Lightworks Free stops at 720p and lapses every 90 days

40 sits at the floor of our Limited band and last of the ten free video editors we score, below CapCut at 58 and VSDC at 56, with the nearest tool above it sixteen points away. Lightworks is also the most professional application in the lower half of this list, and that tension is what the number is recording.

It is not a judgement on the software. It is a judgement on what the free tier is allowed to produce, and on what you have to keep doing to hold onto it. In a category where four free editors carry no resolution ceiling of any kind, a tier that stops at 720p is being compared against tools that will hand you a finished 4K file for the same nothing. That comparison, not the quality of the editor, is what 40 is made of.

Two limits define Lightworks Free, and only one of them gets discussed anywhere (as of July 2026).

Export stops at 720p. That is the entire delivery ceiling. 4K sits behind the Create tier along with a 4K timeline, advanced colour tools, native Quick Audio FX and social media templates, and Pro adds 10-bit support, plugin support, advanced audio and video effects, cloud export and Native Audio FX, with the pricing page putting its export ceiling at 8K.

The free licence expires every 90 days. The LWKS FAQ says it "will expire every 90 days but can be renewed by simply signing back into the application with your Username and Password". It is free of charge and renewable indefinitely, so this is not a trial. It is a licence you keep alive rather than a file you keep, and LWKS's tech specs add that an internet connection is required to install Lightworks and register licences. On a machine that is rarely online, that matters more than it sounds.

Two smaller things:

• An account is required before you can sign into the application at all.
• LWKS asks for a credit without enforcing it. If you use free-tier output commercially, the FAQ asks you to place the Lightworks logo at the end of your video and a link to lwks.com in the description. That is a request in a support document, not something burned into your export, and we would not call it a watermark.

And one thing we could not settle: whether the free tier restricts export formats as well as resolution. The FAQ's phrase "YouTube/Vimeo 720p" hints at it, and we will not claim it without reading it.

What Free does include is not thin, for the record: timeline editing, automatic saving, advanced transitions, simple VFX, inbuilt effects and titles, and audio levelling and EQ.

The cards below carry tier names and no figures for Create or Pro, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The amounts on the LWKS pricing page render client-side and are simply absent from the served HTML, and neither the comparison page nor the FAQ carries them either (checked 31 July 2026). Our rule is to omit a price rather than repeat one from a roundup, so we omit these.

What LWKS does state about the structure is useful on its own. Create and Pro are each sold monthly, yearly or as a one-off payment, quoted in USD, GBP or EUR, excluding applicable sales taxes, and subscriptions can be cancelled at any time. A pay-once option is rare in this category and worth checking if subscriptions are what you are trying to escape.

The thing people upgrade for is not subtle: a file they can publish. Everything else on the paid tiers is craft, and the 720p ceiling is the one limit that stops a finished video from being usable. If you go and read the prices yourself, note that the pricing page and the comparison page disagree over whether Pro tops out at 4K or 8K. We treat the pricing page as authoritative and do not quote the comparison page's tick matrix.

Free permanently, and still a taster. That is not a comment on cost, because nothing here expires into a paywall and the licence renews at no charge for as long as you keep signing in. It is a comment on the output: a tier that stops at 720p shows you how a professional editor works without letting you deliver a finished video in 2026.

Who can genuinely live on it: someone learning a broadcast-style workflow who is not delivering yet, Linux users who want a commercial-grade editor with an official first-party build, and anyone cutting for internal review or rough assembly where the file is not the product. Who cannot: anyone publishing to YouTube, to a client or to a portfolio, and anyone who works offline for long stretches, because the licence needs a sign-in every 90 days on a machine that has to be online to register it.

If the professional interface is the draw, free Lightworks alternatives covers the editors that will hand you a finished file at no cost, and the best free video editors ranks them in order.