Free subtitling tools

There is a great number of professional tools, free, or to buy for creating subtitles. If you’re going to make subtitles regularly, we definitely recommend professional, purchased software tools. However, if you’re going to make subtitles less often or only occasionally, you can easily use free software instead of a purchased one. You can find some free software tools on this list:

Subtitle Workshop

Very popular among the subtitling community is Subtitle Workshop, a handy little program, which doesn’t take up much space on your hard disk and comes with many features.

Advantages:	a range of features, including spell check
Disadvantages:	certain versions had issues with stability and displaying the soundtrack
Platform:	Windows, Linux, Mac OS

VisualSubSync

VisualSubSync is a practical program that can work with the soundtrack and keep track of the subtitle duration.

Advantages:	work with the soundtrack is outstanding, automatically spaced subtitles
Disadvantages:	the development and support has ended
Platform:	Windows

Aegisub

Aegisub, another powerful and almost professional tool for creating and modifying subtitles, is suitable even for the advanced users.

Advantages:	good display of the sound track, SSA/ASS subtitle scripting
Disadvantages:	doesn’t automatically space the subtitles, doesn’t show the reading speed
Platform:	Windows, Linux, Mac OS

We made a comprehensive tutorial for you on how to use this program in the next article.

Recommendation

You can significantly speed up your work with subtitling tools if you learn how to use the keyboard shortcuts. It will save you a lot more time than using your mouse.