Switching from Topaz Video AI to Crisp
Topaz ended perpetual licences in October 2025. Renewal is now $299/year for Personal and $699/year for Pro. Crisp is $19 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 | $19 | Yes |
| Topaz Video AI | Subscription | $299/yr | Yes |
| Aiarty Video Enhancer | One-time | $149 | Yes |
| VideoProc Converter AI | One-time | $149.90 | Yes |
| UniFab All-In-One | One-time | $319.99 | Yes |
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 $19 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/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. 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 $19 licence removes the watermark and unlocks the Max quality lane (a heavier generative restore) and batch processing.
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 $299 every year to keep software you used to own, and your work is mostly upscaling plus editing on a Mac, $19 once is a straightforward trade.