clipping software, AMD clipping software, and the Mac.

Capture does not care what card you have: every tool in the top half of the table encodes on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel alike, and Xbox Game Bar runs on all of them. The hardware question only bites on the cutting side, where the tools that analyse footage on your own machine were written against one vendor's compute stack.

• NVIDIA. The NVIDIA app's Instant Replay is a free download from NVIDIA and is the cheapest capture path on that hardware. Every cutting tool on this page runs on an NVIDIA card, CutBench included, and it is the only card CutBench's supported spec names: 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer. The hotkeys and folders are on how to clip on PC.
• AMD. Adrenalin's Instant Replay and OBS with the AMD encoder cover capture completely, and the browser cutters do not care what GPU you have. CutBench runs on a Radeon but below its supported spec: without CUDA the analysis falls back to the processor and takes tens of times longer. We wrote that up plainly, with the timing, on the AMD clipping software page rather than leaving it to a refund request.
• Mac. OBS for capture, and any of the browser tools for cutting. CutBench has no macOS build, and nothing here changes that.

AI clipping software, and what the label actually promises.

Every tool in the bottom half of the table calls itself AI clipping software, and the label covers two different claims. The first is that the tool chooses the moment for you. The second is that it formats a moment you chose: vertical crop, captions, a hook. Opus Clip, Eklipse and StreamLadder's ClipGPT tier make the first claim on their servers. StreamLadder's base plan and most editors make only the second. CutBench makes the first claim on your own computer, for gameplay specifically, and the way to test any of them is the same: one session of your own with a quiet highlight in it, and a look at whether that moment comes back near the top. On ours that test costs $24.99 up front, because there is no free tier to run it on. Check the hardware section above before you spend it. Our longer write-up on what that choosing step is doing is the AI clip maker for gaming page.

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 or a console. Not us. OBS locally, or any of the browser tools above. On an AMD or Intel Arc card CutBench runs below its supported spec, on the processor, tens of times slower; the honest version with timings is the AMD clipping software page, and we would rather you read it before you pay.

Clipping software for PC FAQ.

Longer write-ups on single tools.

• Eklipse alternatives. The cloud tools people move to from Eklipse, with what each costs, and the local one-time app.
• CutBench vs Opus Clip. The general-purpose cutter against the gameplay-specific one.
• All comparisons. Powder was a local desktop clipper and it shut down; the comparisons page lists the tools that are still running.
• How to clip on PC. Hotkeys, buffer length and folders for the NVIDIA app, AMD Adrenalin, Xbox Game Bar and OBS.
• AMD clipping software. What works on a Radeon, and how our own tool behaves without CUDA.
• How to clip a YouTube video. YouTube's Clip button, the Studio trim tool, and the case where the recording is still on your PC.
• 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.