5 best tools to download YouTube subtitles as SRT files in 2026

If your work ends in a timeline, a translation queue or an accessibility review, a transcript scrolling beside the video is no use to you; you need a file. Our pick to download youtube subtitles as an SRT file is TranscriptYou: free, no account, and an .srt in about four seconds in our test. It sits at number one here, with four alternatives that win in narrower situations.

We ranked them on the questions a video editor or a localisation lead asks before a tool goes into the team’s workflow. Does it export a format Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve will import? Can you pick the right language track when a video carries dozens of them? Does anyone need to create an account? Will it work on a video your company doesn’t own? And what does it cost once more than one person uses it?

1. TranscriptYou

Best for: editors and localisation teams who need a clean SRT from any public captioned video, with no sign-up.

We pasted a youtu.be share link, the kind with a ?si= tracking tail that some tools choke on, into the subtitle downloader. It returned in about 4.4 seconds with .srt already selected and 50 caption tracks in the “Transcript language” menu. The Ken Robinson TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?” carried 65 tracks, and the list showed “English” and “English (auto)” as separate entries. That distinction matters more than it looks. The first is a manual track someone wrote and timed; the second is YouTube’s speech recognition, and for anything going on screen you usually want the manual one if it exists.

The SRT uses the standard cue format with milliseconds (for example 00:00:27,103 –> 00:00:29,678), and the site’s SRT page walks through importing into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Files are UTF-8. There is no account, no watermark, no daily quota, and the file is built in your browser rather than stored on a server.

Trade-off: it only reads captions YouTube already has. A video with no caption track (we tried Big Buck Bunny) returns a clear “No subtitles or transcript are available for this video” message, and private, members-only and age-restricted videos are out of reach. There is no VTT export either.

2. DownSub

Best for: teams whose player or web workflow needs VTT, or who pull captions from more than YouTube.

DownSub exports SRT, VTT and TXT, which makes it the obvious pick when a web player or an HTML5 project wants WebVTT. It also covers 50+ video sites, including TikTok, Facebook and Viki. A small shortcut: add “subtitle.to/” in front of a video URL to jump straight to the download. It has an extension and an API for larger volumes.

Trade-off: like TranscriptYou, it needs captions that already exist, and it has no AI summary. Check its account and API terms before rolling it out to a team.

3. YouTube Studio

Best for: your own channel, when you want the caption file exactly as you uploaded or edited it.

Creators can download caption files for their own videos straight from YouTube Studio. For an in-house team re-cutting its own webinars, that is the most direct source.

Trade-off: it stops at your channel. A localisation agency working on a client’s video needs the client’s login or a different tool, and nobody can use Studio on a competitor’s or partner’s upload.

4. NoteGPT

Best for: videos with no captions at all, where you need text before you can build subtitles.

NoteGPT’s transcript tool works without a login, copies text with or without timestamps and downloads TXT. Its real difference is AI speech-to-text for videos without subtitles (up to two hours, per its own blog). There is also an AI summary and browser extensions for Chrome and Edge.

Trade-off: the output here is TXT, not a timed subtitle file, so an editor still has work to do. Paid plans start at $9/month and the credit system can be confusing.

5. YouTube’s Show transcript

Best for: a quick manual check, or the moment every other tool is down.

On desktop, open the video description and click Show transcript. The text follows playback and each line jumps to its timestamp, which makes it handy for spot-checking a phrase. You can select and copy it into a document.

Trade-off: there is no download button, so no SRT. The mobile app shows the transcript but won’t let you copy it or toggle timestamps. It only appears on videos that have captions.

The 60-second check before a subtitle file goes to the edit

Open the .srt in a plain text editor before importing it. Confirm the track: if the first lines read like rough speech recognition (missing punctuation, odd names), you probably grabbed “English (auto)” and should go back for the manual track. Then scroll to the middle and look at one cue. It should be a number, a timing line in the 00:00:27,103 –> 00:00:29,678 pattern with a comma before the milliseconds, and then the text. Finally, jump to the last cue and compare its end time with the video’s length; if it overshoots or ends a minute early, you have the wrong video or the wrong track.