OpenShot review

A simple timeline that shipped again in April 2026

OpenShot is a desktop video editor from OpenShot Studios, LLC in Rockwall, Texas, and the project has been going since 2008. You get a timeline, keyframes, transitions, titles and video effects, installed as an application on Windows, macOS, Linux or Chrome OS. There is no web version and no mobile version.

Two things about it are commonly reported wrong. It is not abandoned: version 3.5.1 shipped on 8 April 2026, after 3.5.0 in March 2026 and 3.4.0 in December 2025. And the download is not gated behind a donation ask. The platform buttons on openshot.org sit above the donate block and link straight at the GitHub release binaries.

What it feels like in use is deliberately small. Next to Kdenlive or Shotcut there are fewer panels, fewer options and a shorter first hour. That is the appeal, and it is also why heavier work outgrows it.

The people who want a timeline and nothing else

• Anyone cutting a short video who does not want to learn a professional interface
• Linux and Chrome OS users, where the field of installable editors is thinner
• Teachers, students and hobbyists who need titles, transitions and an export, not colour science
• People who want a GPL-3.0 tool with no account and no usage meter anywhere in it

No price, no tiers, and a donate block below the download

OpenShot is free under GPL-3.0-only, for personal and commercial use, and there is nothing to buy (as of July 2026). No account, no sign-in, no export cap, no watermark, no time limit, no feature held back. The download page states the model in its own words: "OpenShot is funded by users, not licenses."

The donate page offers monthly amounts of $5, $10 or $20 and one-time amounts of $5, $15 or $25, with a $5 minimum on the custom field (as of July 2026). Nothing is unlocked by donating, and the block sits below the platform download buttons rather than in front of them.

The Ctrl+C freeze, and the limits of a small project

The honest catch is stability, and OpenShot's own documentation is where we get it. The user guide's troubleshooting page carries a section headed "Windows 11 Unresponsive" which reads: "If you experience a freeze on Windows 11, this is a known issue with PyQt5 and Windows 11, related to the accessibility features in Qt. This is triggered by pressing Ctrl+C in OpenShot." The guide describes an accompanying memory leak that worsens until the application crashes, and what it offers is a workaround rather than a fix: avoid Ctrl+C on Windows 11, use the right-click copy and paste menus, or remap the shortcut in Preferences. The same guide carries a full GDB debugging walkthrough for users hitting crashes on Windows 10 and 11.

Playback is the second limit. Version 3.5.1 added an "Optimize Video" proxy mode, which tells you plainly that large source files need proxies before the timeline is comfortable to work in.

Release cadence is the third. There was roughly a twelve-month gap between 3.3.0 in December 2024 and 3.4.0 in December 2025, and it has picked up since. If you are waiting on a fix, you may be waiting a while.

Where the 4.3 comes from, and what it leaves out

OpenShot holds 4.3 out of 5 on Capterra from 176 reviews (read 31 July 2026). We could not read G2 or Trustpilot for any tool in this category; both returned 403 to every request, so we publish neither rather than quote a number we did not load. One thing worth knowing about the Capterra sample: instability and audio bugs are the most common complaint inside otherwise positive reviews, which lines up exactly with what the project documents about itself.

Would we install it? On Linux or Chrome OS, yes

If you want a free editor you can learn in an afternoon, OpenShot is a fair first install, and on Linux or Chrome OS it is one of the few genuinely simple options with an official build. On Windows 11 we would read the freeze note first and change the Copy shortcut before starting anything long. If it starts feeling fragile, Shotcut and Kdenlive do the same job with more headroom and no documented shortcut bug, and both sit above OpenShot on our free video editors list.