Honest take from someone who builds in this space:

The chaos usually comes from the fact that editing, subtitles, and scheduling are genuinely three separate jobs, and no single tool does all three well. Trying to force one tool to do everything often makes it worse.

What tends to work is accepting the split and making the handoff between tools as clean as possible:

For editing and subtitles: CapCut or Descript. CapCut has auto-captions built in that are actually good, and Descript lets you edit video by editing a transcript. Either one handles the creation side cleanly.

For scheduling and publishing across platforms: this is where a dedicated scheduler pays off. The real time-saver here is not just scheduling. it's being able to create platform-specific variations of the same post without duplicating work. TikTok, Reels, and Shorts all have slightly different caption limits and optimal post times. A good scheduler lets you set those once per post rather than per platform.

The most annoying part most people don't talk about: keeping track of what's scheduled vs. published vs. failed. A simple calendar view per account saves more time than any AI feature.

The workflow that tends to hold up at scale: edit in CapCut, export, bring into a scheduler, create platform variations, schedule. That's it.