The Best Free Stock Footage Sites in 2026

Which free stock footage sites are worth using in 2026?

The best free stock footage sites in October 2026 are Pexels, Pixabay, Mixkit and Coverr for clips you can use commercially without a credit, plus Videezy, Vecteezy, Magnific and Dareful if you’re happy to add attribution. For historical or space footage, the Prelinger Archives, NASA and Wikimedia Commons are the strongest public domain sources.

Many “best free stock video” lists haven’t been rechecked in years. One of the top-ranking articles we read still describes Pexels as CC0, a licence Pexels replaced years ago. Others recommend Videvo and Mazwai as standalone sites, though both domains now redirect to another company. So for this guide we opened every site, read every licence page, and noted what had changed. Where we couldn’t confirm something, we’ve said so.

Free footage matters because video is now the default format. In Wyzowl’s 2026 survey, 91% of businesses said they use video as a marketing tool and 69% had made social media videos. Short vertical video is the biggest growth area: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in June 2025 that Shorts averages 200 billion daily views (TheWrap). Most of that content needs B-roll, and few small teams can shoot it all themselves.

Free stock footage sites compared

Here’s how the 11 live sites we’d recommend compare, as checked in October 2026. “Vertical” means the site has a way to find 9:16 clips, through a filter or a dedicated category.

The biggest practical difference is the credit column. If you can’t put a credit line in your video or its description, such as a 15-second paid ad or a client deliverable, stick to the first four sites or the public domain archives.

Rule of thumb: Read the licence on the clip’s own download page, not the site’s homepage. Videezy, Mixkit and Wikimedia Commons all mix more than one licence in the same library.

The no-attribution sites

Four sites let you use clips commercially without a credit: Pexels, Pixabay, Mixkit and Coverr. Each has a short list of things you can’t do, and those restrictions are where people get caught.

Pexels

Pexels is the safest first stop for general B-roll. The Pexels licence says all its photos and videos are free to use, attribution is not required, and you can modify them. You can’t sell unaltered copies, redistribute clips on other stock or wallpaper platforms, imply that people in a clip endorse your product, or use footage as part of a trademark or business name.

Pexels is owned by Canva, and its library holds more than 3.2 million photos and videos combined (Wikipedia). Its search supports orientation and size filters for videos (Pexels Help), and the Pexels API documentation defines the largest size as 4K, the medium as Full HD and the small as HD. That makes it the quickest place to pull vertical 4K clips.

Pixabay

Pixabay has the biggest free video count we could confirm: its video section says it hosts over 240,000 free clips. The Content Licence summary lets you use, modify and adapt content for free without attribution. You can’t sell clips on a standalone basis, use recognisable trademarks commercially or print them on merchandise, or use content featuring recognisable people in an immoral or misleading way.

Pixabay updated its Terms of Service on 20 October 2026. The terms define “standalone” as content where no creative effort has been applied, so filtering, recolouring, resizing or cropping a clip still counts as standalone. They also ban scraping for machine learning. The Pixabay API returns a large version that is usually 3840x2160 when one exists, so not every clip has a 4K file.

Mixkit

Mixkit is run by Envato (Mixkit), needs no sign-up, and adds no watermark. It has two video licences on its licence page: the Free licence covers commercial use such as YouTube videos, social media marketing, online ads and music videos, while the Restricted licence is for personal, non-commercial use only. Neither asks for attribution on the free side.

Its library is smaller and more hand-picked than Pexels or Pixabay, with a 4K filter and a dedicated vertical category that listed 738 free vertical clips when we checked.

Common mistake: Grabbing a Mixkit clip for a client ad without checking which licence it carries. Restricted clips sit in the same search results, and they rule out business use.

Coverr

Coverr gives you filmmaker-style clips that are free for commercial and non-commercial use with no credit and no sign-up. Its licence has two restrictions most competitors don’t: you can’t use the videos to train AI models or as part of a dataset, and you can’t use them to build a similar or competing service. Coverr also says plainly that it holds no releases for brands, trademarks, landmarks or identifiable properties.

The licence page says 4K versions are free when offered, while the pricing page lists “4K footage” as a feature of its paid plans, which start at $4.20 a month billed annually at the time of writing. In practice, expect some 4K files to sit behind the upgrade. Coverr has also added AI video generation, with 1,000 free credits on sign-up.

Free tiers that need a credit

Videezy, Vecteezy, Magnific and Dareful all offer free footage, but every free download needs attribution. Two of them also put limits on how you can use it.

Videezy

Videezy’s free “Standard” clips can be used for personal, educational, editorial and commercial projects with attribution, according to its Pro membership page. If you can’t give credit, you need a Pro licence bought with credits: $19 for one, $39 for five, or a 10-credit pack on sale for $49 at the time of writing.

The library has real depth in 4K: a search for “4k” returned 6,806 clips. Its licence filter lists Standard, Pro, Creative Commons and Editorial Use Only, so filter out editorial clips before you search for anything commercial.

Vecteezy

Vecteezy has offered free videos since December 2020 under the same licence as its free photos and vectors (Vecteezy). Its licensing agreement sets out the tightest limits of the free sites we checked:

• Attribution is required, and if you can’t provide it you must upgrade to Pro.
• Free content can be used in video, film or production projects with budgets up to $1,000. Pro raises that to $10,000.
• Free content can’t go on products for resale.

The search does have a proper aspect ratio filter with a Vertical option, which is useful. For anything beyond a small project, though, the budget cap pushes you to Pro.

Magnific (formerly Freepik, now home to Videvo)

Freepik rebranded as Magnific on 28 April 2026 (Tech.eu). Magnific’s video library offers HD and 4K clips in MP4 and MOV, and around 50,000 of them are free. Free users must credit Magnific on every resource (Magnific licences); for video, that credit can go in the end credits or the description. Premium subscribers don’t need to credit.

It’s one of the few free sources with a dedicated 9:16 orientation filter, added in 2023 (Magnific).

Dareful

Dareful is a small library of 4K and HD nature, travel and aerial clips under CC BY 4.0. That licence lets you use footage commercially, as long as you credit the creator, link to the licence and note any changes. The site listed 242 videos when we checked, and the newest thumbnails we saw dated from mid-2024, so treat it as a quality archive rather than a growing library.

Public domain archives

Public domain archives give you footage with no licence conditions in most cases, but you trade resolution and freshness for that freedom. Use them for historical footage and space content.

Prelinger Archives on the Internet Archive is the classic source of vintage film, from old ads and classroom films to home movies. The collection held 10,468 items on the Internet Archive when we checked. Rick Prelinger founded the archive in 1982, and the Library of Congress acquired his film holdings in 2002 (Wikipedia). The items we sampled carried a public domain mark, though not every record shows a rights field, so read each one.

NASA footage is generally not subject to copyright in the United States, according to NASA’s media guidelines. The same guidelines say NASA won’t appear to endorse a commercial product, its insignia and logotype aren’t public domain, and commercial use of identifiable people, including astronauts, may need permission.

Wikimedia Commons holds over 50.7 million freely usable media files, video included. Licences vary per file between public domain, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Video comes as WebM or Ogg Theora only (Commons file types), so convert before you edit.

Watch out: “Public domain in the US” isn’t the same as public domain everywhere. NASA’s statement is about US copyright. For commercial work in Australia or elsewhere, prefer clips with no logos or identifiable people, and keep the source URL.

Sites that closed, moved or changed terms

Several sites that still appear on popular lists have redirected, pivoted or stopped updating since those lists were written. This was their status in October 2026.

The Videvo change is the one most likely to affect existing projects. Freepik bought Videvo in 2022, when Videvo had more than 650,000 active users (Keystone Law). The old Videvo had three licence types, including one with no attribution. Under Magnific, free clips need a credit. If you used Videvo clips in the past, keep your original download record, because the old clip pages no longer exist.

Several older lists also describe Dareful as “formerly Mazwai”. We found no evidence for that: Mazwai’s domain redirects to Magnific, while Dareful runs as its own site.

Worth knowing: A licence is a snapshot. Screenshot the licence page and the clip page on the day you download, and save them with the file. If a site changes terms or disappears, that record shows what you agreed to.

Which free stock footage site is best for you?

The right site depends on whether you can give credit, what format you need, and how commercial the use is. Use this table to pick your first stop.

If you work across formats, our free stock directory lists video sites alongside free music and sound effects, which you’ll usually need for the same edit.

How to find vertical 9:16 clips

Pexels, Mixkit, Vecteezy and Magnific let you filter for vertical footage directly. On other sites, the fastest method is to download a 4K horizontal clip and crop a 9:16 frame from it.

A 3840x2160 clip gives you a vertical crop of roughly 1215x2160, which is more than the 1080x1920 most platforms expect. A 1920x1080 clip only gives you about 607x1080, which looks soft on a phone. So for vertical edits, download the 4K file when you have the choice.

Keyword searches for “vertical” aren’t reliable. On Videezy, a “vertical” search returned 1,859 matches, and several were titled “Horizontal”. Check the dimensions on the download page before you commit. For more on cutting clips for short-form, see our guide to free clips for Reels and TikTok edits. If you’re stuck with an HD-only clip, one of the free AI upscalers can help, though they work best on simple scenes.

How to check a footage licence in two minutes

Check the clip, not just the site. Licences vary within the same library, and most problems come from a clip that carries a different licence from the site’s headline one.

For the difference between licence types such as CC0, CC BY and custom stock licences, see our explainer on free stock licences. The same principles apply to video.

Quick check: If a clip shows a person’s face, a brand or a famous building, and you’re using it to sell something, assume you need a release unless the site says it has one. Free sites almost never do.

People, logos and releases

Free footage licences cover the copyright in the clip. They don’t cover the rights of the people, brands or property shown in it, and that gap is where commercial risk sits.

Coverr says it holds no releases for brands, trademarks or identifiable properties. Pexels forbids implying that people in its videos endorse your product, and Pixabay restricts commercial use of recognisable trademarks and bans misleading use of content with recognisable people. NASA warns that its astronauts and staff can’t appear in commercial promotions.

For ads and branded content, the lowest-risk clips show people without visible faces (hands, silhouettes, distant crowds, people from behind), places with logos, shop signs and car badges blurred or cropped out, or subjects like nature and abstract textures that carry no rights beyond the clip itself.

For anything that implies “this is our customer” or “this is our team”, shoot your own footage. A recent phone in good light handles most B-roll.

This list is maintained by Saijo George, who has run AllTheFreeStock since 2015 and works as an AI SEO consultant in Melbourne. We’ll update the tables when sites change terms, and the date at the top of this post shows when we last checked.

Questions you may have

Saijo George

SEO Consultant · Melbourne

Curator of AllTheFreeStock and a handful of other tools for marketers. Spends most of the week on technical SEO and the rest arguing about licence terms.

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