OpenShortsThe free, open source Opus Clip alternative
OpenShorts is an open source AI clip generator you can run yourself for free, or use hosted from $12/month. Opus Clip is a closed-source cloud product starting at $15/month.
Both find viral moments in long video and reframe them to 9:16 with face tracking. OpenShorts adds two-speaker, screencast and webcam-inset layouts and AI UGC video with lip-synced actors. Opus Clip has the larger, more polished caption library and a longer track record.
Pick Opus Clip if you want zero setup and nothing else matters. Pick OpenShorts if you want to self-host for privacy, keep costs near zero, or change how the pipeline behaves.
Your first video free up to 60 minutes, then 20 free minutes a month, no credit card. Or self-host it free under MIT.
Is OpenShorts a real alternative to Opus Clip?
Yes, with one honest caveat. OpenShorts covers the same core job: it takes a long video, finds the segments worth clipping, cuts them, reframes them to 9:16 and burns in subtitles. Where it goes further is the clipping itself: two speakers stacked when both are on camera, screen recordings kept readable over the presenter, and a webcam inset enlarged instead of cropped out. The caveat is that the free edition is self-hosted, which means Docker and a machine to run it on. If you want a hosted product with no setup, that is OpenShorts Cloud, and it is a paid service above 20 minutes a month.
Real OpenShorts output, not a mock-up. A two-person podcast: both speakers stacked in half-frames, captions on the seam where they cover nobody. Source: Turn the Tables with Dan and Shoshana Jordan, Heritage of Faith, CC BY.
What does Opus Clip cost?
Pricing checked 2026-10-05. Vendors change plans without notice; verify before you buy.
- Free: 60 credits a month (one credit is one minute of source video), exports up to 1080p with a watermark, no editing, clips must be exported within 3 days
- Starter: $15/month, monthly billing only: 150 credits a month, no watermark, virality score, auto-posting to YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram
- Pro: $29/month, or $14.50/month billed yearly ($174/year): 300 credits a month, 2 seats, AI B-roll, Premiere and DaVinci export, limited API access
- Business: Custom pricing: API and integrations, SSO, dedicated support
There is also a 7-day free trial of Pro with no credit card. Trial exports carry the watermark, and the account drops to the free plan when the trial ends. Unused credits roll over for two months.
Opus Clip bills one credit per minute of the video you import, not per clip you export. A 60-minute podcast costs 60 credits whether it yields 5 clips or 20, so the effective price depends on your source length rather than your output.
What would you pay for your own usage?
Move the slider to the number of minutes of source video you clip in a month. Each bar is the cheapest published plan that covers it.
Cheapest published plan that covers that many minutes, per month. Prices checked 2026-10-05. Self-hosted needs Docker and your own Gemini key, whose free tier covers 1,500 requests a day.
What does OpenShorts cost?
OpenShorts comes in two editions and they are priced very differently, so it is worth being precise. OpenShorts (self-hosted) is free and open source under the MIT licence: Free and open source under MIT. You run it with Docker on your own machine and bring your own API keys. No watermark, no usage cap, no subscription. What it costs you is hardware and time: on a typical CPU an 8-minute video takes 5 to 8 minutes to process. OpenShorts Cloud is the hosted service: The same software with the compute and API keys covered. An NVIDIA GPU clips that same 8-minute video in about 50 seconds. Free plan: the first video is clipped whole up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month, with a watermark and no credit card. Paid plans start at $12/month for 100 minutes with no watermark, up to $59/month.
Opus Clip vs OpenShorts, feature by feature
| Feature | OpenShorts | Opus Clip |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0 self-hosted · $0 hosted for 20 min/mo · $12/mo hosted without watermark | $15/month |
| Open source | Yes, MIT | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes, Docker Compose | No, cloud only |
| Source video stays on your machine | Yes when self-hosted | No |
| AI viral moment detection | Yes, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | Yes |
| Face-tracked 9:16 reframing | Yes, MediaPipe + YOLOv8 | Yes |
| Word-level auto subtitles | Yes, faster-whisper | Yes |
| AI voice dubbing, 30+ languages | Yes, with your own ElevenLabs key | Yes, listed on its pricing page |
| AI UGC video with lip-synced actors | Yes, from $0.65/video | No |
| Free AI YouTube thumbnail & title studio | Yes | No |
| Usage cap | None when self-hosted · metered on Cloud | Metered in credits (1 per source minute) |
What Opus Clip does better
A comparison that finds nothing good to say about the other tool is not worth reading, so here is where Opus Clip genuinely wins:
- Mature, polished product with a large caption-style library and a virality score (0-99) trained on its own data
- ClipAnything works on footage with little dialogue and takes a prompt for what to look for
- No setup at all, sources up to 10 hours long, and dubbing, B-roll and scheduling in the same product
Where the two differ
- OpenShorts can be self-hosted, so the source video never leaves your machine. Opus Clip is cloud only.
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and auditable. Opus Clip is closed source.
- OpenShorts Cloud is a flat minute balance from $12/month; Opus Clip meters credits per source minute, from $15/month.
- Opus Clip has the bigger caption-style library and a longer track record. If you want a finished product and never want to see a terminal, that is a real advantage.
Which one should you pick?
- You want zero setup and the biggest caption-style library
- Your sources are short, so per-minute credits stay cheap
- You want B-roll and a virality score in one place
- You want to self-host so the video never leaves your machine
- Your sources are long and a per-minute meter would hurt
- You want to read or change the pipeline, or drive it from an agent
Opus Clip is the better pick if you want zero setup, care about caption styling above everything else, and your source videos are short enough that per-minute credits stay cheap. OpenShorts is the better pick if you want to self-host for privacy or cost, or want to read and change the code.
Common questions
- Is there a free alternative to Opus Clip?
- Yes. OpenShorts self-hosted is free and open source under MIT, with no watermark and no usage cap, and it runs on your own machine with Docker. OpenShorts Cloud also has a free plan: your first video clipped whole up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month, with a watermark and no credit card. Opus Clip starts at $15/month.
- Is there an open source alternative to Opus Clip?
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and the full source is on GitHub at github.com/mutonby/openshorts. Opus Clip is closed source. Being able to read the pipeline matters if you need to audit what happens to your video or change how the reframing behaves.
- Can I switch from Opus Clip without losing quality?
- The pipelines are comparable on the core job. OpenShorts transcribes with faster-whisper at word level, detects scenes with PySceneDetect, and scores moments with Google Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, then reframes with MediaPipe face tracking stabilised against jitter. The honest difference is caption styling, where the commercial tools generally ship more presets.
- Does OpenShorts put a watermark on clips?
- Self-hosted, never. On OpenShorts Cloud the free plan is watermarked; every paid plan from $12/month is not, and upgrading removes the mark from the clips you already made.
Sources
- Opus Clip pricing, checked 2026-10-05 on the vendor's public pricing page.
- OpenShorts pipeline details from the project source at github.com/mutonby/openshorts.