Camtasia costs $299 upfront or $179/year; Descript runs $144-288/year with no perpetual license. Descript wins for podcasts and transcription with AI features and faster exports. Camtasia is better for screen recordings and tutorials. The creator rates Descript's interface 8/10 after a May 2024 update, Camtasia's at 7.5/10.
Questions this video answers
About 30 hours.
Creator: US$144 per year; Pro: US$288 per year.
No — Descript is subscription-only.
US$299 for a perpetual license.
About US$179 per year.
Today I'll be comparing Descript with the video editing software called Camtasia. In preparing for this video, I used camtasia for about 30 hours and this video you're watching right now was made using Camtasia. I'll be comparing these two on price, features, user interface speed and reliability. And finally, my recommendation on who should be using each software first. Price Descript has a free version, while Camtasia does not. That said, Descript's free version is super limited and if you're going to be using this tool, you pretty much have to upgrade. For paid Options, descript offers two tiers, Creator and Pro, at US$144 per year and $288 per year respectively. Check out my video linked up here in the top left about choosing the right one for your needs. Also, with Descript you can you can only subscribe to it. There is no option to buy a perpetual license to the software. With Camtasia, on the other hand, you can buy a perpetual license, which means you own the current version of the software and all its updates forever. That costs $299 for the perpetual license. Alternatively, you can get a subscription which runs you about $179 US per year and that gets you access to the latest version when it's released. So my first recommendation here is if you hate subscriptions, Camtasia is a solid choice for you. If you're fine with subscriptions, it's a toss. Up next, let's talk about features. Both are full featured editors, meaning you can add any type of element to a project, cut it up, add transitions, and export it. However, the biggest place where they vary in my opinion is is Camtasia is lacking on AI features. Descript's core features like automatic transcription, AI editing and studio Sound are not available in Camtasia. Camtasia on the other hand, has some features that are missing in descript, and I didn't even know I needed them until I used Camtasia. With Camtasia there are way more options for screen recording, like having preset screen recording sizes, Camtasia being able to add automated zooms to your screen recording, and adding automated clicks. As someone who makes tutorials every day, I wish I'd known about Camtasia a long time ago because it speeds all of that stuff up for me significantly. Until now I've done all that stuff manually in descript. Concerning user interface, these are both relatively simple beginner to intermediate level softwares. They don't have overwhelming amounts of controls and options like a premiere or Final Cut. So in terms of the learning curve, I'd say both of these are very user friendly for beginners. That said, I think Descript is more modern and especially with the update from just a few days ago in late May 2024. As I record this, they consolidated the properties bar onto the right side and changed some of the icons and I think it took descript from a 6 out of 10 in terms of usability to an 8 out of 10. It was a big improvement. Camtasia on the other hand, looks a bit more dated, but again, it's by no means difficult to use. I'd say it took me about three hours in the software to get really comfortable with where everything is and how it all works. So I Give Camtasia a 7.5 on user interface. In terms of speed, this was perhaps my biggest complaint about Camtasia. I've gotten used to Descript, where I can publish my videos directly to YouTube. It works 95% of the time and it only takes a few minutes even for giant 4k projects. In terms of speed within a project, I've edited Multitrack multi hour 4K videos and descript does great. With Camtasia, I couldn't believe how slow it was. Exporting a project to my hard drive sometimes took as long or longer than the video itself. I'd say it's three or four times slower than Descript, and while it has the ability to publish directly to YouTube, I found it even more unreliable than Descript, so I stopped using that feature altogether. But in terms of editing speed, I also had no issues with Camtasia slowing down on me, so no issues there. I give descript A9 for speed and Camtasia A5 due to the slow exports. As far as reliability is concerned, these both do pretty well but are far from perfect. I'd say once out of every hour of editing or so, something will happen where it errors out and crashes the application. Neither one is unusable by any means, but they definitely have their nuances where they crash the software if you do something it doesn't like. So 8 out of 10 on reliability for these two. As for my recommendation, as always with my descript versus series, my answer is it depends on what you're going to do with the software. I still think Descript is the best editor out there for spoken word content such as courses, podcasts and interviews. So if that's what you're making, go with Descript. That's my recommendation. On the other hand, if you are making software tutorials and things where you need a screen recorder. I have to recommend Camtasia over Descript if you it's just so much better for that. The automatic mouse click noises and screen zooms. Those save me so much time and you're going to start seeing me use it a lot more on this channel. Also, if you're someone who hates subscriptions, then that is giant bonus points for Camtasia. So I use them both. I like them both, but let me know in the comments. Which one did you pick and why?
