The Mac editor’s version of the software question used to be simple: Final Cut Pro was $299.99 once, DaVinci Resolve was free, and you picked the timeline you liked. In January Apple changed the shape of it. Final Cut Pro is now also sold inside Apple Creator Studio, a $12.99-a-month subscription that bundles it with Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro, and the one-time purchase sits next to it with a narrower promise attached. Meanwhile Blackmagic shipped DaVinci Resolve 21.1 in September, moved Python scripting behind the Studio paywall, and kept the free version as the most complete free NLE on any platform.
I cut in Resolve. It has been home for years, and I’ve said why in the Premiere comparison and the software roundup. I haven’t cut a paying job in Final Cut Pro 12, so the Final Cut half of this page is the paper trail: Apple’s release notes, Apple’s pricing pages, and what the app hands an editor. That’s enough to answer the question, because the two apps are built around different ideas about who is editing, and the price pages spell it out.
Last updated: October 2026. Prices were read on apple.com, the Mac App Store and blackmagicdesign.com on September 29, 2026. Final Cut Pro links on this page are plain; Apple runs no affiliate program. The Resolve Studio link goes direct to Blackmagic, who pay us nothing either, and the Speed Editor link is an Amazon affiliate link.
TLDR
Mac-only, cutting alone, and you want the fastest path from footage to a finished social or corporate cut: Final Cut Pro is a fair buy, at $299.99 once if it’s your tool for the long haul or $12.99 a month if you want the bundle or aren’t sure you’re staying. Everyone else: DaVinci Resolve, free, with Studio at $295, once, the day you hit a wall. Resolve wins on color, audio, motion graphics, collaboration and interchange, it runs on the Windows box you might own next, and its free tier does more than most people will ever pay Apple for. Final Cut wins on speed of assembly and on being the calmest software on a Mac. Pick the one that matches who you are, and read the two asterisks on Final Cut before you spend $300.
The price math
Final Cut Pro for Mac is $299.99 on the Mac App Store, version 12.3 as of June 30, and it needs macOS 15.6 or later. Motion and Compressor are $49.99 each on top. Apple Creator Studio is $12.99 a month or $129 a year after a 30-day trial, and it includes Final Cut Pro on Mac and iPad, Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro, with Family Sharing for up to five other people. Students and educators pay $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, which is close to free. Divide $299.99 by $129 and the breakeven against the one-time purchase is about 2.3 years, and that’s before you count Motion and Compressor, which push it past three.
DaVinci Resolve is free, with no watermark, no time limit and no export cap short of UHD at 60 fps. DaVinci Resolve Studio is $295, once, perpetual, and Blackmagic has never charged for a major version; 21 was free for Studio owners. What the $295 buys is on its own page, Resolve Studio vs Free: noise reduction, delivery above UHD 60p, the Neural Engine tools, HDR scopes and Dolby Vision, and, as of 21.1, scripting. If you’re buying Studio anyway, the Speed Editor at $435 ships with the Studio activation key in the box, so the keyboard costs $140 on top of a license you were buying regardless. Check the What’s Included line before checkout.
| Final Cut Pro 12.3 | DaVinci Resolve 21.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $299.99 once, or $12.99/mo in Apple Creator Studio | Free, or Studio $295 once |
| Three years | $299.99, or about $387 on the subscription | $0 or $295 |
| Platforms | Mac (Apple silicon for the AI features), iPad | Apple silicon Mac, Windows, Rocky Linux, iPad |
| Color, audio, motion graphics | Color tools built in; Motion is a separate app | Color page, Fairlight, Fusion in the one app |
| Collaboration | None built in | Project Server (free), Blackmagic Cloud ($15/TB) |
| Reads other NLEs’ timelines | FCPXML in, XML out | XML, AAF, EDL, FCPXML, OTIO |
| AI tools | On-device, included | Studio only, no meter |
Now the two asterisks on Final Cut, both from Apple’s own pages. One: on the future of the one-time purchase, Apple says a one-time purchase will still be available, but access to some of the premium content is only for Creator Studio subscribers, and that existing owners will continue to be updated. That is the whole promise. It is narrower than the feature-parity commitment Apple made for Logic Pro, and it leaves Apple room to put the next interesting feature on the subscription side. Two: the Pro Apps Bundle for Education, the $199.99 deal students used to get, is no longer sold on its own. The student answer is now the $2.99 subscription, which is a better deal anyway, but it’s a subscription.
What each one is good at
Final Cut Pro is built around the Magnetic Timeline, which has no tracks. Clips connect to a primary storyline and ripple with it, so an assembly goes together faster than in any track-based editor once the idea clicks, and nothing ever falls out of sync because you deleted a gap. It is the app Apple designed for one person turning footage into a finished piece on a Mac, and everything in 12.x serves that: Transcript Search and Visual Search find a spoken phrase or a dog in the footage without keywording, Beat Detection marks the music, Auto Mask isolates a person for a grade or an effect without a roto pass, and Generate Captions writes styled open captions from the audio. It runs on an M-series chip like it was written for one, because it was. The ProRes engine in every current Mac means a 4K ProRes multicam plays without proxies.
The limits are the same idea seen from the other side. There is no collaboration in the box; a second editor on the same project means a third-party tool like Hedge’s PostLab, or passing libraries around. Motion graphics live in Motion, a separate purchase or a Creator Studio seat. The color tools are good for a corrective grade and a look, and they stop well short of a node tree. Transcripts can be searched but not exported as a document. And FCPXML is the weakest interchange format of the pro NLEs: inside a Final Cut shop it costs you nothing, and the day you hand a cut to a Resolve colorist or an Avid online, you’ll spend an afternoon on conform gremlins the other tools don’t produce.
Resolve’s advantage is that the whole finishing stack is one application, and I mean the whole stack. The Color page is where colorists live, with the panels to match. Fairlight is a real DAW. Fusion is a node compositor, slower to learn than Motion and with render quirks of its own, but a title, a screen replacement or a 3D particle pass never leaves the project. Resolve reads Final Cut Pro XML, AAF, EDL, FCPXML and OpenTimelineIO, which is what made it my home: a timeline from any NLE lands in it, which is more than any of them can say about Resolve’s own timelines going the other way. Project Server collaboration is a free download, Blackmagic Cloud is $15 per terabyte a month, and the same project opens on a Mac, a Windows workstation and a Linux render box.
The cost is that Resolve is eight pages of software, and the Edit page is the least opinionated of them. It does not assemble as fast as a Magnetic Timeline in a practiced hand, and the Cut page, which was Blackmagic’s answer, is a taste you either acquire or don’t. Fusion has a learning curve measured in weekends. The free version’s export ceiling of UHD at 60 fps is generous until the day a client wants 6K, and the Neural Engine tools, which are the best AI tools in any NLE, are all behind the $295.
The AI question, and who pays for the compute
Both apps spent 2026 shipping AI, and the difference is where it runs and what it costs. Apple’s features run on the Mac’s own Neural Engine, they are included in the price, and there is no meter. The trade is that they need Apple silicon, some of them need macOS 15.6 and US English, and none of them generate anything: they search, mask, match and caption footage you shot. That is the right list for an editor, and it is a shorter list than Blackmagic’s.
Resolve 21 added a Photo page and a pile of Neural Engine tools: IntelliSearch across a media pool, a Speech Generator, CineFocus for pulling focus after the fact, face tools, UltraSharpen, Motion Deblur, on top of Magic Mask, Super Scale, Voice Isolation and the Dialogue Separator from earlier versions. All of it is Studio-only and none of it is metered, so the $295 buys the compute along with the license. 21.1 added something no other NLE has: a built-in MCP server, so an AI assistant like Claude can organize a media pool, batch a render queue or rough out a highlight reel from a text instruction. It’s early, it’s Studio-only, and it’s the most interesting thing to happen to an edit page this year. The same release moved Python scripting to Studio, with Blackmagic saying in the notes that the API was being used to hack Studio features into the free version. If you script Resolve, budget the $295.
Hardware: this is a Mac question either way
Final Cut Pro needs a Mac, and its AI features need an Apple silicon one. Resolve 21 also dropped Intel Macs; a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro is capped at Resolve 20 forever and can’t run current Final Cut’s AI features either, so on that machine the answer is a new machine. On any M-series Mac both apps are first-class citizens, both use the media engine for ProRes and HEVC, and the practical difference is memory: Blackmagic’s guidance for the Studio AI tools is 16 GB of unified memory, and Resolve wants more of it the higher the resolution goes. The Mac that fits your budget and your codec is in the Mac guide, and the keyboards that make Resolve faster are in the Resolve keyboard guide.
The one thing Final Cut does that Resolve can’t is disappear into the Mac. It launches fast, it is the calmest of the pro NLEs from one release to the next, and a 12.3 export runs in the background while you keep cutting. If you are the kind of editor for whom the software getting out of the way is the feature, that’s a real argument, and it’s the argument Apple is making.
Who should pick which
Final Cut Pro, if all of these are true: you edit on a Mac and expect to keep editing on a Mac; you work alone, or hand off finished files rather than projects; your deliverables are social, corporate, YouTube, wedding or documentary cuts that finish inside one app; and you value assembly speed over the grading suite. At $299.99 that’s a fair deal, and at $2.99 a month for a student it’s the best deal in editing software.
DaVinci Resolve, if any of these are true: you grade, or want to learn to; you mix, or want Fairlight’s tools; you collaborate, or hand projects to people who don’t use your app; you might own a Windows machine next; you want the AI tools with no meter; or you would rather start free and pay once than pay at all. That is most working editors, and it’s why Resolve is the pick in the software roundup.
FAQ
Is Final Cut Pro still a one-time purchase?
Yes, $299.99 on the Mac App Store as of September 2026, and Apple says existing owners will keep getting updates. Apple also says some premium content is subscriber-only. Read that as: the app is yours, the extras may not be.
Can Resolve open a Final Cut Pro project?
Export an FCPXML from Final Cut and import it under File, Import, Timeline in Resolve. Cuts, dissolves and basic transforms come across; connected-clip structure flattens to tracks, and Final Cut effects, titles and color adjustments don’t survive. Going the other way, Resolve exports FCPXML too, with the same caveats in reverse.
Does the free version of Resolve run on a Mac with Apple silicon?
Yes, on macOS 15 or later, and the Neural Engine tools in Studio use Apple’s silicon directly. The iPad version is free too, with its own Studio purchase separate from the desktop license.
Does Final Cut Pro have transcription?
It transcribes to search (Transcript Search, since 12.0) and to captions (Generate Captions, since 12.3), in US English. It doesn’t export the transcript as a document. Resolve’s transcription and text-based editing are Studio features.
In conclusion
One editor, one Mac, finished files out the door: Final Cut Pro is a good tool at a fair price, and I’d buy it outright rather than subscribe unless the bundle is the point. For the rest of us, the answer hasn’t changed: DaVinci Resolve, free, then Studio for $295 when a wall appears. It’s the better finishing tool, it’s the better collaborator, and it costs nothing to find out whether it’s the better editor for you.
And that’s it! As always, what you see here is what works for me, my clients, and my crew. Your machine, your deliverables, and the people you hand projects to get the final vote. The Premiere side of the same question is in Premiere Pro vs DaVinci Resolve, and the conform prep that makes any handoff survive is in the roundtrip guide. Cutting in Final Cut 12 and disagree? Leave a comment.
