Table of Contents
Video editing software is complex to learn and demanding on computer hardware, so it's important to find a solution that works for you on both fronts. But you also must consider everything else you need to make your video projects shine, including core editing tools, effects and techniques, and media support. Cutting-edge AI features that accelerate the editing process are increasingly important, too. Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio impress on all of these fronts, but there are still some differences between them that might lead you to prefer one over the other. Here, I compare them side-by-side to help you pick the best video editing software for your budget and needs.
Full Specs
| Adobe Premiere Pro | DaVinci Resolve Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Video Tracks | ||
| Number of Video Tracks | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Motion Tracking | ||
| Motion Tracking | ||
| Multicam Editing | ||
| Multicam Editing | ||
| Supports 360° VR Content | ||
| Supports 360° VR Content | ||
| Keyword Tag Media | ||
| Keyword Tag Media | ||
| Supports 4K XAVC-S Format | ||
| Supports 4K XAVC-S Format | ||
| Exports to H.265 (HEVC) | ||
| Exports to H.265 (HEVC) | ||
Price
This is a big differentiator. Adobe Premiere Pro requires a recurring subscription: $22.99 per month with an annual commitment or $263.88 per year up front. Otherwise, you pay $34.99 per month. If you want Adobe's digital audio workstation (Audition) and motion graphics (After Effects) software, you need to pay their $22.99-per-month subscription rates or just spring for the whole Creative Cloud suite to get all of Adobe's apps ($59.99 per month with an annual commitment).
DaVinci Resolve Studio (the complete version of the editor) goes for a one-time payment of $295. (Its developer, Blackmagic Design, makes most of its profits from selling pro video cameras that range from about $2,000 to $7,000.) So, after just a little more than a year of use, Premiere Pro will cost increasingly more than Resolve Studio.
A completely free and extremely functional version (simply called DaVinci Resolve) is also available, though it lacks the most advanced modules and features in Studio and performs a bit more slowly. For comparison, Adobe offers only a seven-day trial for Premiere Pro.
Winner: DaVinci Resolve Studio
Platform and Media Support
Both applications run on macOS and Windows computers, with native support for Apple silicon and Windows on Arm. DaVinci Resolve Studio also runs on linux. Both programs require powerful hardware.
Premiere Pro has a nifty AI tool that detects most video formats and automatically applies the appropriate color corrections. DaVinci Resolve Studio naturally includes native support for Blackmagic raw (BRAW) footage, whereas Premiere Pro requires a plug-in for it. Working with log or raw footage usually requires a LUT filter to render the colors properly, and you can work with these filters equally well in either app.
You can work with 360-degree VR media in either app.
Winner: Tie
Interface and Ease of Use
No professional video editing program is going to be particularly easy to use, but Adobe has been working to improve Premiere Pro's ease of use. The app's interface largely takes a traditional approach, with a timeline along the bottom and panels for content, effects, and properties. Adobe recently overhauled its Import and Export experiences to make them more seamless, too.
DaVinci Resolve Studio's interface is a bit more involved, with different 'pages' for (in order): Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion (motion graphics), Color, Fairlight (audio editing), and Deliver. The buttons for switching between these sections are across the bottom of the interface, which is itself nonstandard (most people would look to the top of the interface). When I first began testing DaVinci Resolve Studio, I had difficulty figuring out how the Cut page worked. Even Blackmagic's site says, "The cut page can sometimes confuse experienced editors as it's a little different!" But the toughest part of the interface is the node editing on the Fusion page, which you need to use for certain editing functions, such as motion tracking.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Project and Media Organization
Premiere Pro can automatically tag your media with keywords based on its content (using Media Intelligence AI analysis) and metadata for easy searching later. And you get several levels of project organization: Edited Timelines populate Sequences, which make up Projects, which fold up into Productions. You can also apply custom keyword tags to and color-code media, while Projects include Bins with source media. The software's Project Manager can organize all of a Project's media into one location for archiving or sharing.
DaVinci Resolve Studio also lets you use bins, which function like subfolders within your media pool. It can create Smart bins based on metadata, too. One cool option is to create bins automatically based on face recognition. You can add Markers to clips, which are essentially simple notes.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Scope of Features
In addition to standard video editing tools, DaVinci Resolve Studio includes extensive audio editing, color grading, and motion graphics components. As mentioned, Premiere makes you pay extra for After Effects and Audition. Adobe's app does come with Adobe Firefly for AI video generation (which requires Adobe AI credits). For reference, a Premiere Pro subscription gets you 500 credits, which are good for five video generations. Meanwhile, the Media Encoder utility helps you perform batch output operations,
Winner: DaVinci Resolve Studio
Video Effects
Both apps offer a wealth of equally capable effects, including blurs, chroma-keying, filters, keyframe editing, motion tracking, stabilization, time remapping, and transitions. In short, you can do pretty much anything you want to with your videos in either software.
Winner: Tie
AI Capabilities
Premiere Pro is ahead on AI tools, thanks to its Generative Extend feature, which adds frames to a track based on your video content to fill gaps. Both have AI auto-captioning tools and support text-based editing, but Premiere Pro goes a step further with automatic translation to 27 languages. As mentioned, Adobe's Media Intelligence tool lets you search for a clip using natural language since the app auto-tags it using AI.
For comparison, DaVinci Resolve Studio's Neural Engine offers features such as Face Refinement, Object Removal, Scene Cut Detection, and Smart Reframe.
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Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Captions and Titles
Adobe can not only automatically transpose spoken dialog into captions, but also separate it by speaker. DaVinci Resolve Studios' transcriptions aren't as accurate (especially if background noise is present).
Both programs offer titles that you can animate and style until the cows come home. Adobe has more font options, however, and lets you use editable, premade motion graphics templates.
Winner: Adobe Premiere Pro
Color Editing and Grading
Premiere Pro includes a capable Lumetri Color panel, which supports color wheels, curves, HSL color editing, and LUTs. Its Scopes show graphical representations of the color in a Sequence. You can further use adjustment layers for grading, similar to how Photoshop's adjustment layers work. The app also offers Sensei AI-powered auto color correction. As mentioned, Premiere Pro can render raw and log footage without requiring you to manually apply LUTs.
DaVinci Resolve Studio's color editing involves using nodes. Some pros find that this interface convention allows for more power and flexibility, but enthusiasts might find this approach more intimidating.
Winner: Tie
Audio Editing
You can do a lot with the audio tools in Adobe Premiere Pro. It offers full soundtrack mixing, and its Essential Sound panel lets you add stock sound clips. You can also remove hums, noises, reverb, and rumble, as well as apply de-essing. Premiere Pro has highly configurable auto-ducking and dynamic audio fader controls, too. During mixing, you can set different room or environment acoustics. AI auto-tagging tools can categorize audio clips as Ambience, dialogue, music, or SFX. Finally, the Essential Sound panel allows you to easily add effects like telephone or radio sounds; it changes the relevant audio characteristics (such as equalization and dynamic processing) automatically, but you can also adjust these manually. The program's Remix option can shorten or lengthen music to match your video.
Still, if you want a complete set of features for fine-tuning audio, you have to send your project's soundtracks to Adobe Audition. It offers mix plug-ins (compression, EQ, and all the other good stuff) and support for broadcast TV and radio standards, among other pro features.
DaVinci Resolve Studio directly integrates the Fairlight audio editor. This is a complete digital audio workstation that offers compression tools, effects processing, full automated dialog replacement (something studios need), MIDI input, real-time EQ, and submixes. Fairlight is also more adept than Premiere Pro at surround sound editing (it supports up to 22.2!). It has all the same sound cleanup tools as Premiere Pro, too—auto-ducking, de-essing, and noise reduction.
Winner: DaVinci Resolve Studio
Performance
For render speed tests, I have each program join seven clips of various resolutions, ranging from 720p up to 8K. I then apply cross-dissolve transitions between them and note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 192Kbps audio at a bitrate of 16Mbps. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I ran this test on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
In testing, I noticed that the free version of DaVinci Resolve performed far more slowly than the Studio version; only the latter supports graphics hardware acceleration. That said, the Studio version outpaced Premiere Pro on my render speed test by just a smidge. For reference, the free DaVinci Resolve took 4 minutes to render my test project in previous attempts.
Winner: Tie
Collaboration
Premiere Pro has deep collaboration features, thanks to Adobe's acquisition of Frame.io. Even without that integration, cloud-synced Team Projects in Premiere Pro (and After Effects) support multiple editors. You get autosave, a file locking feature that prevents conflicting edits, and offline editing as part of the experience. Premiere Pro can also take advantage of dynamic linking with content from Photoshop and After Effects.
DaVinci Resolve Studio is no slouch for collaboration. Its Blackmagic Cloud lets teams work simultaneously on automatically synced projects, and the software can create proxy files for faster transfers and lower storage requirements. Some Blackmagic camera models can even build proxies as they upload footage while live-syncing. Enterprises can set up sub-teams of editors, and Blackmagic Cloud Store offers studios high-speed storage and on-set local storage syncing.
With its Frame.io and integration with other Creative Cloud apps, especially After Effects, Premiere Pro wins this category by a nose. But if you work as part of a large production studio, you might prefer DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Winner: Premiere Pro
Export Options
As mentioned, Premiere Pro comes with the Adobe Media Encoder utility that offers rich output options. Premiere Pro also has built-in output options for common social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube. Its redesigned Export tab makes all your output options clear, too. DaVinci Resolve Studio offers a bit more control over output bitrate. Both support HDR output, but DaVinci Resolve Studio also lets you output Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision content, which are mostly of interest to professionals.
Winner: Tie
And The Winner Is...
Adobe Premiere Pro
DaVinci Resolve Studio is far more economical than Premiere Pro in the long run since you can get all of its capabilities for a one-time fee of $295, compared with an ongoing subscription. But given Premiere Pro's more accessible interface and truly unique generative AI Features, it's ultimately what you should use for serious work on personal projects or editing clips for social media and the winner of our Editors' Choice award. If you edit video in a studio setting that already uses DaVinci Resolve Studio or Premiere Pro, however, you should be more than content using it, since both are incredibly capable.
