Meta’s Instagram Edits finally released to the world. TikTok users in the United States saw just how much Bytedance, owners of TikTok and CapCut and other services, was lost on January 19th when the app went dark for about 12 hours. CapCut was taken with it. I knew it would, I read the Congressional bill and saw Capcut was going to be lost as well. Many did not believe me, that is fine, there are plenty of people crying wolf on the Internet. We saw something interesting, Instagram, owned by Meta, announced Edits was coming. It was being positioned to take on CapCut, Bytedances popular editing app on mobile phones. It was released today, April 22nd, 2025.
I am not going to say Instagram Edits is a copy of CapCut, or Inshot, or YouTube Create, but it is VERY similar. This could be just the fact that there is not a lot of room on a mobile screen to be different. Some things just work better placed in certain areas of the screen – like a start menu on a computer, it just works better at the bottom left corner of the screen.
Things are named differently though; this is something most video editing apps do not necessarily a bad thing for Instagram Edits.
Instead of “Remove BG” on CapCut, Instagram Edits named it “Cutout” little changes like that are the biggest differences.
If you are familiar with CapCut, give yourself about 15 minutes of fumbling around and you will know where things are in Instagram Edits.
That is either good design or ripping off the competition. You decide.
There is an “Inspiration” tab at the bottom of the screen, the play button, that serves up Instagram Reels. Right now, you can only pull the audio from these Reels, not use any templates that creator used. Understandable as, well, Edits just launched and does not have any templates.
In the future I would like to see templates added, they are a great way to entice users to stay in your app. Same for filters. Those are lacking in Instagram Edits as well. Another feature that would be great to see in the future.
The integration with Instagram is nice. You can look at your account for one. You can pull audios from other videos as described above, hopefully more features are added later.
The voice effects are a nice addition as well. CapCut has voices to read your text, but Instagram Edits has filters for your voice.
Easily, yes. Bytedance slowly moved so many amazingly handy features behind a paywall. Auto captions, green screens, etc. The basic CapCut app is nearly unusable except to do extremely basic editing such as cutting content up and rearranging it.
Instagram Edits is coming in hard on areas that CapCut has taken away from users. While captions could be better, they are slightly better than what you would get on your computer with Notepad, they are better than nothing and show Instagram is working on this area.
The actual editing is barebones, just like CapCut, so you are not going to be making any 3D special effects or Hollywood blockbuster movies here. Instagram Edits is a basic mobile video editor that does what it needs to do well enough.
I will say, I am surprised at just how far along it is with their initial launch. I was expecting far less than what Instagram has delivered. I do hope there are updates to add more features later though.
Grab Instagram Edits in your devices app store.
