Instagram Launches Edits — a Free Video Editor With an Agenda

30 April 2025

Instagram has released Edits, a standalone, free video-editing app for phones — and it's transparently a shot at CapCut, the wildly popular editor owned by TikTok's parent company. Whatever the corporate motive, small businesses are the beneficiaries.

What you get for nothing

• A proper timeline editor with no watermark on exports
• A built-in teleprompter — genuinely the most underrated tool for nervous presenters
• Auto captions, green screen, background removal and AI clean-up tools
• An ideas/drafts area and performance insights for what you post

Why the teleprompter deserves its own paragraph

The number one reason business owners avoid video is fluffing their lines. Write your 90 seconds, let the script scroll over the lens, record until it's smooth. Nobody can tell — newsreaders have done it for seventy years. This single feature turns "I can't do video" into "I did three takes and picked the best".

The takeaway

The tooling excuse is now fully dead: filming (your phone), stabilising (its built-in modes), editing and captioning (Edits, free) are all in your pocket. Film one useful answer to a customer question this week. The app will do the polishing.