7 Best DownSub Alternatives in 2026 (Free & No Signup)
If you've tried to download subtitles from a YouTube video recently, you already know the pain. Sites like DownSub come and go, their links break, and half the time the captions it returns are empty or wrong. I've spent more evenings than I'd like to admit hunting for a tool that just works. So here's the shortlist I actually keep using, plus why I built my own.
Why DownSub keeps breaking
DownSub scrapes caption tracks out of YouTube's pages. That works great until YouTube changes the way those pages load, which it does constantly. When that happens, every request returns nothing, and the site looks dead even though it isn't down on purpose. That's why you'll see “is DownSub working?” trending every few months.
1. JustSubtitles Subtitle Downloader (best free all-rounder)
Our own tool. It does exactly what DownSub used to do: paste a URL, get every subtitle track, download as SRT, VTT or TXT, but it also handles sites DownSub never did: TED (with 30+ translated languages), NRK, Dailymotion and VK, alongside YouTube.
There's no signup, no watermark, no daily limit. It runs on our own servers instead of scraping from your browser, so it doesn't trip YouTube's “sign in to continue” walls the way browser extensions do.
→ Try it: JustSubtitles Subtitle Downloader
2. YouTube's built-in transcript
For YouTube specifically, open the video, click the three dots under the player, and choose Show transcript. You can copy the text and paste it into any SRT converter. It's clunky: transcripts merge lines, drop timestamps unless you enable them, and there's no one-click SRT, but it's free and needs no third-party tool.
3. yt-dlp (for the technical crowd)
yt-dlp is a command-line tool that can dump every subtitle track for a video. It's the most reliable YouTube option out there because it gets updated weekly. The catch: you need a terminal and some patience. One command looks like: yt-dlp --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-langs all --skip-download URL
4. Your browser's dev tools
Open the video, press F12, switch to the Network tab, and filter for timedtext. You'll see the caption requests the player makes. Open one in a new tab and you get the raw caption data. It works, but it's fiddly. and if you just want a file, a dedicated tool saves you ten minutes.
5. Browser extensions
Extensions like “YouTube Subtitle Downloader” run in the browser and add a button under the player. They're convenient, but many are abandoned, some inject ads, and a few have asked for scary permissions. I'd rather use a server-side tool that never touches my browser history.
6. OpenSubtitles for movies and TV
OpenSubtitles is the giant database for movie and TV subtitles. It is the SRT files people upload for their downloaded films. It's not a YouTube subtitle tool, but if your goal is captions for a film you have locally, it's the right place. Our main subtitle search actually indexes that same catalog.
7. JustSubtitles' other subtitle tools
If your subtitle file is already downloaded but needs work, we've got you covered there too: convert to SRT, convert to VTT, sync timing, and merge dual-language files.
Which should you pick?
If you want one tool that just works and covers multiple sites, start with our subtitle downloader. If you're comfortable with a terminal, yt-dlp is the most robust fallback. And if you're downloading subtitles for movies, OpenSubtitles is still king.