DaVinci Resolve vs Premiere Pro in 2025: A Brutally Honest Comparison
A working wedding editor scores both programs across five categories and hands Resolve the win, 3.5 to 1.5.
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1 years ago
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
DaVinci Resolve beats Premiere Pro overall in 2025 on stability, export speed, color grading, and AI tools, but Premiere Pro still wins outright on text and the ability to keep editing while a render runs in the background.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You edit video for a living or as a serious hobby and are deciding which NLE to invest your workflow in for 2025.
You already use one of these two programs and want to know what you're missing in the other.
You're a beginner editor weighing whether DaVinci Resolve's node-based color workflow is worth the learning curve.
You care about concrete, lived-in comparisons (crash frequency, export behavior, specific AI features) over marketing claims.
SKIP IF…
You're choosing between mobile editing apps like CapCut, not desktop NLEs.
You already have a firm opinion and aren't looking for a counterargument.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A pro editor who switches between DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro daily scores both across five categories for 2025. Resolve wins stability outright thanks to Live Save, which recovers a crashed project in under 30 seconds. Resolve also exports faster because it writes the final file directly instead of rendering to a temp file first, though Premiere's Media Encoder lets you keep editing while a render runs, which Resolve can't do at all. Resolve dominates color grading for pros but intimidates beginners with its node-based workflow, while Premiere's slider-based tools are easier to learn. Premiere wins text and captions outright. On AI, Resolve 20 ships a multicam switcher, an audio mixing assistant, a beat detector, and an AI voice clone tool, all included free, while Adobe's generative AI features are paid add-ons. Final tally: Resolve 3.5, Premiere 1.5, but the author keeps using both because each has real strengths the other lacks.
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States the format: five categories, a winner per category, overall verdict for 2025.
00:55 – 03:40
02 · Stability
Premiere Pro's 2025 play-button-freeze bug versus DaVinci Resolve's Live Save, which recovers a crash in under 30 seconds. Resolve wins.
03:40 – 06:32
03 · Exporting
Resolve exports faster because it writes the final file directly instead of copying from a temp file like Premiere. But Premiere's Adobe Media Encoder lets you keep editing during a render, which Resolve can't. Mixed, tie-leaning.
06:32 – 08:46
04 · Color
Resolve's node-based grading dominates at a pro level but intimidates beginners; Premiere's Lightroom-style sliders are easier to start with. Resolve wins overall, Premiere wins for beginners.
08:46 – 10:24
05 · Text and captions
Premiere Pro's text tool is faster and more intuitive; Resolve added automatic animated captions in its 20 update, its one text-adjacent win. Premiere wins outright.
10:24 – 13:41
06 · AI tools
Resolve 20 ships a free AI multicam switcher, audio mixing assistant, beat detector, and AI Voice Convert voice cloning. Adobe's generative AI is paid, lower-resolution, and still early. Resolve wins.
13:41 – 14:51
07 · Final tally and verdict
Scores Resolve 3.5 to Premiere 1.5 with half-points for ties, but says he'll keep using both and is also planning to learn Final Cut.
14:51 – 16:00
08 · Bonus: a Premiere crash caught on camera
Closes with a real-time clip of the exact play-button freeze bug happening while recording this video, plus an outro LUT promo.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
DaVinci Resolve's Live Save constantly saves every edit in the background, so a crash costs under 30 seconds of recovery time instead of a lost project.
Premiere Pro's most common 2025 bug isn't a hard crash, it's the play button silently going unresponsive mid-edit, forcing a full program restart.
Resolve exports faster than Premiere not because of a better encoder, but because it writes the final video file directly while Premiere renders to a temporary file first, then copies it, which can take several extra minutes.
Once you hit export in DaVinci Resolve, you're locked out of the render page and can't edit or even pause, while Premiere Pro can hand a render off to Adobe Media Encoder so you keep working.
DaVinci Resolve was originally built as a color grading program before editing tools were added, which is why its node-based color workflow still beats Premiere's at a professional level.
Premiere Pro's color tools borrow the slider-based workflow from Lightroom, making basic color grading easier for beginners even though it's less powerful than Resolve's nodes for pros.
Resolve 20 added automatic animated captions similar to TikTok-style captions, closing Resolve's biggest historical gap versus Premiere and CapCut.
DaVinci Resolve 20's AI multicam switcher cuts between camera angles based on who's speaking, a feature that costs extra as the Autopod plugin in Premiere Pro but ships free and included in Resolve.
Resolve's AI Voice Convert can clone a person's own voice to literally fix a flubbed line, a feature Adobe previewed as Project Voco in 2016 and then shelved for nine years.
Adobe's generative AI tools, like extending a video clip by up to two seconds, are limited to lower resolution with visible glitches when examined closely, and are often paywalled on top of an existing Creative Cloud subscription.
Scoring half a point for ties across five categories, the final tally comes out Resolve 3.5 to Premiere 1.5, with the author still using both because the gap narrows depending on what you value most.
Takeaway
A five-category scorecard beats a single verdict
COMPARISON METHOD
Scoring each category separately, with half-points for genuine ties, produces a more honest and more useful verdict than a single up-or-down recommendation.
Breaking a comparison into named categories forces specific claims instead of a vague overall opinion, which makes the verdict falsifiable and useful to the reader.
A feature that looks like a clear win on paper, Resolve's faster export, can be offset by a workflow cost, no multitasking during render, that only shows up when you weigh the categories against each other.
Crash frequency matters less than recovery time: Resolve still crashes, but a feature that cuts recovery from a lost session to under 30 seconds changes how disruptive that crash actually is.
Beginner-friendliness and professional ceiling are different axes that can point to different winners in the same category, so naming both avoids flattening a nuanced tradeoff into one answer.
Giving credit for including a feature free versus charging extra for it (Resolve's multicam AI vs. Premiere's paid Autopod plugin) turns pricing into part of the comparison, not an afterthought.
Ending with 'I still use both' instead of a single winner is itself information: it tells the reader the decision depends on which category they personally weight heaviest.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Live Save
A DaVinci Resolve feature that continuously saves every edit to the project database in the background, so a crash loses almost no work and the program reopens where you left off in under 30 seconds.
Adobe Media Encoder
A separate Adobe application that renders exports in the background while you keep editing in Premiere Pro, instead of locking the main program during export like DaVinci Resolve does.
Node-based color workflow
DaVinci Resolve's approach to color grading, where adjustments are chained as connected nodes rather than stacked sliders, giving pros more control at the cost of a steeper learning curve.
Generative Extend
An Adobe AI tool in Premiere Pro that extends a video clip by up to two seconds, or an audio clip by up to ten seconds, by generating new frames or sound.
AI Voice Convert
A DaVinci Resolve 20 tool that generates an AI clone of a person's own voice, letting an editor fix a misspoken line using that speaker's real voice instead of a re-record.
“The only way to recover this is to completely restart Premiere Pro. It's just annoying, and it happens at least once in every YouTube video that I edit in the program.”
concrete, relatable pain point stated plainly, no hedging→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
03:13
“The quick recoverability of my work... puts DaVinci Resolve significantly ahead of Premiere Pro in the area of stability in 2025.”
clean verdict line that stands alone as a pull-quote→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
18:53
“Adobe is also charging for a lot of these generative AI features. And whenever you consider video editors are already paying a large monthly subscription for Creative Cloud, it kind of feels like a money grab to me.”
pointed, specific criticism with a built-in financial gripe→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
13:53
“These are like multi-billion dollar companies. What are we doing here? Come on, guys.”
punchy, exasperated one-liner with zero setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
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DaVinci Resolve versus Premiere Pro in 2025. Both Adobe and Blackmagic have been aggressive about releasing updates each year and improving their software. But in this video, I want to put both these programs head to head in five different categories, tell you what I like and dislike, and give you the winner, in my opinion, for this year.
In addition, if you want help editing your videos, regardless of whether you're editing in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, I would love if you would check out my edit videos like a pro guide. It's completely free and linked down in the video description. Now, let's start with arguably one of the most important categories because it affects literally everything that you do with editing, and that is stability.
For context, I use both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve pretty interchangeably, and it's almost a coin flip on which one I will use to edit any video. So when I say that, even now, after Adobe has been working on updates to the stability of Premiere Pro for years at this point, the program is still behind DaVinci whenever it comes to overall stability.
and I'm not gonna sugarcoat my experience. Now, if I had to categorize the issues that I've experienced in particular, mostly editing on PC with Premiere Pro, it would be that while Premiere does not have as many hard crashes as it used to where the program would freeze up and literally close, what I've been dealing with in the 2025 version in particular is the play button will literally stop working while I'm editing.
Yes, I'll be mid edit when suddenly I'm no longer able to play back the video. The play button will become unresponsive. And even though I'm clicking on it repeatedly or pressing the space bar or scrubbing around on the timeline, the video will stay paused on whatever frame it initially froze up on.
And the only way to recover this is to completely restart Premiere Pro. It's just annoying, and it happens at least once in every YouTube video that I edit in the program. Hey, it's Matt, editing this video that you're watching right now in Premiere Pro, and the bug just happened.
So here's an example of it. I'm literally clicking around. I can click on the timeline, but whenever it comes time for me to play, I hit the play button, and it's like, eh, I don't feel like clicking.
Sorry, nope, you just can't click the play button. Only solution is to restart the program. Annoying.
Compare that with DaVinci Resolve on the other hand, and while it's not a perfect program in that I still experience crashes whenever the program will shut down every few projects or so that I'm editing, especially if it's a very large project, what you need to remember is that DaVinci Resolve has a feature called Live Save, where the program is constantly saving every single edit you make in the background.
So even if it does crash, you can restart the program in 10 to 15 seconds and be back exactly where you were beforehand. And I have to say this Live Save makes the rare crashes that I do experience in DaVinci Resolve significantly less disruptive to my workflow.
To be clear, they're still annoying, but I do not honestly expect any software to be perfect these days. And the quick recoverability of my work bring you back to exactly where you were in the editing process in less than 30 seconds, puts DaVinci Resolve significantly ahead of Premiere Pro in the area of stability in 2025.
Now, for the next category, I want to talk about an area where Premiere Pro is actually partially ahead of Resolve, and that is in the area of exporting. As a pro video editor, one of the most important factors to me when editing is time. I need to be editing as fast as possible and not wasting time waiting for my videos to export.
So if we're talking about pure unadulterated exporting speed, DaVinci Resolve is significantly faster than Premiere Pro, oftentimes by several minutes, which if you're wondering why that is, according to my research, it isn't actually down to DaVinci Resolve necessarily having a faster video encoder, no. In my experience, both Premiere and Resolve export at a similar speed and finish exporting at a similar speed.
But where Resolve beats Premiere Pro is that whenever you export a video from Resolve, it's... constantly creating the video file in the background. The .mp4, .mov video file that's being exported starts off at zero megabytes.
But whenever your video is done exporting, it is gonna be several gigabytes in size. With Premiere though, whenever you export your video, for some reason, the program creates a temporary video file, which it renders the video to making it several gigabytes in size, however big your video is gonna be. And then it creates a second video file and copies the video from the temporary file to the final export.
after the rendering process completes. So if you've ever copied a video file from one spot in your hard drive to another spot, you'll know that this can sometimes take a while because your computer is essentially duplicating the file, which takes a lot longer than just moving the file. And like I just said, in my experience, the majority of that extra time that Premiere Pro spends exporting is actually spent copying this temporary video file, not actually rendering the video.
For some reason, Resolve doesn't need to do this. It skips the temporary file process entirely and just gives you the video file, which makes it several minutes faster. That said, as fast as Resolve is to export, which to be clear, I really appreciate, whenever it comes to multitasking and allowing me to continue work and editing while a video is exporting, Premiere Pro is still leagues ahead of Resolve, thanks to one of the best programs in the entire Adobe Creative Suite, in my opinion, Adobe Media Encoder.
Yes, instead of you needing to sit and wait for DaVinci Resolve to export a video, because let's be honest, once you press export and resolve, you're not able to leave the render page or do any editing in the program till it's done. You can't even pause the render. With Premiere Pro, on the other hand, you always have the option of sending a video that you want to render to Adobe Media Encoder so it can render in a completely separate program while you keep editing in Premiere Pro.
This makes a huge difference for me whenever I'm editing. And if I have a lot of smaller video, that I know I'm gonna need to render, the vast majority of the time, I'm going to choose to edit in Premiere Pro so I can continue editing while exporting, which even though Premiere is slower to render, because I can multitask while doing it, I'll end up saving more time in the long run.
In short, I would love to see Blackmagic create a program like Adobe Media Encoder. You can call it Blackmagic Media Encoder for all you want, or Resolve Media Encoder that could render my videos in the background. Heck, DaVinci Resolve already has the Blackmagic Proxy Generator app, which is capable of rendering videos in the background.
It's included with every download. You might not have even known it was there. All they need to do is make it work for exporting videos as well.
Come on, Blackmagic, you're almost there. Speaking of Blackmagic though, let's talk - an area where it is absolutely dominating Premiere Pro, and that is in the area of color.
In the 2025 update of Premiere Pro, Adobe reworked their color management tools, making the program able to handle log footage significantly more easily. But whenever you look at DaVinci Resolve and understand that it was originally created as a world -class color grading program, and then added editing tools on top of that, it's no wonder that so many people love color grading their videos in Resolve over Premiere Pro.
So from a pro color grading level, I have no complaints about Resolve, and I think it's still significantly ahead of Premiere Pro. But that said, if you are a beginner, the entire DaVinci Resolve node -based workflow can be incredibly intimidating. And I know many video editors that have been resistant to even trying Resolve because they don't want to have to take the time to learn how to use nodes.
That is understandable. And whenever you look at Premiere Pro, even though it's not nearly as good for color grading at a pro level, when it comes to the basics of color grading, Premiere is still dramatically easier to use than Resolve because many years ago, Adobe was very smart and they took the very intuitive slider based workflow from their very popular Lightroom photography app and brought those sliders to Premiere Pro.
So there's no nodes to worry about. If you want to adjust your exposure, contrast, saturation, et cetera, just click and drag the slider. It's so easy to.
So in this category, Premiere Pro wins with beginners, DaVinci Resolve wins for pros. I'm still gonna give more of the edge to Resolve there because it's just so good. But I will say in a perfect world, I would love to see Premiere continue to add more robust tools.
And for Resolve, I would love a super simple color grading panel like what we see in Premiere Pro. Blackmagic, give me a really... easy panel that's the first thing that appears in Resolve, just a bunch of sliders for exposure and contrast on the color page.
So many new editors would love something like this, and it would go a long ways toward making Resolve less intimidating. Heck, if you're worried about diluting the beautiful color page for all the pros, put it on the cut page. Just make the cut page have a little color sliders.
You know, that seems to be where Blackmagic is putting all the beginner friendly tools anyways, so you might as well throw it in there as well. Next, let's talk text and I will pre -warn you, this is another area where Premiere Pro is significantly ahead of DaVinci Resolve.
Edit any video and you're pretty much inevitably going to need to add text to it at some point. And like I said, text is an area that I really feel like Premiere Pro has nailed at this point. To add text, all you have to do is press T on your keyboard or click on the text tool, click wherever you want to on your video to add text and start typing.
You have full control over your fonts, shadows, colors, backgrounds, everything directly from the properties menu, which is very easy to access. And with the addition of things like rulers in the play window to help you align and straighten your text, it's so easy to edit and add text.
Can you tell I love it? I use this feature and tool all the time. Compare that now to DaVinci Resolve, which credit where credit is due, Blackmagic just added even more controls to their text tools.
I'm just sad to say this is nowhere near as fast or intuitive as Premiere Pro, and I find myself more often fighting against DaVinci Resolve to make my text look how I want. That said, there is one area where DaVinci Resolve is head of Premiere Pro, and that is in the animated captions category, because in the DaVinci Resolve 20 update, Blackmagic added the ability for Resolve to automatically generate animated captions like you would see on TikTok, etc.
And I love that this feature is built into Resolve, and I want to see them continue to improve it. basically for Resolve and Premiere. The only thing that CapCut does better than either of these programs is captions, but I really want to see them catch up.
These are like multi -billion dollar companies. What are we doing here? Come on, guys.
Anyways, let's end this comparison between these two programs with the biggest buzzword affecting all areas of the tech industry right now, and that is AI. Both Blackmagic and Adobe have been constantly and consistently working on adding AI powered tools to their software with Adobe, adding things like a search panel with media intelligence that allows you to search for specific video clips by looking for objects in them and big headliner features like their generative extend tool that allows you to use AI to extend the length of a video clip by up to two seconds or an audio clip by 10 seconds, which is.
Definitely impressive, but it still feels like this tech is in its relative infancy, with videos being limited to lower resolution and plenty of video glitches and errors being visible in the footage that you generate, especially if you look at it too closely. I've talked about my feelings about Adobe focusing so much on generative AI in a previous video, which I'll link to up in the corner and down in the video description.
But in short, I feel like this form of generative AI is something that Adobe is putting a ton of work and investment into while coming at the expense of focusing on speed and stability of the core capabilities of Premiere Pro. Not to mention Adobe is also charging for a lot of these generative AI features. And whenever you consider video editors are already paying a large monthly subscription for Creative Cloud, it kind of feels like a money grab to me.
Comparing these AI tools in Premiere Pro to what Blackmagic has been focusing on in Resolve, and this is where it feels like Blackmagic is far more in tune with what we as video editors are looking for. And that's because they've been working extremely hard to add features and capabilities that are actually useful and make our editing jobs easier, while also not stealing our jobs or potentially stealing work from other artists and creatives to make the AI tech work, which is definitely a fear of generative AI.
For example, in the DaVinci Resolve 20 update, Blackmagic added several really impressive AI tools with just some of the standouts being an AI multi -cam switcher, similar to a paid plugin for Premiere Pro called Autopod, which I also made a tutorial about that will literally cut between different camera angles, depending on who's speaking, you can now do that in Resolve, it's included, you don't have to pay extra.
Or there's an AI audio assistant that's gonna go through and mix all the spoken dialogue and music in your video in just one click. There's an AI music beat detector that will analyze your audio and place markers on all the beats for quicker and easier editing.
And one of the most impressive updates, there's now a tool called AI Voice Convert that will literally let you take a person's voice and generate an AI clone version of it. I have another video that I've made that shows you exactly how to use this tool because it's so powerful and will enable you to literally fix a person's lines.
If they say the wrong word or mess them up, you're gonna be able to recreate them using that person's own voice with AI. It is so cool. And to be clear, back in 2016, Adobe had a technology like this that would use AI to replicate a person's voice called Project Voco, that they shot off in a preview at their Macs conference, and then they canned it and never actually added it to their software.
But here we are nine years later and Blackmagic said, hey, if you're not gonna do it because we think it's really helpful to editors, we're gonna do it, so here it is. Overall, when it comes to AI, I hope this helps show you that Blackmagic is not getting bogged down with generative AI like Adobe is. And so at least in 2025, I'm going to give the AI edge to Blackmagic.
But hey, there's a chance that Adobe could absolutely nail. generative AI and hopefully still make it affordable to us editors. And maybe things will be different in the 2026 update of Premiere Pro.
But for now, I'm going to give the edge to Blackmagic with more usable AI that is beneficial to us as video editors. Tallying up the results now, Resolve wins outright with stability, color grading, and AI tools. But I do think things are more nuanced when it comes to things like exporting speed and multitasking.
Premiere Pro also outright wins in the area of text editing. So if we give each of these programs half a point for where they tie, the total comes out to Resolve with a total of three and a half points to Premiere with a total of one and a half, which that's not to say the Resolve is dramatically better. These things are a bit nuanced.
You need to look at these categories and decide where the most important to you. And more importantly, I want you to notice that if Adobe can make Premiere as stable and as fast as Resolve or Resolve can leapfrog Premiere whenever it comes to the ease of adding text, these rankings will significantly shift.
So for me personally, I'm going to continue using both of these programs because they each have their strengths and weaknesses. And in addition, I'm also planning on learning Final Cut to really round out my video editing capabilities. As always, let me know which video editing software you use and which one you think is better in the comments.
And while you're down there, please download my edit video. like a pro guide for free in the video description. If you haven't already, please like and consider subscribing if you want to see more videos about editing and filmmaking in the future and have a great day.
It's completely frozen and it's still playing the audio of me speaking, but I'm like, hello? And I'm clicking and it's like, oh, not responding. Okay, close the program.
It's like, eh, maybe. Madigan's still editing this video and here's another variation of this crash. So I can hit play.
The file that's being exported starts off at zero megabyte. But it's still frozen on my face. It doesn't unfreeze unless I restart the program.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A working wedding and YouTube video editor who flips between DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro almost by coin flip puts both through five head-to-head categories, stability, exporting, color, text, and AI, and names a winner for each with specifics from his own 2025 editing sessions, not marketing copy.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:20list
Five-category NLE scorecard
Stability
Exporting
Color
Text
AI
The structure the whole video runs on: score each program per category, give half-points for ties, and total the result for an overall 2025 verdict.
Steal forany head-to-head software or tool comparison video or article
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15:55product
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An 8-minute walkthrough of DaVinci Resolve 21's built-in AI voice cloning — from a clean 10-second audio sample to a convincingly matched line replacement in under two minutes.
A 16-minute feature tour of DaVinci Resolve 21 — nine AI tools, a built-in photo editor, background rendering, and a free update that quietly outpaces most of what Adobe charges for.
A 1h51m walkthrough that edits one vertical talking-head reel twice: a seven-step beginner cut, then an advanced pass with keyframes, cutouts, and a clone.
From snapping every clip to the playhead with one keypress to auto-ducking music under a voiceover, a tour of the DaVinci Resolve features most editors skip past.
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