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
Pixabay
Score9 out of 10
N/A
Pixabay headquartered in Germany offers a digital content platform, which they present as a community for sharing copyright-free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons.
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.
This is perfect for any individual or organization that's working on a budget. You'll get stock photos that, while there's a more limited selection than the usual paid sites (Getty, iStock, etc.), are often just as high-quality. For smaller businesses and nonprofits where every dollar counts, I've found myself leaning on Pixabay quite a bit for stock images and, from time to time, will end up buying one of the linked commercial images when Pixabay doesn't have what I need. However, if you have a large budget for stock images, Pixabay will likely not be your best choice, as the paid services offer generous discounts for bulk credit purchases.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Separate photos, illustrations, and vectors—Many competitors have these images all lumped together with a limited ability to sort through them, while Pixabay has a robust library of all of these, making it easy to find what you're looking for.
Free, high-quality images and easy-to-understand licensing rules—Often a new client will have bad image usage habits, freely snagging any image off of google. Pixabay is an excellent resource to give clients a huge range of photos without the fear of getting into copyright trouble.
Sound effects—Free, good-quality sound effects are surprisingly difficult to find amongst competitors, but Pixabay has them in their lineup as well.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
One thing that kind of sticks out is that with so much to choose from, you can feel overwhelmed.
Some of the photos I sometimes can find separately by googling. In the music business, it seems like many photos rotate on the web so there isn't as much to pick from.
I didn't see an option for more vertical videos for use in Instagram or TikTok.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A lot of times, it can be difficult to find things on a website. Pixabay search works extremely well. This way we don’t have to search and keep searching. The results along with the recommendations are very tailored and work well
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Pixabay has given me the free vectors I need for my whiteboard animation videos, which aren't available on the other sites, in addition to the video and audio clips. They've been around for a long time and have stayed consistent, valuable, and easy to use throughout the years. They were my first site for free downloads and remain my favorite image download site to this day.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
