I played with Instagram’s latest app, Edits, which launched yesterday (22nd April 2025) after numerous delays. It’s a fairly good alternative to the CapCut app owned by ByteDance, the same company that owns TikTok. It’s a bit bare bones as there aren’t as many features compared to CapCut, but that is not a bad thing.
The app has five tabs at the bottom of the UI, and the app feels at home on iOS. The first tab is where you can add ‘Stickies’, a sort of Post-it note with your ideas. For some reason this reminds me of Google Keep. And I really like the UI and how the stickies look. I know I am not going to do it, but if I wanted a task manager that imitated Post-it notes, I’d use this tab!
The second tab is the ‘Inspiration’ tab where you can consume reels, or rather, be inspired from reels. If I could disable reels on the Instagram app and limit it to this app, I’d gladly do so, not because the reels are presented in a better way, but because I don’t want to see reels on the Instagram app. I use Instagram for photography inspiration and sadly reels have taken over the app. This is not the explore tab in Instagram, as the reels that are shown here are out of your control and you can’t go searching for specific reels.
The third tab is where your projects live. This is where you create new reels and the ones you have already created live. In terms of creation of new reels, the features are much more limited compared to CapCut. When you open the editor on CapCut, you can get overwhelmed with all the features available. But with the Edits app, you are limited to a few options like audio, adding voice, text options, captions, overlays, green screen effects, etc. I do not see options for filters and colour grading that CapCut offers; these options may be coming in the future. But I like this bare bones approach to editing reels. The native Instagram app offers too little in terms of options when editing reels. CapCut offers a lot more; Edits finds the perfect balance between these two apps.
A thing to note here is that Edits lets you export 4K videos without any watermarks, and lets you add captions too – some features that CapCut requires you to pay for. This means you can edit and export a video from Edits and still use it elsewhere, not necessarily on Instagram.
The fourth tab is where the camera lives. I haven’t played with this much, but if I was to record myself or something else, I will just stick to the native camera app or something like Kino.
The fifth and final tab is the insights tab, which tells you how your reels have been performing on the Instagram app, which I really like compared to the insights on the Instagram app. Again, it’s much more bare bones, but it just tells you what you need and doesn’t make you dwell into the details.
Overall I like the app. I’m not big on creating reels, so I am not sure if this app is something I will use often. However, I feel like this is a very good alternative to the CapCut app, which to get the full features you would have to end up paying for, but this one remains free. Edits also lets Instagram not be so dependent on CapCut, which is owned by the same company that owns TikTok. If TikTok and CapCut were to vanish from the App Store, Instagram now has an offering, and it’s a decent one.