Captions are not optional
A large share of short-form is watched muted, in public, or with autoplay silenced. A clip that only makes sense with sound is a clip most of its audience will scroll past. Burned-in captions are the single highest-leverage edit you can make, which is why captioning deserves its own category.
Accuracy is measured in correction time
Every auto-captioning tool claims high accuracy. The number that matters to you is how long you spend fixing what it got wrong — names, jargon, overlapping speech, and accents are where they diverge. A tool that is slightly less accurate but easier to correct can be faster overall.
Timing and styling do the real work
Word-level timing — captions that highlight each word as it is spoken — holds attention better than a static block. Legibility matters more than decoration: a heavy weight, a high-contrast outline, and safe positioning away from the platform's interface elements make the difference between readable and ignored.
Resist animated caption styles that draw attention to themselves. The caption should disappear into comprehension, not perform.
Where a standalone tool earns its place
Many editors now auto-generate captions, so a separate captioning tool is justified only when it is meaningfully more accurate, supports a language your editor handles poorly, or offers styling controls you actually need. For a lot of clippers, the captioning built into their editor is enough.