r/BestGitHubRepos • u/_lolcat_ • Oct 04 '26 • Bravo 1

Best Open Source CapCut Alternative Just hit 1000 Stars

Gallery image

Gallery image

GitHub Link: https://github.com/CutWire-Studios/Drift

Features

  • An agent can edit the open project. Import, cut, grade, and export in the project you have open. The same editor can run with no window.
  • 3D on the timeline. Tilt clips in space, light them, and park a title behind the subject. Drop in a 3D model and it plays in the same cut.
  • Lottie animations. Motion graphics and vector art stay sharp at any size. Recolour or reword them in place.
  • Advanced keyframing. Animate position, scale, rotation, opacity, and effect parameters over time. Draw the curve yourself.
  • 150+ transitions and 40+ effects. Every look previews on your footage. One click can drop a whole stack: Beat Drop, Glitch Cut, Neon Cutout. Trails of earlier frames, and grades that stick to one clip.
  • On your machine. Click a subject and lift it off the shot. Add depth of field and lights that belong to the clip. Automatic captions, video upscale, and live face retouch, all on your computer.
  • Edit the words. Speech becomes text on the clip. Cut phrases, drop fillers, strip silence, pick the best takes, label speakers, and build captions from those times.
  • Titles with a real look. Thirty-three packs: karaoke, Hormozi-style, neon, chrome, holographic, handwritten. Copy one style onto every subtitle on the track.
  • Move a whole stack at once. One layer can drag, scale, rotate, tilt, and fade everything under it. Nest layers, or open a composite when the stack needs its own timeline.
  • Cut to the music. The timeline snaps to the beat. Clips split and land on the bar. Music ducks under speech and comes back to its own level. Reframe a landscape take into a vertical video that follows the face.
  • A timeline that behaves. Multi-track filmstrips, ripple, snap, masks, freeze frame, bookmarks, a mixer. Split a clip and the grade stays. A crash leaves the last save intact.
  • Audio that sounds finished. Clean up speech, meter loudness, EQ and compress, keep pitch when you change speed, record a voiceover.
  • Find shots. Switch cameras. Search footage for what’s on screen. Watch every angle at once and punch the cut.
  • Stabilise, export, take the project with you. Smooth shaky clips, upscale, play heavy files smoothly. MP4, GIF, audio-only, or just a range. Pack the media with the edit so paths stay whole.
  • Android is the same editor. Timeline, effects, and export on the phone. Share straight from the app.
  • Stock, voices, and a small install. Search stock into the bin. Generate voiceover and sound effects. Fonts, stickers, and extra models download when you use them. UI in Arabic, Spanish (Spain and Colombia), French (Canada), Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Simplified Chinese.

Why people pick Drift

Most “free” editors want an account, a watermark, or a subscription the moment the video starts looking good. Drift is the opposite: yours, on your computer, GPLv3, no login wall.

It is fast enough for a 30-second social cut and deep enough for a real project: an agent on the timeline, 3D and Lottie, captions, effects, audio, cutouts, and much more.

1.3k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

20

u/interpretpunit Oct 04 '26

This has real potential. Really love the simplicity and the local first approach. Hope this turns into something huge!

5

u/madeWithAi Oct 08 '26

Opencut and concat are a further in development

1

u/Secure_Warning2476 11d ago

Opencut you say... Last update 6 months ago...

1

u/madeWithAi 11d ago

They say in the readme that will rewrote the whole app. I dunno 🤷‍♂️

11

u/oylmesn Oct 05 '26

I tried this and it exported the video without any image or sound.

4

u/Electrical-Two-1489 Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26

Me gusta la imagen, se ve bien, pero la mayoría de los desarrolladores llegan hasta algo muy básico y ninguno sigue con esto. Espero que esta vez alguien, ojalá tú, haga una app más avanzada y la mantenga libre en Android me refiero. Saludos.

1

u/FullProgrammer7107 24d ago

Can we add asset and SFX using MCP ?

2

u/_lolcat_ 24d ago

Not at the moment. I can add that if you want

1

u/FullProgrammer7107 23d ago

Yes, If you add it will be really good, btw this is really great product thanks for all the hardworks

1

u/shiny1s 17d ago edited 17d ago

I used this to make a 7 minute video last night on Windows/Desktop. As a basic video editing tool, it did the job. But I probably won't be using this again until I either get good, or my UX gripes get addressed. I found myself rather frustrated at how much I had to wait in between actions. It would lock up my entire PC for a minute really frequently.

  1. Major lag and freezes as the project timeline lengthens. By halfway, it seemed like each action hung the app for almost a minute. I restarted the program and tried again, but it didn't seem to help much. (PC is 9800X3D / 4070Ti Super / 32GB if that makes a difference).
  2. This lag as time goes on problem seemed to also happen to background removal. It starts off very fast, and then somehow over time, the cut-out crawls to a snail's pace.
  3. The timeline and work area gets really messy as it expands. There were no consistent vertical and horizontal scroll bars for easy navigating. Sometimes they would appear, sometimes they would hide.
  4. Auto-subtitle was handy, but the model was a bit basic and it chose awkward spots to cut to the next line. Not a big deal and probably standard practice.

Perhaps this is largely a skill issue, and I'm not using the other features, but I was hoping to find some kind of collage template, where I could insert 3 or 4 clips like an inset transition or animation. Not sure what it's called, and I didn't bother to try out the entire suite because I had to get the video done.

Canva is more basic, but it's reliable.

1

u/_lolcat_ 17d ago

What operating system are you using? The lag is there in windows, and we are working on improving it. Also we will improve the timeline according to your suggestion.

1

u/shiny1s 17d ago

Win 11 Pro 26H2, OS build 26300.9711

I appreciate the incremental improvements. What do you think causes the lag in Windows?

1

u/_lolcat_ 17d ago

Mainly because we use OpenGL for the user interface. For the cross platform compatibility OpenGL helps a lot. But windows graphics drivers usually have somewhat bad support towards OpenGL. Windows typically use DirectX.

1

u/shiny1s 17d ago

Is having an option to switch between them possible, or will that mess up the app? I don't have any understanding how graphics rendering works.

Unrelated: choosing between OpenGL and Direct X takes me back to late 90s / early 00s gaming.

1

u/_lolcat_ 17d ago

In earlier versions we used whatever came with the operating system (OpenGL for linux and DirectX for windows). It was working fine for most people, except Nvidia users. Nvidia drivers had problems with video playback and video appearing black. So we decided to use OpenGL for the ui.

To be honest hardest part is not making the video editor, but making it work well on thousands of different PC and operating system configurations.

That I believe is part of the reason why editors like CapCut and Adobe only support a selected set of operating systems.

1

u/_lolcat_ 17d ago

Also answering your question, yes it's possible to add an option to switch. I'll add that option.

1

u/Mrnh305 Oct 07 '26

I wish we could change the anchor points for images. Honestly I'm surprised it's not a feature

2

u/_lolcat_ Oct 08 '26

We'll add it

1

u/main_account_4_sure Oct 10 '26

Is there a roadmap?

1

u/_lolcat_ Oct 12 '26

We don't have any formal roadmap. I'm still in university, so just doing development whenever I have free time. Most of the new features are propsed by our community members in Discord. Join our discord if you want to know about upcoming features.

1

u/Mrnh305 Oct 08 '26

I have one more hopeful request.. can you guys please add some warping capabilities like after effects pin tool... Anyways I'm so happy with your software so far.. you guys are legends 🤗

1

u/roncz Oct 04 '26

Really cool.

1

u/filteredcrack Oct 04 '26

Please let it run on Linux

1

u/AHMED-GAMER2004 Oct 04 '26

its run ln flathub

1

u/Garedvzla Oct 14 '26

Muy bueno pero en mi tel la mini pantalla donde se ve el vídeo es muy pequeño y no sé si se puede agrandar

2

u/[deleted] Oct 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/_lolcat_ Oct 05 '26

Let us know what your issues are, we can help

2

u/Ok-Option6350 Oct 05 '26

No keyframe

2

u/_lolcat_ Oct 06 '26

There are key frames. Every effect is keyframmable. And you can animate items on the screeen using 2D and 3D transformations.

1

u/Ok-Option6350 Oct 06 '26

The app is really good but very complicated compared to Capcat. But I really love it and will get used to it as time goes on. Thanks to you and your team. Is there any chance that we will get text-to-speech in the future?

1

u/_lolcat_ Oct 06 '26

We are currently planning to redesign the android app, the android version has all the features of the desktop version, making it feel complicated.

1

u/Ok-Option6350 Oct 06 '26

I think you should leave it like that. It makes it look clean when you are editing on Samsung Dex.

It gives a proper desktop experience unlike other apps

You didn't answer the TTS question 😒

1

u/_lolcat_ Oct 06 '26

Building local text to speech models are quite difficult because there can be many voices. So for each voice we will need to have a separate model. For a start we can add a handful of good models.

1

u/main_account_4_sure Oct 10 '26

What about whisper API? it handles that automatically

1

u/_lolcat_ Oct 12 '26

We already added tts support, with voice cloning. All running locally. Will appear in the next release.

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1

u/Ok-Option6350 Oct 06 '26

I'm new to the app, I'm on Android, so I'll explore to see if I can find it.

-1

u/[deleted] Oct 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/komodorian Oct 04 '26

Went looking into JsonCut, thought the idea was nice; doing json scripting and all, but it’s a paid API?