Instagram Takes on TikTok's CapCut, But The Video Editing Market is Even More Competitive

This week, Instagram joined the busy and lucrative video editor market with the release of Edits, an app built to do exactly what you'd expect: compete with CapCut.

Not exactly what you were expecting? Well...

CapCut, which is owned by TikTok's parent Bytedance, has become the dominant competitor, gobbling up market share faster than any single incumbent.

But by taking on CapCut, Edits is really competing with them as well. And there are quite a few. And many are making good money.

According to Appfigures Explorer, there are 737 video editing apps on the App Store and Google Play right now. That's pretty competitive! But... It's important to remember that not all are actually getting downloads.

How many are? I added a downloads filter to my Explorer search to further narrow this group down and discovered that 104 of those apps saw at least 10K downloads in the last month. Now that's competitive.

And as you might expect, the leader of the bunch is CapCut, who saw 23M downloads in the last month. That's roughly 30% of the 80M downloads generated by all 104 apps in the last month, according to Appfigures Intelligence.

Edits is competing not only with the leader, CapCut, but also with countless other less-known names that are using ASO and paid ads to get to users. And once users are hooked and have a workflow it's hard to get them to switch.

According to our App Intelligence, Edits has accumulated 7.6M downloads since its release on Tuesday. At this rate it could go toe to toe with CapCut if demand gets sticky.

What's interesting to see is where this demand is coming from, and it isn't the US or the App Store. Google Play has been driving more than 78% of the downloads, led by India and Brazil, with the US in third. These also happen to be the top countries for downloads from the App Store but in reverse order.

I have no doubt that Edits will take a decent chunk of the video editor market and fast, but I don't think it'll claw it away from CapCut because the TikTok audience and the Instagram audience are a bit different. Instead, I expect Edits to take over demand from everyone else, including popular apps like InShot and Splice - the top organic results for this keyword.

Competition leads to innovation but for this industry, competition will require every other app to dig into its marketing and really optimize discovery.