Captions vs. Subtitles: What's Actually the Difference?

People use “captions” and “subtitles” interchangeably all the time, and in casual conversation that's fine — everyone knows what you mean. But the two terms describe genuinely different assumptions about your viewer, and it's worth knowing the real distinction.

Subtitles assume the viewer can hear, but doesn't understand the language

Subtitles are a text translation of the dialogue, for an audience that can hear the audio fine but doesn't speak the language it's in. Watching a foreign-language film with English subtitles is the classic case — you can hear every tonal shift and sound effect, you just need the words translated.

Captions assume the viewer can't hear the audio at all

Captions are written for viewers who can't access the audio — whether that's because they're deaf or hard of hearing, or because they're simply watching on mute. Proper captions include more than dialogue: sound effects, music cues, and speaker labels (“[phone ringing]”, “[tense music]”) that a hearing viewer would otherwise pick up automatically.

Which one does short-form video actually need?

For Reels, TikToks, and Shorts, what you almost always want is captions in the original spoken language — burned-in on-screen text that works whether the viewer has the sound on or off. That's the free, automatic part of what CapGen does: transcribe the spoken audio and burn styled captions directly into the video.

If you also want to reach viewers in a different language, that's translation — a separate step, and a paid feature on CapGen's roadmap. The free tier covers same-language captioning for any of roughly 200 languages CapGen can transcribe, listed on the languages page.