Subtitle Edit alternatives for Mac, Linux and the browser

For years Subtitle Edit was a Windows program built on .NET Framework, and guides for Mac and Linux users were about running it through Wine or Mono. That changed with Subtitle Edit 5, rebuilt on the Avalonia UI toolkit: version 5.0.0 came out on 22 June 2026 and the old 4.x line ended with 4.0.16 on 2 June 2026.

• Mac: separate downloads for Apple Silicon and Intel, signed and notarized since 5.2.0. The documentation asks for macOS 12 Monterey or newer and recommends macOS 14 Sonoma.
• Linux: tarballs for x64 and ARM64, plus a Flatpak. The tarballs need libmpv and FFmpeg from your package manager for video; the Flatpak includes them.
• Windows: Windows 10 22H2 or newer. On first use the program offers to download FFmpeg and libmpv for video.

Every build is self-contained, so you don’t install .NET separately. If an older guide tells you to set up Wine first, it was written for Subtitle Edit 4.

Aegisub is the one to pick for styled ASS subtitles: positions, fonts, karaoke and typesetting drawn straight on the video frame, with Lua automation scripts. Development has resumed in its main repository after years of forks; 3.5.0 and 3.5.1 came out in October 2026.

Jubler suits translators: it has a translation mode with the original and the translation side by side and can use Azure Translator. It reads and writes 20+ formats and runs wherever Java does.

Gaupol is a GTK app for Linux that edits text-based subtitles with a built-in video player, and it is installed from your distribution or Flathub. On KDE, Subtitle Composer (Windows and Linux, latest release 0.8.2 from September 2025) adds OCR for VobSub and PGS subtitles.

Tero Subtitler is where former Subtitle Workshop users went: the same developers, free for Windows, macOS and Linux, with a waveform timeline, Whisper-based transcription and OCR.

Many jobs people download a desktop editor for are small: a file that runs two seconds late, a VTT that a player rejects, two parts of a film that need one subtitle file. Our free subtitle editor does these in the browser. It opens SRT, VTT and SBV files up to 5 MB, keeps them on your device, plays them against your video and exports SRT, VTT or TXT for free.

Its tools cover syncing by two points and frame rate, shifting, a validator with one-click fixes, merging and splitting files and two languages in one file. It doesn’t edit ASS styling, read image subtitles or check spelling — for those, Subtitle Edit or Aegisub remain the right tools.

The official downloads are on the releases page of the Subtitle Edit project on GitHub, which its documentation links to. Release 5.4.0 lists, among others:

• a Windows x64 installer (about 58 MB) and a portable x64 zip (about 111 MB) — the documentation says you unzip it, run SubtitleEdit.exe, and settings are kept next to the program;
• a Windows ARM64 zip;
• macOS disk images for Apple Silicon (about 131 MB) and Intel (about 150 MB);
• Linux tarballs (about 61 MB for x64) and a Flatpak;
• seconv, a command-line converter, for all three systems.

Speech-to-text models are downloaded on first use rather than bundled, so the first transcription takes longer.

Checked on 7 November 2026 on each project’s own pages:

• github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases
• subtitleedit.github.io/subtitleedit/overview.html
• subtitleedit.github.io/subtitleedit/reference/supported-formats.html
• aegisub.org/downloads
• github.com/URUWorks/TeroSubtitler
• github.com/teras/Jubler/releases
• otsaloma.io/gaupol
• invent.kde.org/multimedia/subtitlecomposer