Instagram brings Edits to Mac desktop to challenge CapCut

Instagram announced Thursday that Edits, its short-form video editing app, is coming to desktop on Mac, built for projects that benefit from a bigger screen and a mouse and keyboard rather than a phone. The move puts Edits — which Meta launched last year specifically to challenge CapCut — into more direct competition with ByteDance’s tool, which has had Windows and Mac desktop versions since 2021 and remains hugely popular with creators.

The desktop app carries over licensed and royalty-free music, sound and video effects, and automatic captions in multiple languages, and syncs audio and text styles creators already saved on mobile. It adds a full multi-track timeline, keyframes for transitions, audio waveforms for precise cuts, custom keyboard shortcuts that can be imported from other editing software, and support for importing custom font files.

“A lot of creators have described the same moment to us: a project gets too big for your phone,” Brett Westervelt, head of Edits, wrote in a blog post announcing the desktop launch. “You’ve got a dozen clips going, you’re trying to land a cut on the exact beat, and your thumb covers the part of the timeline you need to see.” Creators can publish straight from the desktop editor to Instagram, with tagging and location built in, removing the round trip of editing on desktop, downloading, and finishing on mobile before posting. Exports support both horizontal and vertical formats, watermark-free, at up to 4K resolution for sharing elsewhere.

Instagram plans weekly updates to the desktop editor and is working toward letting creators edit a single project across desktop and mobile seamlessly. It says it will keep growing the mobile Edits app too, which has more than 50 million users.

Why it matters

By matching CapCut’s desktop feature set five years after CapCut got there first, Meta is betting that owning the full edit-to-publish pipeline inside Instagram — not just a competing app — is what finally pulls serious creators away from a rival tool.