A one-stop-shop of tools for journalism content creators

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There has not been a better time to be an independent journalist in the truest sense. The abundance of digital tools and platforms means it is easy to create content, build your own audience and monetise your work.

The following list of tools and platforms is neither exhaustive, nor a guarantee you'll be the next Johnny Harris or Francesca Fiorentini. But it should put some tools in your arsenal, without breaking the bank, to help get build a brand for yourself. We'll start with the basics.

NB: All prices are based on full-term one-off or monthly prices. In some cases, these were converted to British pounds sterling. Price may vary based on location, promotions, and subscription terms.

Did we miss any of your favourite tools off? Let us know so we can update this resource.

The usual suspects

Google

You cannot go wrong with the core staple of Google suite products available for free with any Google account. Google Drive provides 15GB of free data storage per account to back up or share files and photos, as well as Google Docs and Google Sheets, which are helpful for any shared projects. Google Meet and Google Calendars are handy ways to set up and organise interviews. There are also free AI assistants like Gemini and NotebookLLM which get increased capabilities through premium plans.

Google One plans now start at less than £2/month for 100GB storage, and go up to £19/month for AI-focused packages in AI Pro. The AI Ultra tier is currently US-exclusive.

Adobe

Abobe products are for more advanced editing jobs. Adobe's Creative Cloud Pro costs £57/month for its full suite of products - including Premiere Pro (video editing), Audition (audio editing), After Effects (video effects), Photoshop (graphic design), and Dreamweaver (website design). Individual app subscriptions vary in price, but tend to be around £20/month.

Included in Creative Pro (but can be bought separately) is the new Adobe Firefly, providing AI-powered features like generative fill in Photoshop, text effects, and image generation.

Canva

Canva is a beginner-friendly graphic design tool, used for a variety of visual purposes like social media posts and graphics. It can double up for creating presentations, CVs, invoices, business cards and more.

It also supports and can be used for some basic use cases like creating social media stories, stock library footage and generating auto-captions. But it tends to struggle with heavy-duty video tasks.

Canva has a free tier, and individual Pro plans start at £13/month You'll need the Pro plan to make the most out of Canva AI an AI assistant that helps with design tasks, and AI features like Magic Media for generating images and videos, background removal, and text-to-image generation.

Now we'll look at specific use cases and what your options are. Free plans suit most individuals, but usually come with restrictions and watermarks.

Content creation

Interviewing

It's a rookie mistake to use basic communication platforms like Zoom for recorded interviews. Dedicated recording platforms are of better quality because they record in HD via local devices rather than from an internet connection. Most interviewing platforms also offer post-production editing and promotion tools.

Blinder (free trial, enquire for price) - Privacy-first: online scheduling dashboard, ideal for interviewing high-profile talent.

Riverside (freemium, up to £22/month) - Low barrier to entry: the free option and a reliable recording platform. Free plan offers two hours of recordings and an AI-powered "magic clips" tool, which cherry-picks and primes your best moments for social. Upgrade for livestreaming, "magic audio", show notes and more.

Zencastr (£15/month) - Heavy-duty: paid only, because it's purpose-built for big jobs, handling up to 11 guests and ZenAI, features like face centring and long pause removal are underrated.

Iris (£7/month) - Cost-effective: all the staple products are here, and you can incrementally customise your plan as you need, adding more hours for a few pounds more, rather than stretching to the next tier.

Script-writing and autocues

Sophiana (freemium, £6/month) - By and for journalists: produce algorithm-ready video scripts and confident delivery with an intuitive in-app teleprompter, created by multi-award-winning journalist Sophia Smith Galer. Upgrade for unlimited features.

Teleprompter (free) - Old reliable: a simple mobile autocue app that displays your script in large, easy-to-read text that scrolls at your preferred speed.

Video shooting

A smartphone can be a lightweight and cheaper way to shoot video, provided you have the right apps.

FILMIC PRO (free app, requires a £3/week or £51/year subscription) - Market leading: offers full manual editing control and a dual camera mode, DoubleTake, for easy two-way video interviews. Legacy users (those who bought the original app before the price change) can claim a small discount.

Multirecs (free, with in-app purchases) - A solid alternative: can shoot with up to three cameras simultaneously.

Video editing

Produce videos on the go with your mobile phone or at your desk with desktop computers, depending on what you need. We've omitted popular video editing app CapCut amid its controversial policy changes.

Kdenlive (free and open-source) - Desktop video editor: comprehensive editing capabilities.

Lumafusion (£22) - Gold standard: it's like having Adobe Premiere in your pocket.

Filmmaker Pro (freemium, £120 one-time purchase or subscription at £8/month or £60/year) - iOS-only: comes with 4K support, voice-to-text captions, and royalty-free music tracks.

Mojo (freemium, premium £13/month) - Collaborative: a specialist video app for vertical video, upgrade for collaborative team features in the premium tiers.

Clipchamp (freemium, premium £10/month) - Social friendly: basic stock assets (video, images, sounds) and AI text-to-speech features in the free plan, upgrade for brand kits.

Audio recording

What if you just need to record some basic info? Depending on your situation, there's lots of fixes.

Voice Record Pro (free, with in-app purchase) - mobile recording app for iOS and Android: handy app to have installed for impromptu interviews, note taking and audio editing. It offers a range of exporting options.

Rev (free) - desktop audio recording: just start recording straight from the website, that simple.

Audio editing

Editing a podcast? Look no further.

Audacity (free and open-source) - Classic: a desktop multitrack audio editor for recording and producing audio content

Hindenburg (free trial, £11/month) - Simple and effective: an audio editor made with interviews in mind, making multitracks and sound levels simple to tweak. Also available as a mobile app (£5)

AudioMass (free) - Web-based: trim clips on the fly by dropping them into this web tool.

Promotion

Clip your best moments up for social media using these tools.

Audiogram (freemium, £14month) - Audiograms: hence the name, this is a dedicated tool for reversioning audio into social video content with images and waveforms. Two videos a month for free, upgrade for more usage and longer transcription jobs.

Headliner (freemium, up to £13/month) - Mileage: also good for creating audiogram-style content, but with one unwatermarked and unlimited watermarked videos a month on the free plan. Upgrade for greater customisation and auto-posting to social media.

PodVideo (£7/month) - Mobile-focused: a dedicated app for converting podcast clips into visual content on the fly.

Exemplary AI (freemium, £14/month) - AI-focused: the free plan will net you 20 AI-generated clips a month, plus a string of other AI tools like translation and transcription.

Animation

These can lift your video quality and help to explain difficult concepts. Both of these are simple, drag-and-drop animation studios with an asset library designed for beginners.

Animaker (freemium, £11/month) - Customisable: AI-powered animation tools and extensive asset library, upgrade to basic for 100 AI generations and 5 premium downloads per month.

Videoscribe (free trial, £11/month) - Beginner-friendly: whiteboard animation style, with scriptwriting assistance and voiceover generation.

Live

Most social media platforms offer native tools, but they can be quite barebones. Some external tools can increase the production values for your live streams. You can also use platforms like Riverside to go live.

Twitch (free) - Down with the kids: more commonly associated with video gaming, but includes a "creative" section. Best use cases would be YouTube or X, possibly making it a live outlet for your podcast.

Restream (freemium, £14/month) - Multi-platform and customisation: versatile choice for Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube - and even Twitch, if you fancy a bit more customisation for your virtual studio.

Streamyard (freemium, £19/month) - Heavy duty: good for going live with multiple guests while adding some production value to social media channels and online events.

All-in-one

Lots of tools offer numerous features, from subtitles, social clips, general editing, and translation.

Descript (freemium, £12/month) - Text-based editing: quick and easy way to edit your audio and video content, doubling up as an easy way to subtitle, clip up and polish content.

Zubtitle (freemium, £14/month) - Platform perfect: suited for tailoring videos for specific platforms (even LinkedIn). Good for subtitles, video descriptions and general video editing for good measure.

Clideo (freemium, £7/month) - Versatile video jobs: lots of possibilities from video translation, GIF maker, screen recorder, video converter. The list goes on.

Kapwing (freemium, £12/month) - AI-savvy: plenty of mileage in the free plan with text-to-speech and auto-subtitler. Premium adds Kapwing AI to the package, capable of translating into more than 100 languages, generating B-roll and scripts, and clipping up your videos.

AI boom

There's no ignoring it. These tools are here to stay and can help you prioritise your time if used right.

Text generation

Claude AI by Anthropic (freemium, £18/month) - Creative problems: Its free model, Claude Sonnet 4, excels at writing, research, coding, and image analysis. Claude Opus 4, available only to paid subscribers, handles the most complex reasoning tasks, extensive document analysis, and multi-step investigations.

ChatGPT by Open AI (free tier, £20/month) - Chatbot's choice: Free model, GPT-3.5, handles general writing, summaries, and light coding well. GPT-4-turbo, exclusive to premium subscribers, excels at multi-step reasoning and it's particularly strong at answering complex questions, providing personalised recommendations, and performing sentiment analysis, making it one of the most capable models for chatbots. Also includes DALL-E 3, a leading AI image generator.

Gemini by Google (free, included in Google One at £19/month) - Workhorse: the free model Gemini 2.5 flash balances performance and speed, providing a high volume of responses with very high usage thresholds. Among its benefits, upgrading to Gemini 2.5 Pro shows its value by integrating itself into popular Google products like Docs, Sheets and Gmail.

Perplexity (free, £12/month) - Research and fact-checking: free users get unlimited basic searches and up to three advanced Pro and three Deep Research queries per day, while the Pro subscription removes these limits and provides multi-model access to ChatGPT's GPT-4, Claude 3 and Perplexity's Sonar series, including Labs, an exclusive model designed for project creation.

Image generation

Don't forget that Canva has many AI image generators on its individual Pro plans.

Generative AI by Getty Images (custom pricing) - Commercially safe: trained exclusively on Getty's licensed content, ensuring no copyright issues with pricing varying based on usage requirements.

Midjourney (£8/month) - Accuracy: reliable tool with multiple tiers available depending on desired usage and speed of generation. Members can also prompt images through Discord, a community engagement platform (see below).

AI transcription

Transcription tools are essential for journalists conducting interviews, creating subtitles, and repurposing audio content into written articles.

Otter.ai (free basic plan, £6/month) - Note taker: OtterPilot auto-joins your meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings. Free plan includes 300 monthly transcription minutes capped at 30 minutes per conversation.

Riverside (free) - No strings attached: just upload your file and it spits out a transcription

Good Tape (free plan, premium £12/month) - Security conscious: made by Danish news organisation, Zetland, it can transcribe audio and video in nearly 100 languages with EU-based processing. Free plan offers three transcriptions monthly up to 30 minutes per file.

Speechmatics (8 hours free monthly, then £0.24/hour) - Pay as you go: 50 languages available with live input for immediate transcription and translation.

Summary: AI Meeting Note Taker (free trial available, £36 a month) - Live transcription: Record live talks and meetings, then get an instant summary and transcription afterwards.

Platforms

You've got great content, superb. Now, where does it go?

Newsletters

Substack (free, 10 per cent revenue share) - Accelerator: the newsletter subscription service includes simple tools and built-in monetisation features. Many writers find that the dense Substack community helps them grow quickly in the early days.

Ghost (scaled to size; £14/month for 1000 members) - Customisable: an all-in-one platform for building a blog or newsletter subscriber base with a community of users skilled at leveraging its customisability.

Mailchimp (scaled to size; £15/month for 500 members) - Marketing focused: creative tools, in-depth analytics and marketing automation make this primed for growth and revenue.

Beehiiv (freemium and scaled; £37/month for 500 members) - Beginner-friendly: custom domains and newsletters available for free for those with less than 2,500 subscribers.

Video

YouTube (free) Content king: very little introduction needed.

Vimeo (£15/month) - Private and ad-free: a popular place for virtual events, webinars and training.

Muse.ai (£12/month) - AI-powered: a video player with AI indexing and video search capabilities, primed for archives, collections and events. Comes with transcriptions.

Nebula (contact team for pricing) - Alternative creator network: a streaming service made up of digital video creators and podcasters.

Podcasts

YouTube (free) - Double-up: don't sleep on YouTube for podcasts. You can upload podcasts via YouTube Studio, and it's a good alternative to the big boys, Spotify (join via Spotify for Creators) or Apple Podcasts (join via Apple Podcasts for Creators) - you can also do this via other podcast hosting platforms, like:

Podbean (freemium, £7/month) - Monetisation: basic analytics on the free tier, upgrade for access to the ad marketplace and dynamic ad insertion.

Spreaker (freemium, £15/month) - Monetisation plus: make money through ads and subscriptions.

Buzzsprout (freemium, £14/month) - Networking effect: beyond Apple Podcasts and Spotify, Buzzsprout boasts a very large network of podcast platforms it can ping your content onto.

Acast (freemium, £15/month) - all-in-one: the essentials are included in the free tier, giving you both ample distribution and monetisation even when starting out. Premium subscriptions and integrating with Headliner are among the useful premium perks.

Community and membership building

There are many ways you can contact your audience directly these days.

Reddit (free) - Online communities: journalists can build and contribute to dedicated subreddits, where there really is no community too niche. Popular for Ask Me Anything sessions to build authentic, give-and-take relationships.

Telegram (free) - Private messaging platform: you max out at 200,000 people on your Telegram broadcasting channel.

Subtext (free with revenue share, enquire directly) - Text message subscription service: texting audiences directly with news updates or for help with a story, either free or premium.

Discord (free) - Old school forum style: a popular communication tool offering exclusive conversations and brainstorming sessions.

Discourse (£15/month) - Bespoke: create your own community with custom domains, API access, and extensive plugins for gamification and subscriptions. An open-source version is available for free for self-hosting.

Patreon (free, 10 per cent revenue share as of August 2025) - Monetisation: a popular choice in the general creator economy, a place to post exclusive content, get to know your biggest fans and get insights and analytics.

Ko-fi (freemium, 5 per cent revenue share) - Patreon alternative: a cheaper way to yield memberships, one-off donations and crowdfunding projects.

Memberful (unlimited test mode, £49/month) - Integration savvy: a full suite of tools for subscription offers, member management and paywall builders. It integrates with WordPress websites, other community platforms (Discord or Discourse), newsletter providers (like Mailchimp or Kit) and more.

Steady (free with 5 per cent revenue share) - Creator network: monetisation tool built specifically for content creators, be that newsletter writers, YouTubers, podcasters or independent journalists.

Handy tools to have

Project management

Staying organised is crucial for content creators juggling multiple projects, deadlines, and collaborations.

Basecamp (freemium, £11/month per user) - **Jack-of-all-trades:** free tier covers one project, upgrade to pro for increased storage and unlimited projects.

Notion (freemium, up to £8.50/month per user) - **Large file uploads:** free plan handles up to 5GB per file, unlimited on premium.

Airtable (freemium, up to £16/month per user) - **Heavy AI capacity:** 500 AI credits and 100 automation runs included in free plan, upgrade for 15,000 AI credits and 25,000 automation runs.

Trello (freemium, up to £4/month) - **Visual management boards:** helpful cards and boards to stay on top of tasks. Capture to-do lists from emails, Slack and Teams with premium AI tools.

Social media tools

These are important players in any social strategy to schedule your lovingly created posts and monitor your growth and performance.

Hootsuite (£129/month) - **In-depth analytics:** a super-powered social media sous chef, helping you with competitor analysis, automated DMs, unlimited post scheduling, Canva templates and AI assistance.

Sendible (£21/month) - **A solid alternative:** creator plans provide a cheaper package with all the essentials: unlimited scheduling, AI content assistance and analytics reports.

Later (£19/month) - **Dedicated scheduling:** capped scheduled posts, AI tools and analytics, but it does throw in the **Linkinbio** link referral tool for your Instagram channels.

Linktree (freemium, £2/month) - **One link to rule them all:** a link referral alternative that is SEO optimised, provides analytics and comes with a unique QR code, too. Upgrade for extra features and perks.

Safety and security

Bitwarden (freemium, £1 a month) - Password manager: with excellent security features and optional self-hosting for maximum control.

Backblaze (£7/month) - Cloud backup: automatically protecting content, interviews, and project files without storage limits.

NordVPN (£10/month) High-speed VPN: service with strong privacy features, essential for protecting sources and conducting secure research.

Pricing clarification: This article was first published on 11 January 2023 and was updated on 31 July 2025 and 5 November 2025 to reflect current pricing across all platforms mentioned.