CutBench is an Eklipse alternative for people who would rather not send the session anywhere at all. Eklipse clips your gameplay on its own servers, on a recurring plan whose price only appears at checkout. CutBench does the same job on your own PC, on hardware you already bought for the game. Your footage never leaves the machine, and you pay once.
Eklipse's pipeline begins once your footage is on its infrastructure, and the advantages of that are real and worth naming first. There is nothing to install and no hardware bar to clear. It works from a browser, which means it works on macOS, on an AMD card, on a laptop with integrated graphics, on the machine your employer gave you. And the work happens somewhere that is not your PC, so your own GPU stays free while it runs. If you do not keep local recordings at all, if you stream and the only copy of the session lives on the platform, then a local tool has nothing to open and a hosted one is simply the right answer.
CutBench never sends the file anywhere, because the pass runs on your own NVIDIA GPU. You point it at the raw recording in your captures folder and it works through the whole thing: it reads the picture as well as the sound, and judges a moment on what actually happened rather than on how loud it got. That is combined into a score for every candidate moment. Each moment is trimmed to its payoff, cropped to 9:16, captioned and labelled with a hook, and the results come back as a list sorted best first.
One claim we will not make, because plenty of tools in this category imply it: nothing here reads text on screen. There is no OCR, so no kill feed is being parsed and no scoreboard is being read. The ranking works from speech, from sound, from cuts, and from a classifier trained on what a HUD looks like in a given state. That is narrower than saying the software understands your game, and it is the version that holds up when someone checks.
The privacy difference is not abstract either. A raw session is the least edited thing you own. It has the party voice chat on it, the things said when nobody expected them to matter, whatever notification slid across the screen. A hosted clipper needs all of that on its servers to do its job. A local one needs it to stay exactly where it is.
The last difference is the bill, and here Eklipse is unusually hard to plan around: checked on 14 August 2026 it publishes no pricing page, the rate appears at checkout, and its own blog says the free clipping tier ended in June 2026. CutBench is one line item on Steam that you can read before you decide.
| CutBench | Eklipse | |
|---|---|---|
| What you feed it | A whole 3-hour session, in place | Footage you upload |
| Pricing model | Free demo · $34.99 once | Not published · shown at checkout |
| Free tier | Demo, no expiry · watermark | Free clipping tier ended June 2026 |
| Where your footage runs | Your PC | Their servers |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Install needed | Windows app | None · runs in a browser |
| macOS / AMD / integrated GPU | — | Yes, nothing to install |
| Upload limits | None · local disk | Not published |
| Game-aware ranking | Rust + ARC tuned | Not verified |
| Deep game-event scoring | Tuned on two games. | Not verified |
| Reads on-screen text (OCR) | — no OCR | Not verified |
| Output structure | Loop + linear · payoff-trimmed | Highlight detection |
| Direct publish (TikTok/YT) | YouTube direct · TikTok to drafts | Included (paid) |
| Subscription | Never | Recurring plan |
Checked on 14 August 2026: Eklipse does not publish a pricing page, the rate is shown at checkout, and its own blog says the free clipping tier ended in June 2026 and puts the plan at roughly $12.50 a month billed annually. We would rather show no number than a wrong one, so check their checkout before you buy. Blank cells and dashes mean the feature is not offered, not that it is offered badly. "Not verified" means exactly that, and we left it rather than guess.
Start with the file, because everything else follows from its size. Three hours of 1080p60 gameplay written by OBS or ShadowPlay at around 30 Mbit/s comes to roughly 40 GB. Capture at 15 Mbit/s and it is nearer 20 GB. Capture at 4K and it is several times either figure. Whatever your settings, that session is the largest thing you made this week.
A hosted clipper has to move it. On a 20 Mbit/s upstream connection, 40 GB takes about four and a half hours, with the uplink saturated the whole time, so you are not playing anything competitive while it goes. On the 10 Mbit/s upstream that plenty of home plans still ship, it is closer to nine hours. Which is why almost nobody uploads a full session. They cut it down by hand first, so only the parts they already believe in make the trip. That step appears on no pricing page, and it is the expensive one.
Attention is the number that decides this. Scrubbing three hours at four times speed to mark the moments is forty-five minutes of watching you cannot do anything else during, and you spend it before the tool has done a single thing for you. Multiply by however many unwatched sessions are on the drive right now.
The local route moves nothing. CutBench opens the file where it already sits and works through all of it. A 3-hour session takes roughly two to five hours on an RTX 3060 class card, unattended. Start it before dinner or before bed and come back to a ranked list, with the weak candidates already sorted to the bottom. Bytes uploaded: zero. Bandwidth spent: zero. Time you personally sat there: the click at the start and a few minutes reviewing the top of the list at the end.
To be fair about the other side of that trade: once your footage is on a hosted service, it comes back faster than a local GPU will manage, and it does not tie up your machine. The waiting with CutBench is real. It is just waiting you can sleep through, and it happens once per session instead of once per clip.
Checked on 14 August 2026: Eklipse does not publish a pricing page. The rate is shown at checkout. Its own blog puts the plan at roughly $12.50 a month billed annually, and says the free clipping tier ended in June 2026. We would rather quote their blog and label where it came from than repeat a number off a comparison site, so treat that figure as their claim rather than ours.
If $12.50 a month holds, a year is about $150 and two years about $300. If it does not hold, you find out at checkout, and that is the part worth planning around more than the number itself. A price you cannot see until you have started buying is a price you cannot compare against anything, which is awkward when comparing is the entire reason you opened this page.
CutBench is $34.99 once, on Steam. No tiers, no credits to ration, no renewal, and no window after which your exports stop working. Against a $12.50 monthly figure the one-time price pays for itself somewhere in the third month, and after that the gap widens every month you keep clipping.
The free demo is the same pipeline on the same footage, with a watermark burned into the exports and no expiry date. That means you can measure the ranking against your own games and your own taste before any money changes hands, which is the only test that tells you anything.
Our price is the Steam listing on the date given. The Eklipse figure comes from their own blog, not from a price displayed to us. Regional pricing, tax treatment and promotions move them around, so treat them as a checkpoint rather than a quote.
Eklipse is good at something CutBench cannot do at all, and it is not a small something. It runs with nothing installed, on any machine with a browser. That means macOS, Linux, an AMD or Intel Arc card, a laptop with integrated graphics, a work machine you have no admin rights on, or a Steam Deck. If that describes your setup, this is not a close call and we would rather say so here than after you have paid us.
Pick it too if your footage does not live on a drive you control. If you stream and never keep a local copy, if the session exists as a VOD on a platform, if the clips come off a console or a phone, then a local tool has nothing to open. Pick it if you want the result in minutes rather than hours, or if you need your GPU free because you are still playing. And pick it if you would genuinely rather rent than own, because a recurring plan means someone else buys the hardware and keeps it current.
What you are trading away for that convenience is privacy over the raw session, a price you can read up front, and a ranker that was tuned on gameplay specifically. If none of those three matter much to you, stop reading and go use Eklipse with our blessing.
Nothing here asks you to cancel anything on day one, and finding out whether the ranking works on your games should cost you one evening, not a weekend.
Going local buys privacy and a one-time price, and it charges you in hardware and patience. If any of the following describes you, stay where you are.
Eklipse is a hosted service on a recurring plan: your footage uploads to its servers and the work happens there. Checked on 14 August 2026, it publishes no pricing page, the rate appears at checkout, and its own blog says the free clipping tier ended in June 2026. CutBench is a local Windows app with a one-time purchase; your footage never leaves your PC, and the ranking is game-aware, tuned for Rust and ARC Raiders.
For long local gameplay recordings, yes, and that is the case it was built for. You give CutBench a whole 3-hour session rather than footage you already trimmed, and it reads the picture as well as the sound. Where it is not an alternative is on hardware: no macOS, no Linux, no AMD or Intel Arc, and no phone.
Checked on 14 August 2026, Eklipse does not publish a pricing page and the rate is shown at checkout. Its own blog puts the plan at roughly $12.50 a month billed annually, and says the free clipping tier ended in June 2026. That is their figure rather than ours, so check the checkout before you plan a budget around it.
No. The entire pipeline runs locally on your NVIDIA GPU. Your footage never leaves your PC. The models ship inside the build, so nothing downloads on first run. Internet is used only if you click Publish.
No. There is no OCR anywhere in the pipeline, so nothing reads text on screen. It reads the picture as well as the sound, and Rust and ARC Raiders were tuned on real footage from those games.
Roughly two to five hours on an RTX 3060 class GPU, running unattended. It is built to be started before bed or before you go out, not to hand you a clip while you wait. The trade is that you get a whole session's worth of ranked clips rather than one.
Yes. Buy once on Steam for $34.99. No subscription, no per-clip credits, no export deadline. A free demo runs the full pipeline with a small watermark; the paid version renders clean clips.
An NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB or more of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer, on Windows 10 or 11, with 8 GB of RAM and 30 GB of free disk. That means an RTX 2060, RTX 3050 8GB or RTX 4050 and up. AMD and Intel Arc GPUs, macOS and Linux are not supported.
Yes. The free demo on Steam is the whole tool: same pipeline, same ranked clips, 100% local, and it does not expire. The only difference is a small watermark on demo clips.
Try the free demo. It runs the whole pipeline on your PC. Buy once when you're ready to drop the watermark.