Blender review

A 3D suite with a 32-slot video sequencer inside

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite from the Blender Foundation, an independent public benefit organization in Amsterdam founded in 2002. Modelling, sculpting, animation, rendering, simulation and VFX are the product. Video editing is a feature of it.

That feature is the Video Sequencer, and it is more capable than people expect. Blender's own features page describes a built-in video sequence editor for "basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking or color grading", with "Up to 32 slots" for video, images, audio, scenes, masks and effects, live preview, luma waveform, chroma vectorscope and histogram displays, audio mixing, syncing, scrubbing and waveform visualization, plus speed control, adjustment layers, transitions and keyframes.

We rank Blender last in this category deliberately, and not because the sequencer is weak. It is the only entry here that is a side feature of a different application.

The people already inside Blender for other reasons

• 3D artists who want to cut a render without leaving the file it came from
• Motion designers combining animation, compositing and a timeline in one application
• Linux users who already have Blender installed for other work
• Anyone who needs the sequencer next to Blender's own scenes, masks and adjustment layers

Nothing to pay, and no price list to read

Blender is free under the GNU GPL with no tiers, no account, no watermark and no export cap (as of July 2026). There is no pricing page because there is nothing priced. The Blender Foundation is funded by donations and Development Fund memberships, and neither of those unlocks a feature.

The licence is worth stating precisely, because articles get it wrong in both directions. Blender's licence page says the source the Foundation develops is "default being licensed as GNU GPL Version 2 or later", and that distributed Blender binaries carry GNU GPL Version 3 or later. The Cycles renderer is Apache-2.0. Version 5.2.0 LTS was released on 14 July 2026 and carries two years of LTS updates, so this is a current, actively maintained application.

The interface is the limit, and it is a real one

Blender's own project supplies the clearest evidence for our caveat. The manual's Video Editing chapter opens with "In addition to modeling and animation, Blender can be used to edit videos", framing the sequencer as one of two in-suite methods alongside the Compositor. And the project ships a separate "Video Editing" application template plus a dedicated video editing screen layout. If the default environment were right for cutting video, that template would not need to exist.

Everything else follows from that. The download is a full 3D suite, 348 MB on Windows as of July 2026, with a keymap, a vocabulary and a navigation model built for 3D work. There is no first-party route on blender.org for someone who only wants to trim a clip; the video editing page is one of eleven feature pages under a 3D application. We went looking for any first-party statement telling a non-3D user to edit video in Blender and found none, which is itself the answer.

A 4.7 that is not rating the video sequencer

Blender holds 4.7 out of 5 on Capterra from 953 reviews (read 31 July 2026), the largest sample of any tool in this category. Read it for what it is: those reviewers are rating a 3D creation suite, and the Video Sequencer is a secondary component of it. A high score here is not evidence that Blender is a good place to edit video. We could not read G2 or Trustpilot for any tool in this category, both returned 403 to every request, so no score from either venue appears on our video editing pages.

Where we would send you unless you already model in 3D

If Blender is already open on your machine, the Video Sequencer is a genuine 32-slot timeline and there is no reason to install anything else for a straightforward cut. If it is not, we would not install a 3D suite in order to edit video, and we would not let a 4.7 from 953 reviewers stand in for a judgement about the sequencer. Start with a purpose-built free editor instead, and come back to Blender the day your edit needs a 3D scene in it. Our free video editors list ranks the alternatives, with Blender at the bottom of it for exactly the reason above.