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<span class="eyebrow">Opus Clip vs Clips Kitty</span>
<h1>A free, open-source Opus Clip alternative that runs on your own PC</h1>
<p class="lead">
Clips Kitty is an open-source alternative to Opus Clip. The difference that
matters is where the work happens: your video never leaves your computer, so
there is nothing to meter and nothing to charge for.
</p>
<p class="lead">
It is a Windows desktop app rather than a website, and that is the trade. This
page lays out both halves of it, with current prices, so you can decide in about
two minutes.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<section id="support">
<div class="wrap">
<div class="support">
<div class="body">
<p class="title">Clips Kitty is free &amp; open source ❤️</p>
<p>
It runs entirely on your PC with no fees. Please consider donating to help
cover development costs and keep it free for everyone.
</p>
</div>
<a class="btn btn-accent" href="https://paypal.me/clipsstudio" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Donate to Clips Kitty</a>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>The short version</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
Switch if you clip regularly, you own a Windows PC with a graphics card, and you
would rather not pay a monthly fee or upload footage you have not published yet.
</p>
<p class="section-lead">
Stay where you are if you clip occasionally, work from a phone or a Mac, or want
somebody to email when it breaks. Both of those are real answers, and the rest of
this page is the detail behind them.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Opus Clip vs Clips Kitty, row by row</h2>
<div class="table-scroll">
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>&nbsp;</th>
<th>Clips Kitty</th>
<th>Opus Clip</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><strong>Price</strong></td>
<td>Free. AGPL-3.0, no paid tier.</td>
<td>Free tier, $15/mo Starter, $29/mo Pro, Business on request.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Clips per month</strong></td>
<td>Unlimited. Re-run a stream as often as you like.</td>
<td>Allocated by plan.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Watermark</strong></td>
<td>Never, on any export.</td>
<td>On the free tier.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Export resolution</strong></td>
<td>Whatever your source is.</td>
<td>Free tier caps at 1080p.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>How long exports last</strong></td>
<td>On your disk, for as long as you keep them.</td>
<td>Free tier exports expire after three days.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Where processing happens</strong></td>
<td>Your PC.</td>
<td>Their servers.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Upload required</strong></td>
<td>No. By default nothing leaves the machine.</td>
<td>Yes. The whole video goes up first.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Wait before it starts</strong></td>
<td>None. It reads the file where it already is.</td>
<td>However long the upload takes.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Works offline</strong></td>
<td>Yes, once first-run setup is done.</td>
<td>No.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Account required</strong></td>
<td>No.</td>
<td>Yes.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Phone, Mac or Chromebook</strong></td>
<td>No. Windows 10 and 11 only.</td>
<td>Yes, any browser.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Hardware needed</strong></td>
<td>16 GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 2060 or newer recommended.</td>
<td>A browser.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Source code</strong></td>
<td>Open. Auditable and forkable.</td>
<td>Closed.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>The AI model</strong></td>
<td>Your choice through Ollama, swapped in one click.</td>
<td>Whichever one they picked.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>How clips are chosen</strong></td>
<td>Editable. The scoring prompt and signal weights are yours.</td>
<td>Fixed.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Ongoing cost at volume</strong></td>
<td>Electricity.</td>
<td>The plan, every month, clipped or not.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>If the terms change</strong></td>
<td>Your copy keeps working. The licence cannot be revoked.</td>
<td>You are on their terms.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p class="note">
Opus Clip pricing and plan limits checked on 12 September 2026 at
<a href="https://www.opus.pro/pricing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">opus.pro/pricing</a>.
Their plans change, and this table does not update itself. Only the rows above were
verified: anything not listed here is something we did not check rather than
something they lack.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Using Opus Clip without a subscription</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
There is a free tier, so the honest answer is yes. What matters is what comes out
of it.
</p>
<h3>What the free tier gives you</h3>
<p>
A watermark on the clip, a 1080p ceiling, an export that expires after three days,
and an allowance set by the plan. Each of those is survivable on its own. Together
they make a free-tier export closer to a preview than something you would post to
a channel you care about.
</p>
<h3>What free costs on this side</h3>
<p>
Clips Kitty has no tiers, so there is nothing to sit behind. The cost is paid in
other currency: about 20 GB of disk, a one-time model download sized to your
graphics card, and your own machine being busy while a stream processes. If you
do not have the hardware, that is not a cheaper deal. It is no deal at all.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>What it actually costs over a year</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
Monthly pricing hides the number that matters, so here it is written out.
</p>
<ul class="ticks">
<li>
<strong>Starter at $15 a month is $180 a year.</strong> Pro at $29 a month is
$348 a year. You pay in the months you clip four streams and in the months you
clip none.
</li>
<li>
<strong>Per clip, it depends entirely on volume.</strong> Forty clips in a month
on Pro works out around 73 cents each. Five clips in a slow month is closer to
$5.80 each, for the same bill.
</li>
<li>
<strong>On your own hardware the marginal cost is electricity.</strong> A mid
range graphics card draws a couple of hundred watts under load, so an hour of
processing is in the region of a fifth of a kilowatt hour. That is an order of
magnitude rather than a measurement, and it is pennies either way.
</li>
<li>
<strong>The crossover is volume, not principle.</strong> Clip twice a month and
a subscription is genuinely cheaper than caring about any of this. Clip several
long streams a week and the arithmetic stops being close.
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Where your video goes</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
A cloud clipper needs the whole video before it can start. That is not a criticism
of any particular company, it is just how the architecture works.
</p>
<p>
It matters more in some situations than others. Unreleased footage, sponsor reads
under embargo, a podcast guest who signed something, a client's rushes you do not
own: in all of those, "it was uploaded to a third party" is a sentence you may have
to say out loud one day. Clips Kitty never puts you there, because the file is read
where it already sits. The full detail is in the
<a href="privacy.html">privacy policy</a>, which is short and specific.
</p>
<p>
One exception, stated plainly because the rest of this page leans on it: Clips
Kitty can also post a finished clip to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and six more
platforms at once, and that path does send the clip to a third party. It runs
through <a href="https://woopsocial.com/?via=clipskitty" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer sponsored">WoopSocial</a> or Upload-Post on an account you create yourself, it is off until you
switch it on, and it applies only to clips you chose to publish. Nothing about
the footage you are still working on changes.
</p>
<p class="note">Affiliate link - Clips Kitty may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you.</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>When Opus Clip is the better choice</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
This section is here because it is true, and because you will find out anyway.
</p>
<ul class="ticks">
<li class="weak">
<strong>You do not have a Windows PC.</strong> A Mac, a Chromebook or a phone
rules this out completely, and no future release fixes that.
</li>
<li class="weak">
<strong>You do not have a graphics card.</strong> It runs on the processor, but
slowly enough that most people give up on it.
</li>
<li class="weak">
<strong>You clip occasionally.</strong> A free tier you use twice a month beats
a 20 GB install and a setup wizard.
</li>
<li class="weak">
<strong>You clip away from your desk.</strong> A browser works on a train. A
desktop app does not.
</li>
<li class="weak">
<strong>Your streamer is a VTuber.</strong> The framing looks for a real person on
camera; with an avatar, the game fills the screen instead.
</li>
<li class="weak">
<strong>You want support with someone behind it.</strong> It's a free
open-source project, the installer is unsigned so Windows shows a warning the first time,
and the support channel is a GitHub issue tracker.
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>What switching actually involves</h2>
<ol class="pipeline">
<li>Download the installer and run it. Windows will warn that it is unsigned.</li>
<li>
The setup wizard checks your hardware and downloads one AI model sized to your
graphics card. This is the slow part, and it happens once.
</li>
<li>
Paste the same link you would have pasted into a browser tool, or point it at a
file on your disk.
</li>
<li>
It transcribes, scores, crops and captions while you do something else. Nothing
uploads.
</li>
<li>Review and fix the clips in the built-in editor, then post them.</li>
</ol>
<p class="note">
What you give up in the move: there is no cloud library, so clips live on the
machine that made them. You cannot pick up where you left off from another device,
and you cannot send an editor a link to a project. If those matter to how you
work, they matter more than the price.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Why the clip picking works differently</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
A model that fits on a consumer graphics card is smaller than one running in a
data centre, and the pipeline is built around that rather than pretending
otherwise. It finds more candidates, ranks finalists against each other instead of
grading them in isolation, and leaves the final pick to you.
</p>
<p>
The long version, with none of the pricing, is in
<a href="local-vs-cloud.html">how local clipping compares to a cloud service</a>.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Questions people ask before switching</h2>
<h3>Is there a free alternative to Opus Clip?</h3>
<p>
Clips Kitty is free with no paid tier at all. It runs on your own Windows PC, so
there is no server bill to pass on and nothing to meter. There is no watermark, no
clip cap and no export expiry. The trade is that you need a reasonably capable
Windows computer, ideally with an NVIDIA graphics card.
</p>
<h3>Is there an open-source alternative to Opus Clip?</h3>
<p>
Clips Kitty is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. You can read every line,
including every line that touches the network, change how clips are scored, or
fork it entirely. Because the licence cannot be revoked, a copy you have today
keeps working whatever happens to the project.
</p>
<h3>Can I use Opus Clip without a subscription?</h3>
<p>
Opus Clip has a free tier, but exports from it carry a watermark, are capped at
1080p, and expire after three days. That makes it closer to a preview than a
deliverable. Clips Kitty has no tiers, so every export is full quality,
unwatermarked, and sits on your own disk for as long as you keep it.
</p>
<h3>Is Clips Kitty better than Opus Clip?</h3>
<p>
Not for everyone. If you do not have a Windows PC with a graphics card, if you
clip only occasionally, or if you need to work from a phone or a borrowed machine,
Opus Clip is the better choice and it is not close. Clips Kitty is built for
clipping at volume on hardware you already own.
</p>
<h3>Does Clips Kitty upload my video anywhere?</h3>
<p>
No. Transcription, scoring, speaker tracking, captions and rendering all run on
your own machine. The only thing that touches the network in a normal run is
downloading the source video if you pasted a link. Publishing is optional and off
by default: a finished clip can go straight from your PC to your own YouTube
channel, or, if you connect a publishing service, to nine platforms at once
through that service.
</p>
<h3>Do I need a graphics card to run it?</h3>
<p>
It runs without one, on the processor, but slowly enough that most people will not
enjoy it. An NVIDIA card makes the largest single difference. The published
minimum is Windows 10 or 11, 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2060 or newer, and the 16 GB
is a requirement rather than a suggestion.
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section>
<div class="wrap">
<h2>Try it on one stream</h2>
<p class="section-lead">
The honest test is your own footage. Run one VOD through it and see whether the
moments it picks are the ones you would have picked.
</p>
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>
<a class="btn btn-ghost" href="https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NB6XT7DSQZZ" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Get it from Microsoft Store</a
>
<a class="btn btn-ghost" href="alternatives.html">Compare all seven tools</a>
<a class="btn btn-ghost" href="index.html">Back to the overview</a>
</div>
<p class="note">
Opus Clip is a trademark of its owner. Clips Kitty is an independent open-source
project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Opus Clip. The
comparison above is offered as fact, with the date it was checked, so you can
verify it yourself.
</p>
</div>
</section>
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