Switching from Topaz Video AI to Crisp
Topaz ended perpetual licences in October 2025. The app is now called Topaz Video and costs $299 a year on its annual plan — about $25 a month — with the all-apps Topaz Studio bundle at $399 a year (checked 7 September 2026). Crisp is $129 once, runs entirely on your Mac, and never uploads your footage. If the subscription is why you're here, this page tells you exactly what moves across and what doesn't.
What actually changed at Topaz
Before October 2025 you could buy Topaz Video AI outright and keep the version you paid for. That option is gone for new buyers. Existing perpetual holders keep their last purchased build, but new models and updates require an active plan.
That single change is why the "Topaz alternative" search volume exploded. It isn't that the software got worse. The ownership model changed.
Price, honestly
| Tool | Model | Cost | Runs offline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crisp | One-time | $129 | Yes |
| Topaz Video | Subscription | $299/yr | Yes |
| Aiarty Video Enhancer | One-time | $165 | Yes |
| VideoProc Converter AI | One-time | $54.95 | Yes |
| UniFab All-In-One | One-time | $319.99 | Yes |
Prices checked 8 September 2026 in a rendered browser, read off topazlabs.com/pricing: Topaz Video $299/yr on the annual plan, Topaz Video Pro $699/yr, Topaz Studio — which bundles all six apps — $399/yr, and Topaz Studio Pro $799/yr. The browser version, Topaz for Web – Video, is a separate $199/yr, and topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai still redirects, so the product is called Topaz Video now. An earlier version of this page said “$25/month billed annually — $300 a year”. $300 is twelve times the monthly figure rather than a price Topaz charges; its own annual plan is $299. That version also said Studio bundles seven apps, and Topaz lists six. Both corrected. The other three tools in the table above have their own pages and their own prices, read the same way. Aiarty Video Enhancer: lifetime $235 list, $165 when checked, covering 3 Macs — read off aiarty.com on 8 September 2026, where the yearly plan is $99 list and $79 discounted. VideoProc Converter AI: lifetime $89.95 list, $54.95 when checked, covering 1 Mac — read off videoproc.com’s Mac purchase page on 8 September 2026, where a 3-Mac yearly plan is $34.95 and a 5-Mac lifetime is $79.95. UniFab All-In-One: $319.99 list, discounted to $229.99 when read off unifab.ai in a rendered browser on 8 September 2026 — the figure and its working are set out in full on the UniFab comparison. Both the Aiarty and VideoProc figures are the Mac purchase pages, not the marketing pages, because the two disagree and the purchase page is the one you pay. Crisp is $129 once, from this site.
Every remaining one-time option sits between roughly $95 and $320. Crisp is the cheapest by a wide margin, and that deserves a caveat rather than a victory lap: a $129 app built by one person is not going to match a decade of Topaz engineering on every axis. Read the next section before you switch.
Where Topaz is still the better buy
Worth saying plainly, because a comparison page that never concedes anything is an advert.
- Model breadth. Topaz ships many specialised models — different ones for progressive footage, interlaced sources, CGI, and heavy compression. Crisp has a much smaller set.
- Frame interpolation. Topaz's slow-motion and frame-rate conversion work is genuinely strong and mature. Crisp does not compete there.
- Fine control. If you want to tune individual model parameters per shot, Topaz exposes far more.
- Windows. Crisp is Mac-only. Topaz isn't.
If you upscale professionally every day and bill for it, $299 a year is a rounding error against your time, and the breadth is worth it. Switch for the ownership model and the privacy, not because Crisp out-features Topaz. It doesn't.
What moves across cleanly
The everyday jobs — taking soft 1080p to 4K, cleaning up compressed capture footage, denoising a dim clip — are what most people actually bought Topaz for, and those transfer fine. Crisp adds a full timeline editor Topaz has no equivalent for: trim, split, montage, split-screen, titles, colour, audio. You upscale and cut in the same app instead of round-tripping through a second one.
Your footage never leaves the Mac
Crisp does every render on-device. No upload, no queue, no account, and it works on a plane. Two things Topaz documents are worth carrying over with you. Topaz's own activation page treats signing in as a connection to their server, so their apps expect an account where Crisp expects none. And their Cloud Rendering documentation says Cloud Rendering “is required when using Starlight models on a Personal license” — their desktop app renders Starlight locally on other tiers, and the same page says their users “rely heavily on the privacy-focused offline rendering that Topaz Video is known for”, which is fair and worth repeating. But if you are on the licence most individuals buy, the models you switched for run on their machines, not yours. Both read 8 September 2026. For anyone under an NDA, handling client footage, or editing anything they'd rather not hand to a server, that constraint matters more than any quality benchmark.
Topaz also processes locally, so this isn't a point against it — but it is a real difference against the browser tools people often shortlist alongside it, where the upload is mandatory.
Try it before you cancel anything
Crisp's free tier is the whole editor plus 4K AI upscaling, with a small "Made with Crisp" watermark on exports. That's enough to run your own comparison on your own footage, which is the only test that counts. The $129 licence removes the watermark and unlocks the Max quality lane (a heavier generative restore) and batch processing. Max is the slow one. It runs a generative model on every frame, so budget roughly 20 minutes of processing per second of video on a fast Mac. It suits a short clip you're rescuing rather than a whole film.
One caveat on Max: it's slow. It's an overnight-batch feature on a long clip, not something you sit and wait for. Use the standard Enhance lane for day-to-day work.
The short version
If you're a working pro who needs model breadth and interpolation, stay on Topaz. If you resent paying a subscription every month to keep software you used to own, and your work is mostly upscaling plus editing on a Mac, $129 once is a straightforward trade.
Which preset replaces which model
This is the part switchers actually get stuck on. Topaz hands you a catalogue and expects you to know which network suits your clip. Crisp has four, plus an automatic mode that is the default, and the honest way to describe the difference is that we made the choice narrower on purpose rather than that we made it smarter.
| Preset | Network | Denoise | The footage it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto | picked per clip | picked per clip | The default. Start here. |
| Enhance | RealESRGAN general v3 | 0.4 | Ordinary live action that is soft or compressed. |
| Low-light cleanup | RealESRGAN general WDN v3 | 0.85 | Dark, grainy, high-ISO. A different network, trained with denoising. |
| Anime / Cartoon | realesr-animevideov3 | 0 | Drawn line art, where photographic models smear the lines. |
| Max quality | SeedVR2 | 0 | Badly degraded footage worth waiting for. Needs 32GB and the Max pack. |
What Auto can and cannot work out
Auto measures the average brightness of the range you are actually rendering, not of the whole file, and combines that with the source resolution to choose the network, the scale and how much cleanup to apply. So a dark clip gets the denoise-trained network and a much stronger setting than a bright one, without you deciding anything.
There is one thing it cannot infer, and it is worth knowing before you blame the output. Nothing in a frame's brightness or size says whether the footage was filmed or drawn, and line art needs a different network entirely. If your source is animation, pick Anime yourself. Auto will otherwise treat it as live action and soften exactly the hard edges that make it look like animation.
The other case worth overriding is Max. It is genuinely the best result Crisp can produce on badly damaged footage, and it is slow enough that it is a decision rather than a default: budget roughly twenty minutes of processing per second of video. That suits a short clip you are rescuing, not a reel.