I second
Movavi Video Editor Plus 21. It has a straightforward UI that lets you do pretty much anything in the realm of non-professional video editing, short of 3D imports and complex motion graphics like in AfterEffects.
A new version for 2021 just came out and it can be bought on Steam too. Here's a tip - don't mind the price they ask for it on their website; if you download Movavi trial and then try to uninstall it - they'll offer you a pretty big discount to change your mind.
I just hate that they removed the ability to render videos directly to HEVC (H.265 codec), so you'll need to re-encode H.264 videos from Movavi into H.265 in some other free app or converter (Handbrake, ffpmeg, etc). As a bonus, they have tons of video tutorials on their YouTube
channel covering 99% of what an average user would need to do.
As for other editors, I've been trying all kinds of video editing software this autumn so my impressions are still pretty fresh.
I've tried
DaVinci Resolve 16.7, it's an insanely deep and feature-rich program (Fusion is spectacular), but it's also ultra complex and a professional level app, that most video editing beginners are likely to get lost in. Also, Resolve Free version doesn't support GPU accelerated encoding or decoding, unlike Movavi or Filmora. It's the most powerful of all the free/cheap video editors, absolutely no doubt about it, but the learning curve is high and the software is quite taxing and resource hungry. Many people on the Resolve subreddit complain often about choppy preview playback. One other thing, Resolve doesn't play nicely with variable bit-rate videos which most of mainstream gameplay recording software produces (Geforce Experience Shadowplay, Windows XBox Game bar, etc.), so you'll first need to convert those to constant bit-rate with another app and then import them into Resolve.
Next, I have also tried
Filmora Pro and
HitFilm Express Free, and these two companies seem to have some sort of a cooperation agreement since both apps appear to be built on top of the same codebase and their UIs are almost identical, only with differently arranged elements. Filmora Pro is far too expensive for what it offers compared to Movavi, and HitFilm Free, while intuitive and solid in and of itself, locks most of its effects, transitions, color correction, etc. behind ridiculously segmented 'DLC' packages you need to purchase. Just look at the
HitFilm Express Store here how much they charge for some basic effects or adjustments. Most of that stuff, save for 3D model importing, comes with Movavi VE Plus right of the bat. But HitFilm has plenty of video tutorials online, and the company is consciously orientated toward the Youtube content creator crowd. HitFilm, like Movavi, also does not support HEVC (H.265).
The cheaper Wondershare Filmora editor - the non pro variant just called
Filmora X - is a separate and different app from Filmora Pro and that one just came out with new version 10, that I've not yet had the opportunity to try test drive, but from what I see in YouTube reviews, it covers pretty much all the same bases as Movavi VE+.
The best semi-pro/prosumer video editor by online reputation is surely
Premiere Pro, but Adobe, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't not offer the monthly subscription for any Creative Cloud app in my country (the only one in the EU where that is the case) and instead asks $450 for a yearly Premiere Pro licence, so, out of protest, I don't even want to download the trial. #%&*$# you to hell, Adobe.
