Submagic makes great captions for clips you already have. Short.now does that — and finds the clips for you. Upload a long video and get captioned, reframed Shorts automatically.
Submagic built its reputation on beautiful, high-converting captions and short-form edits. If you already have a clip and want to make it pop with animated captions, B-roll, and emojis, it does that well. But Submagic starts from a clip you've already cut — it doesn't take a long video and decide what's worth clipping. That's the gap Short.now fills. Short.now's AI analyzes your entire long video, finds the moments worth turning into Shorts, then captions and reframes them automatically. You get the full pipeline — from long upload to ready-to-post Shorts — instead of just the captioning step.
| Feature | Short.now | Submagic |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 3 videos/month, no card | Limited trial |
| Starting paid price | $12/month | $20+/month |
| Finds clips in long videos | Yes | No |
| AI moment detection | Yes | No |
| Animated captions | Word-by-word, custom styles | Word-by-word, custom styles |
| Auto B-roll | Roadmap | Yes |
| 9:16 auto-reframe | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-platform publishing | YouTube, TikTok, Reels, LinkedIn, X | Export + manual upload |
| No watermark on free | Yes | No |
| Best for | Long video → Shorts, end to end | Polishing clips you already cut |
Submagic assumes you already know which 30 seconds to use. Short.now's AI watches the whole video and surfaces the best moments automatically — so you skip the most time-consuming part of short-form: finding what to clip.
Short.now's Starter plan gives you 3 full videos every month — AI clipping, captions, and reframing — with no credit card and no watermark on exports.
With Submagic you still need a separate tool to cut clips out of long content. Short.now is the whole pipeline: upload long video, get captioned Shorts, publish — in one place.
Short.now charges by video, so a 90-minute podcast costs the same as a 20-minute video. No per-minute meter to watch.
Submagic is a caption-and-polish tool for clips you've already cut. Short.now is an end-to-end clipper: it analyzes your full long video, finds the best moments, and then captions and reframes them. Short.now does the finding; Submagic assumes you've already found the moment.
Yes. Short.now generates word-by-word animated captions with custom fonts, colors, positioning, and animation styles — the same high-retention caption style Submagic is known for.
Yes — that's its core function. Upload a long video or paste a YouTube link and Short.now returns a batch of ranked, captioned, 9:16 Shorts. Submagic does not do automatic moment detection from long-form source.
Short.now starts at $12/month with a genuine free tier. For creators working with long-form source content, the per-video pricing and built-in clip detection usually make it the more cost-effective choice.
3 videos/month free. No credit card. No watermark.
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