Butter Motion vs Submagic and Captions
Two jobs share the word "captions" and they are not the same job. One is the transcript: what a person said, on screen, in time with their voice. The other is the designed plate that carries a name, a chapter number, a location, a handle. We wrote about that split in Animated captions and lower thirds, so this piece goes straight to the three products.
Everything below about Submagic and Captions comes from their own pages, read on 2 September 2026. Prices and limits move on both sites, so open their pricing before you pay rather than trusting a paragraph here. We have not run either tool on a real deadline, so there is nothing here about how the output looks.
Submagic
The homepage promise is "Edit shorts 10x faster with AI", and the caption line under it reads "Generate viral caption styles in 123 languages". Their subtitle page claims "99% caption accuracy" and "123+ supported languages", while their separate languages page says "50+ languages supported with high accuracy". Both numbers are live on the same site today, so check the language you actually work in.
The pipeline is transcription first and everything else after: text based editing, Magic Clips that pull shorts out of a long video, an auto edit that removes silences, B-roll, AI avatars, auto zoom, sound effects, music and transitions.
Pricing is per member and per month. Starter is $19, Pro is $39, Business plus API is $69, with a stated "41% Annual Discount" that brings them to $12, $23 and $41 annually. The limits are the part to read carefully: Starter gives 15 videos a month at up to 2 minutes each, Pro 40 videos at up to 5 minutes, Business up to 100 videos at up to 30 minutes. Output quality tracks the plan too, 1080p at 30fps on Starter, 1080p and 2K on Pro, 1080p through 4K at up to 60fps on Business. No watermark on any paid plan, and you can try it with "3 free videos. No credit card required." Magic Clips is a separate add-on at $19 a month, $12 annually.
Captions
Captions calls itself "AI that edits like a professional editor would", and the editing is the product rather than the subtitles alone. AI Edit takes raw footage and applies a whole style. There are avatars and digital twins, eye contact correction, noise removal, filler word and pause trimming, generated music, and prompt driven changes to a cut.
On captions specifically: "Choose from 100+ caption styles" and "Choose from 100+ languages", with speech recognition described as built for "a wide range of accents, speaking speeds, and audio quality". A clip source can be a YouTube link or an upload, "up to 3 hours and 10 GB per video", and their clip tool is built for multi speaker conversation with overlapped speech.
Where it runs matters here. Their download page says "Captions is available for iOS and Android", with a web sign up, and adds "Captions is made for your phone". No macOS or Windows desktop app is listed.
Pricing: a free tier with basic editing and no credits, Max at "$24.99/mo" with 500 credits, three Scale tiers at "$69.99/mo" for 1,400 credits, "$139.99/mo" for 2,800 and "$279.99/mo" for 5,600, plus custom Enterprise. Their own footnote is worth quoting: "All prices displayed in USD. Features and prices reflect iOS plans only."
The export question, which is the whole thing for an editor
If you finish inside Submagic or Captions, none of this matters. Both are built to end at a post, and Captions is explicit: "Export and post directly to any social platform, all optimized for the right format." That workflow does not need Premiere at all.
If you do finish in Premiere, the question becomes what leaves the tool.
Submagic answers it in two ways. There is a subtitle file: "Need a subtitle file in SRT, VTT, or TXT formats? Easy." And there is a keyable layer: "Export with green screen to use in After Effects or Premiere Pro." Their help article calls the result "clean, ready-to-key caption files".
Ready to key is not the same as ready to composite, and the difference is a step you have to do. A green screen layer arrives with a background Premiere has to remove with Ultra Key: a key to set up, spill to watch for, soft edges on small type where the letters meet the green. A file with a real alpha channel arrives with the background already absent. Butter Motion writes transparent generations as MOV in ProRes 4444 with a real alpha channel, on every plan and every quality tier, so the plate drops onto the track above your footage and there is nothing to key. That is in Background and transparency.
We found no stated alpha or SRT export on the Captions pages we read. If you need either, check before building a workflow on it.
Where they win, plainly
If the job is subtitles, use one of them and stop reading. Butter Motion has no speech recognition in it. It never opens your audio, it does not know what anyone said, and it cannot sync a word to a waveform. Word by word karaoke captions are outside what it does and no setting changes that.
If the job is volume, use one of them too. Sixty shorts a month from a podcast is a pipeline problem, not a design problem, and a per clip graphics plugin is the wrong instrument for it.
If you edit on a phone, Captions is a phone app and we are not. If you need a hundred languages of translated subtitles, we are not in the conversation at all.
What is left, and why it is a lot
Take the transcript off the table and count what is left in a real cut. Name plates, chapter cards, location stamps, a handle in the corner, section dividers, callouts pointing at something in the shot, charts, counters, logo reveals. None of that comes from the audio. All of it comes from a decision you already made, which is why typing it is fast and building it is not.
That is what Butter Motion is for. It is a panel inside Premiere Pro 2022 or newer, on macOS 11 or later with Apple Silicon or 64 bit Windows 10 or later. You describe a graphic, watch a live preview, adjust it, and put it on the timeline. The render runs on your own machine, so there is no shared queue and no watermark, and only the planning step goes online.
This is not a replacement for a motion designer. It is the routine half of the pile, the part an editor can close without waiting for one.
Output matches the sequence you are cutting: 3 to 20 seconds, 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1, up to 4K, 24 through 60fps, MP4 with a background or MOV with alpha without one. The file lands in a _ButterMotion folder next to your .prproj, imports into a ButterMotion bin, and drops at the playhead, with transparent clips going to the first empty track above your footage. See Rendering to the timeline.
Generations cost 7 credits on Flash, 10 on Balance, 15 on Ultra, with the price on the button and an automatic refund if one fails. Nothing else moves it. Everything after is free for subscribers: the first tweak, the customization controls where you set an exact hex or retype a line, and re-rendering as often as you like. Pro is $12 a month for 500 credits, Studio is $39 for 2 000. See Pro and Studio.
Side by side
| Butter Motion | Submagic | Captions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transcribes speech | No | Yes, 123+ languages claimed | Yes, 100+ languages |
| Makes plates and titles from a description | Yes | Not stated on their pages | Not stated on their pages |
| Where it runs | Panel in Premiere Pro | Web app | iOS, Android, web |
| Subtitle file export | No | SRT, VTT, TXT | Not stated |
| Keyable overlay | MOV, ProRes 4444, real alpha | Green or blue screen layer | Not stated |
| Entry price | $12 a month (Pro) | $12 a month annually (Starter) | $24.99 a month (Max) |
| Free tier | None | 3 free videos | Yes, basic editing |
Which to pick
Take Submagic if you ship short form every week and want captions, clips and silence removal in one place. If you finish in Premiere rather than the browser, its SRT and green screen exports are a real bridge.
Take Captions if you shoot and cut on a phone, or if you want translated subtitles at scale and AI avatars alongside them. Read the iOS pricing footnote before you plan a budget on it.
Take Butter Motion if the graphics are the work. Twelve lower thirds that match across a project, a chart in the brand accent, a counter that lands on the beat, all in real alpha, all landing on the right track without a round trip.
Most editors we talk to end up with two tools rather than one, because these are two jobs. If you are still mapping the category, Butter Motion vs Transcript Studio vs PremiereCopilot covers the plugins that do both inside Premiere.