Camtasia is a video editor and screen recorder. Camtasia offers a range of plans designed to meet varying video creation needs, and enables users to produce professional-looking videos. Its features include Camtasia Rev, script generation, text-to-speech, translations, and avatar videos, to streamline the video creation process. The editions available are Free, Essentials, Create, or the Pro plan.
$179.88
per year per user
Descript
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Descript is a collaborative audio/video editor, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that works like a doc. It includes transcription, a screen recorder, publishing, full multitrack editing, and AI tools.
$12
per month
Pricing
Camtasia
Descript
Editions & Modules
Camtasia Business
$198
per year per seat
Free
$0
Annual billing - Hobbyist
$12
per month per user
Monthly Billing - Hobbyist
$19
per month per user
Annual billing - Creator
$24
per month per user
Monthly Billing - Creator
$35
per month per user
Annual billing - Business
$40
per month per user
Monthly Billing - Business
$50
per month per user
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Camtasia
Descript
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
*Discounts available for purchases supporting a large volume of users.
Camtasia is so easy to use that I recommend it over Adobe Premiere, Captivate, Storyline, and other tools. The only problem is the price. Due to the fact that I purchased this for education purposes, and educational prices have gone up exponentially, it has been difficult even at $179 to upgrade, as an educator and the organization is not always willing to reimburse the purchase, it would have been more economical. It was less than $100 (Black Friday) when I bought our updated version in 2019. Camtasia profile accounts aren't the best setup, however. My profile account does not reflect when I was a user or show past invoices, and I wanted to see how long ago I was a user.
Descript is well-suited for fast editing of training videos, tutorials, podcasts, and screen recordings, where transcript-based editing and quick cleanup save time. It works best when you need a simple workflow to record, transcribe, remove filler words, tighten sections, and apply basic enhancement tools like noise cleanup. It is less appropriate for high-stakes projects where losing edits would be very costly, or when you need strong guarantees around long-term project history, backups, and recovery. Based on our experience, if you are doing many hours of edits and expect to revisit projects months later, you may want an additional export/archive process outside the platform.
USB Microphones can sometimes cause a problem if they become accidentally unplugged during a recording session. This can corrupt some of the files that the Camtasia Recorder application uses to capture directly to .avi mode.
You'll sometimes get a message when you next try to record that .avi mode isn't available and the only way to fix this is by completely uninstalling and reinstalling Camtasia (with a reboot in the middle of these two actions).
This bug only manifested after Camtasia 8 was released, but still seems to cause an issue right up to and including Camtasia 2021.
I'd like to see more standard Annotation options. The existing ones are pretty good, but variety is a little lacking.
More 'Behaviours' would also be really welcome as these are a great feature and make Callouts a bit more interesting and lively. I've not seen any new Behaviours over the past few versions (since Camtasia 2018).
UX Performance. Because it's synced to the cloud, there can be some delay or lag in the UX when editing.
Editing Transcriptions. Machine-based transcriptions always need some post-editing. While Descript makes it pretty easy, I still think there is some room for improvement. For instance, I would like to be able to automatically update for all occurrences of a word after fixing it in the transcript.
Automatic importing of YouTube and hosted video files. I often have to download a video from YouTube to be able to import it into Descript. Would be nice to be able to just paste in the URL to the video and have Descript automatically import it.
Each release of Camtasia has added just enough functionality to justify the upgrade to the new version. I like that Camtasia is not a subscription-based product as we have more flexibility and control over our spend on the product. We can also purchase support packages that include the next version when released.
I haven't used another video recording and editing tools that is as comprehensive and straight-forward as Camtasia. Typically, if you want a user-friendly video editing tools for novice users, you have to compromise on features. Camtasia solves this problem by offering extensive editing features in a simplistic, user-friendly environment. Highly recommend
It's pretty user friendly, has a easy-moderate learning curve. However during updates they do change the features in different panes / sections that make them harder to find. The text editor is near perfect, some of the other tools such as colour, templates, audio etc. are arranged in a slighlty less intuitive manner
With the latest version (Camtasia 2020), I actually had problems with an Imac with HighSierra, but from the first moment they answered and guided me to solve the problem, even before making the purchase (with some doubts I had). And they have support in English and Spanish, I really liked that.
We had a very frustrating experience with Descript and their support.
We used Descript to record and edit several videos. The edits were done around May, mainly using the web app. When we opened those same projects in December, many of them looked like raw recordings again. Cuts were missing and effects were missing.
Support and engineering told us they checked their logs and only saw “creation → recording → transcription,” and they said they could not find proof the edits were ever made. That explanation does not match what we saw in the app. The affected videos show two project backup files. In Descript, backups only appear after you start editing (the app even says so). But when we checked other projects that we know are raw, those do not show any backup files. We asked a simple question: if backups appear only after editing, why do the “raw” affected videos have two backups while truly raw videos have none? They did not answer this clearly.
One rep also said they noticed a spike in network errors in May. That is exactly when the edits were done, which makes it very likely the edits did not save or sync correctly. Instead of admitting this could be the cause, support kept pointing to “no logs of edits” and that it was our fault.
They refunded one month, but called it a “courtesy.” That was disappointing. We also stopped using Descript while they were investigating because we did not feel it was safe to keep working in the platform. If that one-month refund was meant to cover the time we could not use the service during the investigation, that still does not address the real damage. We lost many hours of work, we paid our editor hourly, and we paid for the subscription for convenience and reliability. For the amount of inconvenience and loss we experienced, one month is clearly not enough.
I've tried several freeware recorders, too. If all you want to do is literally record your screen, and nothing else, you don't need Camtasia. There are literally dozens of apps that will do that. If you want an app that will record your screen while capturing mouse clicks, follow you, record your voice while you capture, and annotate when you're done, Camtasia has no equal. Plus, it doesn't stop there. You can add professional intros and outros (many already created to choose from), lower thirds, etc., leading to videos with very high production value. This is THE program to buy if you want to produce training videos of very high quality.
Descript is by far superior to the other editing software you can get on Apple computers. It's able to do a lot more and really save us tons of time. Other Adobe apps are great, but take a while to learn. Descript is very user-friendly, making it easy to start from day one with very little training.
I can get video completed much more quickly and cheaply
We can produce more video content because of the speed with which we can have a finished product
We can have shorter timelines for example I record on Monday and we publish on Tuesday which wouldn't be otherwise possible with other methods I've used
