Lightworks review

A broadcast editor with a consumer-grade ceiling

Lightworks is a non-linear editor from LWKS Software Ltd in Swindon, United Kingdom, with a long history in broadcast and film finishing. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux from a single application whose capabilities are unlocked by whichever licence you are signed in with, and there are three of those: Free, Create and Pro.

The free tier is a real editor rather than a demo. There is no watermark, and LWKS says so on its own pricing page. What it has instead is a delivery ceiling that has not moved with the rest of the industry.

The product is actively shipped. The latest release listed by LWKS is 2025.2-56356, dated January 2026, with fixes to an audio fade crash and to AAC export bitrate.

Editors learning the craft on a 720p ceiling

• Anyone learning a professional editing workflow who does not yet need to deliver in HD
• Linux users who want a commercial-grade editor with an official first-party build
• Editors who want to live in the interface for a while before deciding whether to pay
• People cutting for internal review or rough assembly rather than final delivery

720p on the free tier, and paid prices we could not read

Free exports at up to 720p, and LWKS confirms it three ways on its own site. The pricing page lists "Up to 720p" for the Free tier. The comparison page says "Save your finished video in 720p resolution." The FAQ describes the free version as having "restricted file output limited to YouTube/Vimeo 720p" and tells you to upgrade to Create or Pro to go higher. A lot of 2025 and 2026 roundups claim that cap was lifted to 1080p. On 31 July 2026 it was not.

Free also gives you timeline editing, automatic saving, advanced transitions, simple VFX, inbuilt effects and titles, and audio levelling and EQ.

Above it, Create adds 4K export and a 4K timeline, advanced colour tools, native Quick Audio FX and social media templates. Pro adds 10-bit support, plugin support, advanced audio and video effects, cloud export and Native Audio FX, and the pricing page puts its export ceiling at 8K.

We are publishing no Lightworks price at all, and that is deliberate. The amounts on lwks.com/pricing render client-side and are simply not in the served HTML, and the comparison page and the FAQ do not carry them either. LWKS does say the figures come in USD, GBP and EUR, exclude applicable sales taxes, and can be paid monthly, yearly or once, and that subscriptions can be cancelled anytime. We would rather send you to LWKS's page than quote a number we could not read. One warning if you go looking: the pricing page and the comparison page disagree over whether Pro tops out at 4K or 8K, and we treat the pricing page as authoritative.

Sign in, then sign in again every 90 days: the limits

720p is the limit everyone quotes. The account is the one nobody mentions. Lightworks requires you to register and sign into the application, and the FAQ says the free licence "will expire every 90 days but can be renewed by simply signing back into the application with your Username and Password". LWKS's tech specs add that an internet connection is required to install Lightworks and register licences. So this is a licence you keep alive, not a file you keep.

There is one more thing the FAQ asks rather than enforces. If you use free-tier output commercially, LWKS 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 stamped into your export, and it should not be described as a watermark.

We also could not confirm whether the free tier restricts export formats as well as resolution. The FAQ's phrase "YouTube/Vimeo 720p" hints at it, and we are not going to claim it without reading it.

Would we edit here? Only if 720p is genuinely enough

Lightworks is the most professional application in this half of our list and the one whose free tier we would recommend least often. A 720p deliverable in 2026 is a hard sell, and a licence that lapses every 90 days is a second thing to remember on a machine you may not have online. If you want to learn a broadcast-style workflow without paying, the free tier is a legitimate place to do it. If you want to publish, a free editor with no resolution ceiling is the better trade, and our free video editors list ranks the ones we would reach for first.