Captions AI vs Submagic: Phone App or Web Editor?

Captions is built for the iPhone (iOS 17 or 18). Its web app at captions.ai is a much smaller product: there is no standalone caption generator, captions come through AI Edit styles that cost more credits, videos must be 9:16 and 4 to 60 seconds long, and uploads from the home screen are capped at 100 MB. Eye contact, dubbing, AI Trim, AI Zoom, AI sound effects, AI music, AI Twins and the manual timeline are missing on the web, and the web app is English-only. On Android you get Captions Lite, a reduced app with a $4.99/mo plan for manual editing; Captions’ help center says eye contact is available there too. Captions’ web help says there is no dedicated Mac or PC app.

Submagic is the opposite: everything runs in the browser, on Windows, Mac or a phone browser, and its help center says there is no native mobile app. If you work on a computer, Submagic gives you its full feature set; if you work on an iPhone, Captions does.

Captions renamed its plans: Pro is now called Basic and Scale is now Frontier, though its own llms.txt file still uses the old names. Basic ($9.99/mo, or $64.99 a year or $5.99 a week in the iOS app) isn’t shown on the pricing page, where Max ($24.99/mo) is the headline plan. Frontier costs $69.99/mo, and Frontier 2x and 4x cost $139.99 and $279.99 a month. The pricing page says "Features and prices reflect iOS plans only", web checkout can show local prices, and yearly prices for Max and Frontier are not published.

Submagic’s prices are per member: Starter $19/mo or $12/mo billed yearly, Pro $39 or $23, Business $69 or $41. Yearly billing saves up to 41%, and the free trial covers 3 short videos with a watermark and no card.

On refunds, Captions’ help center says "Monthly plans are non-refundable", and Submagic’s says it does not offer refunds.

Captions charges credits for AI work, not for exports. AI Edit costs 10 to 40 credits per video, changing a style costs 1, each chat message with the AI costs 2, one AI sound effect costs 2 (4 with the MMAudio model), and Prompt to Video costs 16 credits per 6 seconds. Credits are spent even if you never export the result. Unused credits roll over, up to 3 times your monthly allowance, but standard plans can’t buy top-ups: only Teams, Business and Frontier 4x can.

In practice, Basic’s 200 credits cover about 5 to 20 AI Edits a month and Max’s 500 cover about 12 to 50, depending on the style you pick and how often you redo an edit.

Submagic is simpler to predict. One video costs 3 credits, so Starter’s 45 credits make 15 videos, Pro’s 120 make 40 and Business’s 300 make 100. Credits are also used by premium features such as AI B-roll and Magic Clips, and extra packs can be bought.

Captions lists 101 caption languages (its marketing says 100+). Submagic says 100+ on some pages and 48+ on others. For templates, Captions’ free plan has 1 ("Eclipse"), Max and Frontier have 100+, the web editor has over 30 presets, and AI Edit has 95 basic styles. Submagic has 35+ caption styles, standard ones on Starter and premium themes on Pro and Business, including themes named Hormozi 1 to 5. We found no template officially named after Hormozi in Captions.

Both animate captions word by word, emphasize keywords and add emojis automatically. Captions can export an SRT file. If Hormozi-style captions are what you are after, Submagic (Hormozi 1–5) and StoryCut (6 Hormozi-style presets) have them ready-made.

Eye contact: Captions has it from Basic on iPhone, and in Captions Lite on Android, but not in its new web app. Submagic has it on Pro and Business, in the browser.

One-click editing: Captions’ AI Edit restyles a whole video with captions, B-roll, zooms and sounds, but works on videos up to 2 minutes on iOS and 1 minute on the web. Submagic’s AI Auto Edit applies captions, B-roll, transitions and zooms in one step, with 3 templates.

Zoom and cuts: Captions has AI Zoom and AI Trim (pauses and "uhms") on iOS only. Submagic has auto zooms, silence and bad-take removal and filler-word removal on Pro and Business.

B-roll: Captions’ AI Edit places B-roll for you, and Max adds generative AI B-roll. Submagic has free stock B-roll on Starter, Storyblocks B-roll on Pro and movie clips on Business.

Sound effects and music: Captions generates a sound effect from a text prompt (AI Sounds, on Max per its pricing page), and AI Edit adds sounds as part of its edit, on iPhone. Submagic adds sound effects by hand from a library of 10 sounds or your uploads, and has a music library. Neither places sound effects on your key words the way StoryCut Pro does.

Captions dubs your voice into 31 languages with a voice clone, and Lipdub matches your lip movements to the new language. Translated captions and dubbing work on videos up to 5 minutes. Its pricing page puts dubbing on Max, while one help page lists "Caption & Dub" under Basic, so check the plan in the app before you buy.

Submagic’s translator page still describes translated subtitles (“isn’t robotic voice cloning or uncanny valley lip sync”), but its help center, updated September 29, 2026, says it now supports voice translation too, without saying which plans include it. If you want lip-sync in another language, Captions’ Lipdub is the one of these two that does it.

StoryCut Pro translates captions into 33 languages and can dub your voice with AI, including a clone of your own voice, on videos up to 10 minutes.

Captions’ Clips feature (formerly AI Shorts) is on Max. It takes a video up to 3 hours or 10 GB, or a YouTube link, and returns 30+ ranked clips, reframed automatically. Two Captions help pages disagree on whether Clips works on the web, so plan on the iPhone app.

Submagic’s Magic Clips is an add-on at $19/mo for 10 uploads, on top of your plan. It takes a YouTube link, an upload or a Google Drive file and returns 20+ clips with a virality score, usually in 10 to 25 minutes.

StoryCut includes AI clips in every plan: a YouTube link or an upload from 2 minutes to 2.5 hours, 3 to 12 clips per video with a virality score, reframed to 9:16 around the active speaker, with captions on (1 long video a month on Free, 10 on Starter).

Length: Captions handles same-language captions on videos up to 10 minutes on iOS, but AI Edit stops at 2 minutes on iOS and 1 minute on the web, and translation and dubbing at 5 minutes. Submagic caps each video at 2 minutes on Starter, 5 on Pro and 30 on Business, with files up to 3,000 MB.

Export: Captions’ feature table says it exports "4K and below" on iOS and the web, with no HDR on the web. Submagic exports 1080p at 30fps on Starter, up to 2K on Pro and up to 4K at 60fps on Business.

Your projects: Captions’ web help says web projects are stored locally in your browser and are not synced, so logging out or clearing your browser cache deletes them. Export anything you want to keep. Submagic’s editor runs in your account in the browser.

Captions has 4.7 stars from about 38,000 ratings on the US App Store and 4.4 on Trustpilot from 480 reviews (68% five stars, 20% one star). Recent Trustpilot reviewers praise fast support and refunds. The complaints are mostly about credits: App Store reviewers say they feel "nickel and dimed" (November 2025) and that they spend credits fixing the AI’s mistakes (July 2026), and one review titled "Extremely Misleading Trial" (May 2026) describes confusing plan tiers.

Submagic has 4.5 stars on Trustpilot from 844 reviews (86% five stars, 7% one star). Its 1-star reviews are mostly about renewals and its no-refund policy: one reviewer says it "took €339.48 from me without proper notification of the subscription renewal" (July 2026). Reviewers praise the time it saves, its transcription and its style library.

Ratings were checked on October 3, 2026. We could not check Reddit for this page.

Disclosure: we make StoryCut, so read this section with that in mind.

StoryCut is closer to Submagic: a web app that runs in desktop and mobile browsers, with nothing to install. Captions start on their own when your upload finishes, in 49 languages, with 26 built-in styles including 6 Hormozi-style presets. Compared with Submagic, videos can be longer on cheaper plans (7 minutes on Starter at $7/mo billed yearly, 10 on Pro), Pro places sound effects on 4 to 8 key words for you and dubs your voice into 33 languages, and AI clips from long videos are in every plan with no add-on.

Compared with Captions, eye contact correction starts on Pro ($14/mo billed yearly, 10 videos a month), not on a $9.99 plan, but every account can fix one video for free with no card, 5 more cost $9 one-time, and it works in the browser, which Captions’ web app doesn’t offer. StoryCut counts videos at a time rather than credits, so changing caption styles doesn’t use anything up.

Where it is weaker than both: no iPhone or Android app, no AI avatars, no API and no social posting, a free plan that exports 720p with a watermark, and no third-party reviews yet.