If I had to rank video editors, I would say this:
For corroborative editing, and group projects:
The answer is quite easy, just use whatever else other people are using or what they ask you to use. If they ask you to use some obscure old video editor that only runs on Windows 98, just do this. Just comply with whatever demands they have. How good or bad the software is, is actually irrelevant.
Currently, the most popular and used video editors are Avid (for very professional work), Premiere Pro, and MAYBE Davinci Resolve. So, they are probably the best to invest in, if you want to do corroborative work, or work on freelance projects.
For solo video editing:
Solo video editing is great, because we don’t have to worry about how other people are judging the software we want to use.
I will mainly be judging software on two main aspects: features and performance.
For low-end PCs:
-Directly using CLI tools like ffmpeg can be great, if that’s what you’re into.
-Shotcut is great as a modern alternative to Windows Movie Maker, that packs a bit more punch. It’s light and it can be easy to use, if you like its interface. It runs great on weaker hardware, if you don’t find some strange bugs. Its Windows/Mac/Linux compatibility is nice.
-Filmora. Especially older versions like Filmora 9, is more like an intermediate video editor. It contains a bit less features than the big guys, but it mostly runs great on weaker hardware.
I haven’t tested older versions of Premiere on weaker hardware, so I can’t speak on this.
If you have a relatively strong PC:
-You can still decide to use the simpler video editors I said above, they work great on both weak and stronger hardware. If they satisfy your needs and you don’t need anything more, why seek a complicated life?
-If you want to most powerful video editor and don’t care about anything else, just use Avid. It’s a commonly-used professional tool for big movies and big TV shows for a reason.
-If you want a “safe”, but strong video editor, just use Premiere. It has a lot of fancy features, it has a lot of AI features integrated in, a lot of tutorials and a massive community of users. Its integration with other Adobe tools, makes it really great. You cannot really go wrong by going with Premiere, if you have any doubt in these matters.
-Davinci Resolve can be an alternative to Premiere, it can be a bit less feature-rich in some aspects, a bit more in others, but it’s still a very powerful video editor. Most people consider it #2 to Premiere.
It may seem demoralizing at first to realize that Shotcut isn’t the default choice, few people talk about it and it isn’t considered an “advanced” video editor by any means.
However, I don’t always need to produce super high quality footage, with very fancy effects. Sometimes, I just want to trim a video or play some music on top of a video, when I am on my weak laptop, and I don’t need to bring some fancy editor for this.
In my experience, among the FOSS, Shotcut has been the best. Kdenlive seems to be in a strange state on Windows compatibility, it seems like Windows support isn’t their highest priority, whereas Shotcut tries quite hard to offer a premium experience on Windows, Linux, and Mac which is nice.
I think that Shotcut had a bad reputation due to its past technical issues. I am the first one to complain about technical problems, bug and crashes, I won’t shut up about it, trust me, but honestly I haven’t experienced anything abnormal.
Maybe I was lucky with my potato laptop OR devs squashed the bugs.
My only real criticism of Shotcut for me is that it has no Android support, but hey we can’t have everything after all, so I’m already happy with what we have.