Video editing software can be intimidating, especially for beginners. The choice between the variety of excellent software available can be even more intimidating.
The most common first choice for most people is Adobe Premiere Pro. While Premier is a top-rated video editing software, there’s another offering by Adobe that confuses beginners. Another popular software is called After Effects.
In this article, we distinguish between the two so you can decide which one to use and when.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Premiere Pro, at its core, is a video editing program above else. Several options are available inside Premiere for you to take complete control of your footage and edit it just how you want.
Apart from regular trimming clips and repositioning them, there is a lot more to Premiere. You can animate the physical attributes of your clips. You can even add many visual effects, transitions, colour presets, LUTs, animations, titles, text, etc.

Premiere Pro also features a fantastic timeline that makes it extremely easy for anyone to navigate through it while editing footage. If you’re working on a more complex project and have multiple short clips, titles, transitions etc., Premiere makes it easy for you to manage everything on your timeline.
It also provides numerous file management capabilities for your project files. You can import and keep files in separate bins and colour-code them on the timeline. This makes it incredibly easy to identify a particular type of footage when your timeline becomes all spaghetti.
Pros
- Amazing video editing capabilities
- Several templates/ downloadable resources regarding effects, animations, transitions, LUTs, etc, are available.
- Easier to learn for beginners
Cons
- Not a lot of VFX/SFX capabilities
- Mediocre animation capabilities
- Quite expensive at about $239.88/yr
Also read: Cinematography 101: Introduction to colour grading in Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects
In layperson’s terms, After Effects is a digital motion graphics, visual effects and compositing software.
That pretty much sums up what After Effects does. It’s a very different software compared to Premiere, as both deal with other parts of video editing. They are often confused as both work closely with the term video editing.

While you can do some of the animations in After Effects in Premiere, it’s much easier and cleaner to do them in After Effects. You get a more detailed timeline that deals with everything in layers and much more control over your clips and files.
Also, After Effects has many tools that make VFX editing a breeze in the park; you can do so much more with the interactive layer-based timeline and the composting methods present. You can create complete animation videos by incorporating Adobe Illustrator into your workflow.
Pros
- Excellent VFX/animation capabilities
- Easy to create motion graphics, titles or advanced effects
- Cheaper than Premiere at about $135/year
Cons
- Slightly tricky to learn for beginners
- Poor video editing capabilities
Which one should you use?
Our advice would be to use both in close tandem.
Premiere Pro handles all the video editing, and After Effects can take all the animations, VFX, titles, and other motion graphics your project might need. You can use Adobe Dynamic Link to transfer clips to and fro between the two programs without having to export and import them individually.
Individually, if it is a simple animation, After Effects can take care of it, and Premiere Pro can take care of it if it is a simple video project.
Related read: Adobe Photoshop vs Lightroom: Which one should you use when?