Free subtitle editors for Windows, Mac and Linux compared
For most people on Windows, Mac or Linux, Subtitle Edit is the safe pick: free, open source and, since 2026, on all three systems. Aegisub is the specialist for styled ASS subtitles and now has Apple Silicon builds. Subtitle Workshop is no longer developed — its makers continue as Tero Subtitler — and Jubler is a cross-platform editor built around translation.
Disclosure: we make BlaBlaScribe. Facts about other tools come from their own websites, linked in the sources, and every page says where the other tool is the better choice.
At a glance
- 6
- free desktop editors compared, all of them open source
- 3 of 6
- offer their own builds for Windows, macOS and Linux: Subtitle Edit, Tero Subtitler and Jubler
- 2023
- the year Subtitle Workshop development moved to Tero Subtitler
- 3.5.1
- Aegisub’s release of 17 October 2026, with builds for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
From each project’s official website, documentation and releases page, checked 7 November 2026.
Feature by feature
Waveform, speech recognition and OCR are where these editors differ most. OCR matters if you work with image subtitles ripped from DVD or Blu-ray.
| Editor | Windows · Mac · Linux | Waveform | Speech to text | OCR of image subtitles | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subtitle Edit | All three | Yes, plus spectrogram | Built in (Whisper and others) | Yes | MIT |
| Aegisub | Windows, Mac; Linux from distributions | Yes, plus spectrum view | Not in its documentation | Not in its documentation | BSD-style |
| Tero Subtitler | All three | Yes | Built in (whisper.cpp, Faster-Whisper) | Yes (Tesseract) | MPL-2.0 |
| Jubler | All three | Yes | Through external tools such as Whisper | Not in its documentation | AGPL-3.0 |
| Gaupol | Linux | Not in its documentation | Not in its documentation | Not in its documentation | GPL-3.0 |
| Subtitle Composer | Windows, Linux | Yes | Built in (PocketSphinx) | Yes (VobSub, PGS) | GPL-2.0 |
“Not in its documentation” means we found no mention on the project’s own pages, not that the feature is confirmed missing. All six are free to download and use.
The best subtitle editor for Windows
On Windows the choice is widest. Subtitle Edit is the default answer: a 58 MB installer or a portable zip, Windows 10 22H2 or newer, and tools for almost every subtitle job — waveform and spectrogram, visual and point sync, frame-rate change, batch conversion, OCR of DVD and Blu-ray subtitles and Whisper-based speech-to-text.
Aegisub also comes as an installer or a portable zip and is the better tool when the result is a styled ASS file. Tero Subtitler lists Windows 7 to 11 as supported, which helps on older machines, and Subtitle Composer publishes Windows builds too.
What happened to Subtitle Workshop
Subtitle Workshop by URUWorks was a classic free Windows editor. On 2 June 2023 its developers announced that work continues under a new project, Tero Subtitler, and called the Subtitle Workshop repository obsolete and unsupported. Old installers still circulate on download sites, but they no longer get fixes.
Tero Subtitler is free, open source under the MPL-2.0 and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Version 1.0.2.3 came out on 18 September 2026, with nightly builds since. It has a waveform timeline, transcription with whisper.cpp or Faster-Whisper, machine translation, Tesseract OCR, Blu-ray SUP import and export, spell check and burn-in.
Jubler: Java today, a rewrite on the way
Jubler’s stable release, 10.0.0 of 1 July 2026, is a Java application with builds for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and a Linux AppImage. That release replaced MPlayer with VLC for video and the waveform. Its strengths are a translation mode, two-point sync, frame-rate conversion, quality checks against TED guidelines and 20+ subtitle formats.
A rewrite in C++ and Qt 6 without Java is published as 11.0.0-alpha (23 September 2026) and marked by its author as not for production. Jubler is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 and, according to its website, lives on donations.
Aegisub on a Mac
Aegisub’s official downloads page offers disk images for Apple Silicon (about 28 MB) and Intel Macs (about 31 MB). Release 3.5.1 of 17 October 2026 fixed a startup crash on macOS 13. Development happens in the TypesettingTools repository on GitHub; the old Aegisub/Aegisub repository stopped at 3.2.2 in 2014, and the popular arch1t3cht fork now points users back to the main project.
Aegisub saves ASS natively and comes with waveform and spectrum views, a video preview with visual typesetting tools, Lua automation, a spell checker and a translation assistant.
On Linux
Gaupol (2.0.1, September 2026, GPL-3.0) is a native GTK editor for text-based subtitles with a built-in video player; install it from your distribution or Flathub. Subtitle Composer (0.8.2, GPL-2.0) fits KDE desktops, comes as an AppImage and adds OCR and PocketSphinx speech recognition. Subtitle Edit has Linux tarballs and a Flatpak, Tero Subtitler and Jubler ship Linux builds, and Aegisub is installed from distribution packages.
Or skip the install
For a single file that is out of sync, rejected by a player or split across two parts, a desktop editor can be more than you need. The BlaBlaScribe Subtitle Editor — made by us — opens SRT, VTT and SBV up to 5 MB in the browser without uploading them, with timing tools, a validator and merging. It doesn’t replace the editors above for ASS styling, OCR or spell check.
Sources
Checked on 7 November 2026 on each project’s own pages:
- subtitleedit.github.io/subtitleedit/overview.html
- github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases
- aegisub.org/downloads
- aegisub.org/docs/latest
- github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub
- github.com/URUWorks/subtitleworkshop
- github.com/URUWorks/TeroSubtitler
- uruworks.net
- jubler.org
- github.com/teras/Jubler/releases
- github.com/otsaloma/gaupol
- subtitlecomposer.kde.org
- invent.kde.org/multimedia/subtitlecomposer
