Reviews and rankings for 20 video downloaders across 12 major platforms

There is no single answer, it comes down to your use case:

• Widest site coverage, command line is fine: yt-dlp, 1,800+ sites and the most frequent updates.
• A GUI plus bulk downloads: Stacher (free) or 4K Video Downloader Plus (paid, more complete).
• Saving the odd link with nothing installed: Cobalt.tools or SaveFrom.net.
• One platform only: a dedicated browser extension is the most efficient route, see Supported sites.

Still unsure? Read Which one if you're new to this, a decision guide.

Downloading a publicly accessible video to watch offline yourself falls inside the private-copying exception in most regions, and is generally tolerated. These do not:

• Re-uploading it to another platform, or passing it on to other people
• Commercial use, including cutting it into your own paid content
• Reaching paid content by bypassing a paywall, a membership gate or DRM

Local law varies a lot, and platform terms of service usually forbid downloading outright. Go by the rules where you live, and see Terms of use.

Web tool needs no install and works across devices, but it is capped by server bandwidth and anti-bot measures, the quality options are often incomplete, bulk is basically unsupported, and the ads are heavy.

Browser extension works on the page you are already logged into, so it reaches content that needs a login (private groups, Stories). The downside is extension-store policy, which gets these pulled.

Desktop app parses and merges locally, handles batch queues, 4K/8K, subtitle and audio-track selection, and is the most reliable. The cost is installing it and keeping it updated.

They are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of people run a desktop app with one online tool as a fallback.

Major platforms periodically change the signing algorithm on playback URLs, the encrypted parameters, or add a bot check. A downloader has to ship updated parsing rules before it recovers.

That makes maintenance activity matter more than a feature list: yt-dlp ships releases roughly every week and usually recovers within days, while an online site nobody has touched in a year can stay broken for good. Before you depend on a tool, check when it last shipped an update.

TikTok burns the watermark in server-side during transcoding, but some endpoints still return a source stream without it. Extensions built specifically for TikTok request that address first, which is why their hit rate is higher; a general-purpose downloader does not always take that path.

For which tools actually land it, see The 6 best video downloaders for TikTok and the TikTok platform guide.

No. We index, test and rank tools. We host no media files, proxy no download requests, and run no parsing endpoint. Every download happens inside the third-party tool you picked.

We also take no payment for placement, and the order follows only our published testing method.