7 Best Apps to Caption Videos Effortlessly - Riverside.fm

Captioning your videos adds an extra step to your creation process. But that doesn’t mean it has to be time-intensive or complicated. 

With tools like Riverside’s AI transcription, captioning your videos can take just minutes. You can reap all the accessibility, SEO, and exposure benefits captions offer without investing too much time. 

The only difficulty lies in choosing the best tool for the job. This article walks you through 7 of the best apps to add captions to videos for every device. 

TL:DR

• Captions offer tons of benefits, including increased accessibility, exposure, and stronger SEO
• Choose your captioning app based on accuracy, ease of use, and price 
• Riverside’s AI transcription generator is intuitive, highly accurate, and easy to use. And it’s completely free for unlimited transcriptions. 

Why should you caption videos?

If you’re not already captioning your videos, you’re missing out on several benefits to your content’s reach and accessibility. Let’s take a look at why: 

Accessibility 

Captions are essential to ensuring all viewers enjoy your content. This includes those who are hard of hearing, deaf, or simply can’t have their audio switched on. 

Keeping your content competitive

With saturated ‘for you pages’ and feeds, it can be difficult to catch the attention of your target viewers. Especially since most people scroll through content with their audio muted. Including captions gives you a better chance of piquing viewers’ interest as they scroll past. 

Strengthen SEO 

Another huge advantage of captioning your videos is the SEO benefits. Since search engines can index your transcript files, you’ll rank for keywords relevant to your video’s content. This is essential for ensuring your video surfaces to a broad audience. 

Is there an app to add captions to videos?

There are actually several apps and platforms that offer captioning in some capacity. You’ll come across paid and free apps that you can use yourself and dedicated ‘captioning services’. 

How to choose your video captioning app

Since there are many options, it can be tricky to choose which is the best one for you. Here are a few tips to help make the decision a little easier: 

Price 

Price, budget, and value for money should be big considerations when weighing up different video captioning apps. If you’re budget-conscious, you’ll probably be on the hunt for a free tool. Bear in mind that not all free tools offer the same quality. It’s good practice to really delve into and compare different features. 

Usability 

You should look for an app that’s easy and intuitive to use. You don’t want to spend unnecessary time captioning your video when some tools offer a seamless, almost instant turnaround. 

Accuracy 

You need a tool that can produce accurate captions autonomously. You don’t want to have to spend your precious time adjusting and editing your transcript to get it up to scratch.  

6 Best Apps to Caption Videos on Any Device

Best video caption apps for Desktop 

Riverside

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Price: Free, with paid plans starting at $15

Compatibility: Browser-based

Riverside is an online video creation platform that makes recording and editing professional content a seamless workflow. With built-in Ai transcriptions, you don’t even need to switch platforms for video captions. 

Riverside’s AI transcriptions offer unmatched accuracy and are available in over 100 languages. You can either download an SRT or TXT file for closed video captioning, or you can add captions directly to your video in the editor.

In the editor, you can also use your transcriptions to edit your videos.Using Riverside’s text-based video editor, you can simply delete text from your transcripts to remove the corresponding audio and video in your recording. 

This makes it incredibly easy to integrate transcription as part of your recording workflow. 

Alternatively, if you haven’t used Riverside to record your content, you can still use their free AI transcription tool. With no limits on how many files you can upload, this is a powerful tool that offers super-accurate transcriptions in over 100 languages. 

Pros

• If you use Riverside to record your content, you’re guaranteed high-quality audio and video. This is important for your transcripts because high-quality audio helps the AI-powered machine generate more accurate transcriptions 
• Choose between SRT and TXT files, depending on your needs. SRT files are generally better for captioning videos. 
• Add open captions directly on your videos and style them as you like
• Ultra-accurate transcripts powered by Open AI’s Whisper Software 
• Multilingual transcription in over 100 languages 
• Fast turnaround with the ability to generate transcripts straight after recording
• Intuitive & straightforward 
• Automated speaker detection in your transcript 
• Use your transcription to make text-based edits to your video recording. 

Cons

• Built in transcription downloads are only available on paid plans. (You can use the transcription tool for free though, and if you didn't record on Riverside.)

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Filmora

Price: $79.99 for each computer but this only gives you 30 mins of speech-to-text. 

Compatibility: Mac and Windows desktop

Filmora is a video-editing app by name. But they also happen to offer subtitling as part of your subscription. It’s an easy to use tool that’s great for beginners. They have a desktop, iPad and iPhone version - though your capabilities depend on which device you’re using. 

Using the Filmora video editor, you can add subtitles to your videos in three ways: 

• Uploading an .srt file
• Using their auto-transcribe tool 
• Adding them manually yourself. 

Pros

• High-accuracy auto-subtitling
• Auto-subtitles in up to 16 languages 
• Other editing tools available 

Cons

• Not as many languages as other captioning apps 
• Expensive with limited auto-captioning 

Veed

Price:

Free plan gives you unlimited 720p exports (with a Veed watermark) and a maximum duration of 10 minutes. Also, you can only create 30 minutes of subtitles per month. Their Basic plan which is $12/month gives you 720 minutes of subtitles, though still with a limit of 1080p video quality. 

Compatibility: Browser-based. Also works on Android & iPhone 

Veed is a recording, streaming, and browser-based editing tool. They emphasize how uncomplicated their platform is. Their ‘one-click’ features are perfect for beginners.  You can use Veed to add subtitles to your videos, though be wary of the monthly limits. 

Pros 

• Flexibility to add subtitles manually, use Veed’s auto-transcribe tool or upload a pre-generated subtitle file 
• Customize your subtitles’ font, color and size
• Multilingual subtitles 
• Ability to shift subtitles to correct timing 

Cons

• Monthly subtitle limits 

Zubtitle

Price: Free ‘Bootstrapper’ plan available, but you only get 2 videos per month, limited at 720p resolution and with a Zubtitle watermark. Zubtitle’s most affordable plan starts at $19/month, but you still only get 10 videos per month. 

Compatibility: Browser-based & mobile-friendly for both iOS and Android devices. 

Zubtitle is an online editor tool that is geared towards creating social media videos. Since it’s browser-based, you can use it with any device. They offer ready-to-use templates which are ideal for quick and easy workflows.  

Zubtitle also helps you to subtitle your videos. Its automatic subtitling engine makes adding and editing captions easy. 

Pros 

• Subtitles directly onto your video. But you can also download the .SRT file. 
• Automatic topic timestamp generator 
• Custom fonts and colors to help you personalize your captions 
• Multilingual captioning 
• Ability to animate your captions 

Cons

• Limited number of videos, even with a paid subscription 
• Can upload videos of maximum duration of 20 minutes

Best video caption apps for iPhone

Clips by Apple

Price: Free

Compatibility: iPhone and iPad 

Clips is Apple’s app aimed at helping users capture short-form videos. It also comes with an auto-captioning tool. To generate automatic on-screen captions, simply record with Clip’s live title style. 

Pros 

• You can choose the style of your captions 
• Multilingual captions 

Cons

• Only available for Apple users
• Might be overly simplistic for some creators
• No ability to record your video using another software 

Captions App

‍Price: Free to download. Captions Pro costs $9.99 per month. 

Compatibility: iPhone 

Captions is actually a creator studio app. The app is all about helping you capture content instantaneously with captions. All you need to do is tap record and the app will automatically transcribe and caption your videos. You’ll also be able to edit and clip your content through the app to get it publication ready. 

Pros 

• You can customize your caption text styles with different fonts 
• Easy to use creation to caption workflow 
• Multilingual captioning 
• AI Powered writing assistant and idea generator 
• Overdubbing for when you make a mistake

Cons

• No details about the quality of your video recording
• No ability to transcribe purely audio recordings 
• Appears that you need to use the app to create a video, rather than uploading your own. 

Best video caption apps for Android

Kaptioned

Price:

Free trial for one 15 minute video. Unlimited videos for $9.99/month. 

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Compatibility

Android and also iPhone. 

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Kaptioned auto-generates subtitles for your videos. It claims to be the ‘fastest way to create subtitled videos’ which is great for creators looking to save on time. You can edit and change the subtitles and timing in the app. 

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Pros

• Customize your subtitles by changing the colors, fonts and adding a background 
• Add custom hashtags/captions in addition to your subtitles 
• Multilingual subtitling and the ability to include subtitles in two languages 

Cons 

• Quite expensive for a simple app 

Best free video caption app

If you’re looking for a free video captioning app, there are a few good options for the list above. Clips by Apple is a great budget-friendly app that integrates well if you’re using your iPhone anyway. Zubtitle’s free ‘bootstrap’ plan is also a good option if you’re not planning on creating a lot of content. 

Finally, if you haven’t recorded your content with Riverside, you can still use the AI transcription tool to generate a super-accurate transcription in minutes. 

Which video caption app should you choose?

This totally depends on your budget, needs, and device compatibility. For the best all-rounder that will cater to most, if not all, creators, we’d recommend Riverside.

Best practices for captioning videos effectively

Here are some tips for optimizing the quality of your captions: 

Maximize recording quality 

If you’re using an AI caption generator, you must ensure that your recording’s audio quality is as good as possible. Fuzzy, unclear, or stuttery audio will confuse the AI-powered tool and could lead to inaccuracies in your transcription. Ultimately, this will waste your time because you’ll need to go in and make manual corrections and adjustments. 

Use a tool like Riverside to guarantee studio-quality audio every time you record. 

Understand the difference between open & closed captions 

It’s not as simple as ‘captioning your video’. You need to choose between open and closed captions. Open captions are ‘burned’ into your video file, whereas closed captions exist in a separate ‘sidecar’ file. 

Opting for closed captions means you give the viewer the choice of whether they want to watch with captions. This also means you can reap some SEO benefits too. Open captions are better suited to social media because most users scroll on mute. 

Read more: Closed Captions vs Open Captions: Which is Best for Videos

Optimize for each platform 

If you’re going with closed captions, you must ensure your transcription file format is compatible with your uploading platform. 

Customize your open captions

Finally, if you choose to include open captions, have some fun customizing your captions' font, size, and color. Since open captions exist as part of your video file, they become a part of the visual identity of your content. Make sure that they are easy to read while still representing your brand. 

FAQs on App to Caption Videos

How do I caption my videos?

Use Riverside to accurately transcribe your video’s audio, then decide whether you will use open or closed captions. If you choose open captions, you’ll need to open a video editing tool that lets you burn your captions onto your file. If you’re happy with closed captions, take your Riverside-generated .srt file and upload it alongside your video. 

Is there a way to auto-caption a video?

Yes, as we’ve seen there are a number of free (and paid) tools out there that offer auto-captioning. Be careful, though, because auto-captioning isn’t always super accurate.