Captions

Captions is the other major player in the AI-caption-plus-short-polish category. The feature overlap with Submagic is around 80%; the differentiation is in template depth, talking-head AI tools (Eye Contact, Lip Sync), and multilingual dubbing.

We use Captions when the project needs more design control than Submagic's opinionated defaults allow, or when we need to dub a video into another language without re-recording.

What it does

Upload a short or long-form video. Captions transcribes, captions, and styles the output. Beyond captions, the tool ships with AI features that adjust the talking-head footage itself: Eye Contact corrects gaze toward camera, Lip Sync re-times mouth movements to match dubbed audio, and AI Dub re-voices the entire video in another language.

Output: a fully-captioned short or long-form video, optionally with corrected eye contact or dubbed audio.

Where it wins

Template depth. Captions ships with significantly more caption templates than Submagic, with more granular control over font, color, animation, and positioning per template. If you want captions that look specifically like a particular creator's, the template library probably has the closest match.

AI Eye Contact. Useful for talking-head shorts where you're reading a script and not looking at the camera. The AI subtly redirects the gaze to camera. Works about 85% of the time; the 15% misses are noticeable but rare.

AI Dub plus Lip Sync. Dub a video into Spanish, Hindi, or Mandarin and the lip movements re-time to match. Quality varies by language; Spanish and Portuguese are best, Mandarin and Arabic are weaker. For expanding a channel into multilingual audiences, this is the only tool that does both audio dub and lip sync in one workflow.

Positioning control. Captions allows more granular per-caption positioning than Submagic. Useful when your short has UI overlays or graphics at fixed positions.

Where it underdelivers

Pricing. Captions has multiple tier names (Creator, Pro, Scale, Business) that don't map cleanly to usage volume. Working out which tier matches your monthly minute count requires more math than it should. The pricing page changes often.

Desktop interface. The tool is designed mobile-first and the desktop interface inherits that. Batch operations on a laptop are slower than they should be. Submagic's desktop interface is cleaner.

Default caption styling. The default templates are competent but a generation behind the cinematic short styles that are converting in 2026. You can customize them, but out of the box they don't pop the same way Submagic's defaults do.

Pricing reality check

The $10/mo Creator tier handles light usage. The $24/mo Pro tier is the realistic working tier. The Scale and Business tiers add AI Dub volume and team features.

If you need AI Dub plus Lip Sync, you're probably on Pro or higher. If you only need captions, Submagic at $9/mo is cheaper for the same caption use case.

Stack fit

We pair Captions with:

• ElevenLabs for the source-language voiceover (Captions handles the dub-to-target-language)
• Descript for the long-form cut before Captions handles the short-form polish
• Submagic on projects where we don't need AI Eye Contact or AI Dub (cheaper for vanilla caption work)

Should you use it

Yes if:

• You need AI Eye Contact for talking-head shorts where the creator can't consistently look at camera
• You're dubbing content into multiple languages
• You want a deeper template library than Submagic ships with

No if:

• You only need captions and effects (Submagic is cheaper and cleaner for that case)
• You do most of your work on desktop and don't want a mobile-first interface
• You ship under 5 shorts a month (the per-short cost is high at this volume)

Try it

Try Captions free→

Disclosure: affiliate link. Commission on paid upgrades. We use Captions when AI Eye Contact or multilingual dub is part of the workflow; otherwise Submagic is our default.