Both Adobe and Blackmagic have been aggressive about releasing updates every year, and in 2025, both programs are better than ever. But which one actually wins?

I put them head to head in five categories, and I’m going to tell you what I like, what I dislike, and who I think takes the W in each one.

And before we dive in, if you want help editing your videos regardless of which program you use, grab my free Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. It’s completely free and covers my biggest rules for making better edits. Let’s get into it.

1. Stability

Let’s start with arguably the most important category, because it affects literally everything you do when editing: stability. For context, I use both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve pretty interchangeably. It’s almost a coin flip on which one I’ll open for any given project. So when I say that, even now, after Adobe has been working on stability improvements for years, Premiere Pro is still behind DaVinci Resolve in this area, I am not sugarcoating my experience.

The issues I run into most often in the 2025 version of Premiere Pro on PC aren’t hard crashes where the program freezes and closes. That’s actually become less frequent. What I keep running into instead is that the play button will literally stop working while I’m editing.

I’ll be in the middle of a cut, and suddenly I can no longer play back the video. The play button is completely unresponsive. Pressing the spacebar, clicking repeatedly, scrubbing the timeline, none of it works. The video just stays frozen on whatever frame it paused on, and the only fix is to fully restart Premiere.

It’s annoying.

And it happens at least once in every YouTube video I edit in the program. DaVinci Resolve, on the other hand, is not a perfect program either. I do still experience crashes where the program will shut down, especially on very large projects. But here’s the key difference: Resolve has a feature called Live Save, which constantly saves every edit you make in the background.

So even when it does crash, you can restart the program in 10 to 15 seconds and be back exactly where you were. That makes a huge difference. The crashes are still annoying, but the quick recoverability puts Resolve significantly ahead of Premiere when it comes to stability in 2025. 

Winner: DaVinci Resolve

2. Exporting

This one is more nuanced, and it’s actually an area where Premiere Pro has a meaningful advantage in one specific way. In terms of raw export speed, DaVinci Resolve is significantly faster than Premiere Pro, often by several minutes.

The reason isn’t that Resolve has a faster video encoder. From what I’ve found, both programs encode at a similar speed. The difference is in what happens during the export process. When you export from Resolve, it creates the final .MP4 or .MOV file directly. The file starts at 0 MB and builds up as the export runs. Premiere, for some reason, creates a large temporary file first, renders the video to that file, and then copies the video from the temporary file to the final exported file.

If you’ve ever copied a large video file from one location on your hard drive to another, you know that can take a while. That extra copying step is where most of Premiere’s additional export time is spent, and it’s completely unnecessary. That said, there’s one area where Premiere holds a big advantage: multitasking while exporting.

With DaVinci Resolve, once you hit Export and head to the Render page, you’re stuck there until it’s done. You can’t go back to editing. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, lets you send your video to Adobe Media Encoder, which renders it in a completely separate program while you keep editing in Premiere. That is genuinely one of my favorite features in the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

If I have a batch of smaller videos to export, I will often choose to edit in Premiere specifically for this reason. Even though Premiere is slower to render, being able to keep editing while it exports means I save more time overall. 

I would love to see Blackmagic build something like Adobe Media Encoder. They already have the Blackmagic Proxy Generator app that renders proxies in the background. Just make it work for full exports too, and they’d be right there.

Winner: Split (Resolve wins on speed, Premiere wins on multitasking)

3. Color Grading

This is where DaVinci Resolve absolutely dominates, and it shouldn’t be a surprise. Resolve was originally built as a world-class color grading program, and editing tools were added on top of that foundation.

At a professional level, I have no complaints about Resolve’s color tools. They are still significantly ahead of Premiere Pro. If you want to go deeper on color grading your videos, I’ve put together a collection of LUTs that I use in my own work, which you can check out here.

That said, there is a real caveat: if you’re a beginner, Resolve’s node-based color workflow can be incredibly intimidating. I know plenty of video editors who have refused to even try Resolve because they don’t want to learn nodes. That’s a legitimate barrier.

Premiere Pro, on the other hand, borrowed the slider-based workflow from Adobe Lightroom and brought it into the color panel. Want to adjust exposure, contrast, or saturation? Just drag a slider. It’s intuitive, and beginners can get results quickly without a steep learning curve.

In a perfect world, I’d love to see Premiere continue adding more robust color tools, and I’d love to see Resolve add a simple, beginner-friendly panel with basic sliders right upfront. Put it on the Cut page, Blackmagic. That’s where all the beginner-friendly stuff lives anyway. So many new editors would appreciate it. 

Winner: Split (Resolve wins for pros, Premiere wins for beginners)

4. Text Tools

Pre-warning: this is another area where Premiere Pro pulls ahead, and it’s not especially close. Adding text in Premiere is genuinely a pleasure. Press T on your keyboard, click anywhere on your video, and start typing. You have full control over fonts, shadows, colors, backgrounds, everything, directly from the properties panel. There are even rulers in the playback window to help you align and position your text. It’s fast, it’s intuitive, and I use it constantly.

DaVinci Resolve has been adding more text controls, and credit where it’s due, they keep improving. But I still find myself fighting against Resolve to get my text looking the way I want. It’s not nearly as fast or easy as Premiere, and that friction adds up over the course of an edit. The one area where Resolve does pull ahead is animated captions.

The DaVinci Resolve 20 update added the ability to automatically generate animated captions similar to what you’d see on TikTok, and having that built natively into the program is great. I want to see them keep pushing this forward.

Honestly, CapCut still does captions better than either of these programs, and I’d love to see both Adobe and Blackmagic catch up there. 

Winner: Premiere Pro

5. AI Tools

This is the biggest buzzword across the entire tech industry right now, and both companies have been investing heavily here, but in very different ways. Adobe has added some genuinely impressive features, like a search panel with media intelligence that lets you search for clips by the objects in them, and their Generative Extend tool, which uses AI to lengthen a video clip by up to two seconds or an audio clip by up to 10 seconds.

That’s cool. But right now it feels like it’s still in its infancy. Videos are limited to lower resolutions, and if you look too closely, the glitches and errors in the generated footage are noticeable.

I’ve talked about my feelings on Adobe’s heavy focus on generative AI in a separate video, but the short version is this: it feels like Adobe is pouring resources into generative AI at the expense of the core speed and stability of Premiere Pro.

And on top of that, they’re starting to charge for these features, which feels like a money grab when video editors are already paying a significant monthly subscription for Creative Cloud. Compare that to what Blackmagic has been building with DaVinci Resolve, and it feels like they are genuinely more in tune with what editors actually need.

The Resolve 20 update added an AI multicam switcher that automatically cuts between camera angles based on who’s speaking, similar to a paid plug-in for Premiere called AutoPod. They added an AI audio assistant that mixes all of your spoken dialogue and music with one click. They added an AI beat detector that analyzes your audio and places markers on all the beats. And one of the most impressive additions is AI Voice Convert, which lets you take a person’s voice and generate an AI voice clone of it.

I’m working on a full video about that last feature because it’s so powerful. If a subject says the wrong word or stumbles through a line, you can potentially recreate that line using their own voice with AI. Back in 2016, Adobe actually showed off a similar technology called Project Voco at their MAX conference and then never shipped it.

Here we are nine years later, and Blackmagic said “if you’re not going to do it, we will.” And they did. 

Winner: DaVinci Resolve

Final Score

Here’s how it breaks down: 

DaVinci Resolve wins outright: Stability, AI Tools 

Premiere Pro wins outright: Text Tools 

Split categories: Exporting, Color Grading

Giving each program half a point on the split categories, the final tally comes out to Resolve: 3 points, Premiere: 2 points.

But here’s the thing: that score doesn’t tell the whole story. These aren’t dramatic blowouts in most categories. If Adobe can get Premiere as stable and fast as Resolve, or if Resolve can leapfrog Premiere on ease of adding text, these rankings shift. Both programs are genuinely good, and the right choice depends on what matters most to your specific workflow.

For me personally, I’m going to keep using both. They each have real strengths and real weaknesses, and being comfortable in both gives me flexibility. I’m also planning to get more serious about Final Cut Pro to round things out even further. If you want to get better at editing regardless of which software you’re using, download my free Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. And let me know in the comments which editor you use and which one you think is better in 2025. I’d love to hear where people land on this.