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9 Best Instagram Story App For Creating Outstanding Stories (2021)

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Originally Posted On: https://famoid.com/instagram-story-apps/

If you are a person who scrutinizes their Instagram pictures a hundred times before posting them, then you would know how updating your Instagram stories on the go constantly keeps you on edge.

Sure, the built-in Instagram tools & effects make your content more presentable but are those tools really reliable?

This is where third-party editing software steps in.

Not only do they help you edit your pictures to their best potential, but they also assist you in improvising your videos on the go.

In this blog, we will be looking at some of the best Instagram Story apps that do not require you to have the mad skills of a film editor and are simple but still effective to use.

Why are these Instagram story apps necessary? How can they help you elevate your content presentation, and how much of your resources are you required to invest in getting the best use out of them? We’re going to cover everything in this post.

So ready to dive? Let’s jump in.

Table of Contents

9 Best Instagram Story Apps in 20211. Canva (Android/iOS)

Started in 2013, Canva is one of the most popular editing and publishing platforms for photos and videos alike. This app comes with inbuilt templates to support every occasion of creativity.

One of their mottos is to “make complex things simple,” and their editing tools live up to this.

This app is extremely suitable for creating fluid, expressive Instagram stories within a short period almost effortlessly. It comes with the highest collection of pre-built templates for Instagram stories, Instagram posts, Twitter posts – anything you want.

Canva is one of the best applications right now for creative and even for non-creative professionals. Once you get the hang of it and get in the flow, you can easily keep creating the graphics you need for whatever purpose.

It also comes with a huge database of stock images that you can use as your background or other aspects of your post. It has more than 50 million users creating 5 billion-plus designs every month!

This app is available in 190 countries, with 100 languages that elevate their user experience.

Key Features: 

  • 1 Million+ Background images
  • 60,000+ templates
  • Multiple design tools like photo vignette, design grid, photo enhancer, and photo blur, etc.
  • A large collection of different elements, including graphics, badges, icons, and frames.

Functions: With Canva, you can create social media graphics, edit content, build documentaries, posters, flyers, business cards, logos, resumes, and several other visual contents. You will also be able to create custom charts and logos with ease.

Canva boasts a hassle-free drag and drops feature curated for non-designers alongside a high-resolution publishing and downloading facility.

Pros: 

  • Affordable
  • User-friendly
  • Easy-to-use
  • A huge database of stock images & graphics

Cons: 

  • Inability to remove watermarks in the free version
  • Sometimes there can be glitches
2. VSCO (Android/iOS)

If maintaining aesthetics in your stories is one of your priorities, you will probably have heard about VSCO already.

VSCO is a mobile application that lets you edit & apply filters to your photos and share them on your social networks.

It can be a bit difficult to figure out in the beginning. This app also has it’s own social community, which has more professional and creative photographs, unlike Instagram.

The app also comes with its own presets and filters, which automatically tells you about its heavy emphasis on editing and unique image creation.

Irrespective of all the clout surrounding VSCO users, this platform has a reputation for having an eye for aesthetics and providing its users with befitting filters and editorial tools.

Overall, this app is highly suitable for users looking to create professionally produced pictures and video stories.

Key Features: 

  • Awesome filters
  • X Skew, Y Skew
  • Tint
  • Clarity

Functions: VSCO provides its users with more than 200 presets that save your time and effort in creating editing recipes. It also allows you to manually adjust several aspects of your content with their advanced tools to create something unique.

It allows you to curate your gallery and connect with other creators as well! With this app, you can also piece together several short videos to create montages and gifs.

Pros: 

  • Simple & beautiful design
  • Excellent & easy to use editing tools for color and exposure
  • Attractive web galleries
  • High-level photo effect filters

Cons: 

  • Not the best with the social interaction features
  • It can be a little buggy
3. Motionleap (Android/iOS)

Another app that helps you to “breathe life into your Instagram stories” is Enlight Pixaloop. If you’re looking to animate your Instagram stories for a gripping effect, then you are likely to find Motionleap useful.

It is one of the most popular photo animation apps which lets you animate any picture within few minutes. It comes with Camera FXs, sky packs, and different overlays, which gives your images the oomph it needs!

Pixaloop lets you add all kinds of movements in your images – be it a horse running, or water dripping, or maybe steam coming out of your mug. It also lets you move different elements in your images in different directions, creating trippy effects.

Key Features: 

  • Video effects
  • Overlays
  • Camera FX for cinematic movement
  • Animation
  • AI-powered water animation
  • Effects and movements
  • Geometric notion animations
  • Sky replacement technology

Functions: With the provision of several editing tools, you will produce motion direction to animate your pictures intuitively. You will be able to get rid of any background disturbances while polishing it with selections from a wide array of filters. One of the highlights of this app is that it has options to overlay filters and create motion loop pictures that resemble time-lapses.

Pros: 

  • Easy to use
  • Neat & clean effects
  • Moving overlays
  • Accuracy

Cons: 

  • It takes time to create animations
  • It needs better source photos
4. Cutstory (iOS)

This app is designed to create and edit stories on several social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter. This app saves you a lot of time when preparing videos for your Instagram stories while also preserving the quality of your uploads.

No particular special skill is required to use this app, and it still delivers results even without an internet connection. You also don’t have to research the ideal short video length for different social media platforms. This app comes with preset video clip timing for different platforms, namely 15 seconds for an Instagram story, 20 seconds for the Facebook story, and 30 seconds for Whatsapp.

Key Features: 

  • Supports all video formats
  • Cuts long videos into 15 seconds clips for Instagram stories and reels!

Functions: The primary purpose of this app is to cut your video stories into ten-second segments to be conveniently uploaded into segments. This app is practical with its editing options since you can cut your existing footage into any range from 2 to 19 seconds. It’s also pretty flexible due to its feature that exports videos without compressing them sequentially to fit into your social platform.

Pros: 

  • Simple Design
  • Custom length for Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook
  • Import and export easily
  • Automatic save without compression
  • Optional feature to add music to the clips

Cons: 

  • Only available for iOS
  • It takes a long time to import even short clips
5. Typorama (Android/iOS)

Launched back in 2015, Typorama is an app developed by Apperto Studios. Typorama lets you create beautiful typographic designs with ease – just choose the background and get writing!

If you are looking to create fun and attention-grabbing text over your Instagram story, this is the app you need.

This app helps in reducing your editing and mostly typing time by providing you with a variety of fonts that lets you customize and use them to create interesting typographies for your stories. Apart from advanced text tools, this app also provides several editing features. From overlays and filters to image correction – it gives you everything you need to polish your image.

Key Features: 

  • 100+ fonts & typefaces
  • 50+ typographic styles
  • Hundreds of quotes to use in your stories
  • 1000+ stock images to choose from
  • Gradient, shadows, etc. features for text enhancement
  • Advanced text styling tools

Functions: The predesigned fonts allow you to type quicker and suitable captions for your Instagram stories. The wide array of 3D tools rotations, high-quality filters, outlines, partial erasability, and the color and highlight palette makes it one of the must-have apps for creating Instagram stories.

Pros: 

  • Image control with overlay, filters, and different editing options
  • Easily include watermarks in the pictures
  • Easy to edit if you mess up
  • A LOT of options with texts

Cons: 

  • You can’t move the pictures behind the presets
  • 3D text is not the best
6. Inshot (Android/iOS)

Inshot describes itself as a ‘video editor and video maker’ application that has actively been in the business since 2015. It was first marketed around the globe as Viva Video, but the name was later changed to Inshort.

This app comes with an easy-to-use interface, which allows its users to edit videos and images alike. The simplistic layout of this tool and the diversity in the app’s pre-made filters save a lot of time and require minimum effort to create quality content for your Instagram stories.

It comes with a range of features that allow you to cut, trim, split, crop, or merge the videos. It also provides different filters, backgrounds, and effects for both images and videos. You can also add sound and music to your videos with the option of fading them out.

Inshot also allows you to add texts, emojis, stickers, design effects to both videos and images. It is one of the best apps to create Instagram story for both amateurs and professional Instagram influencers.

Key Features:

  • Allows you to split, merge, blur and control the speed of your videos
  • Easy and quality video conversions
  • A wide array of collages and editing tools
  • Allows you to add effects and music to your videos
  • Filters, texts, icons, and several other photo and video editing tools

Functions: Users of this app can trim, cut, edit and crop the content to their liking and suitability. This app comes with features that allow you to add music, additional pictures, stickers, effects, and music to your videos.

You can also merge, split and time your videos conveniently. The video transition options with ratio manager is another highlight of this application. It is also credited by the Google app store to create HD quality videos.

Pros:

  • Accessible menus
  • Affordable
  • Compatible with most mobile devices

Cons:

  • Comparatively limited photo editing options
  • Lack of support and in-app guides
  • A slightly complex video manipulation process
7. Unfold (Android/iOS)

Another one of the best Instagram story editing tools is Unfold. This story maker and Instagram Template Editor allow you to make quick edits to your content for a finished look. It comes with a lot of minimalist and elegant templates for your Instagram stories. You can explore your creativity and produce sharp contents that are as good as professional editing works.

This app does not require you to set up an account; you can just download it and start editing!

Key Features:

  • 5 and more font options and advanced text options
  • More than 60 premium templates and 25 free templates
  • Works well with both photo and video formats

Functions: The 400+ available templates and collages is the attention-grabbing feature of this application. However, unlike other Instagram story editing apps, it allows you to schedule your edited content to be posted later.

You can always add filters to beautify your content and texture your background with some of the most advanced tools available for mobile apps.

Pros:

  • A wide variety of advanced tools
  • Fit for commercial use
  • Clean design and easy use the format

Cons:

  • Lack of customization
  • Comparatively expensive to other applications
8. Seen (iOS)

For those looking to spice up their Instagram stories, Seen is an app to remove the blandness from them.

It was developed and designed by the creators of facetune and facetune 2, and the unblemished finishings speak for themselves. Influencers are trusted to curate their stories into better quality edits and are highly suitable for casual use.

Key Features:

  • Trendy new templates and layout formats
  • More than 1000 filters
  • Unlimited access to tools, filters, effects, and other features

Functions: With a stash of more than 1000+ filters and templates, Seen is loaded with several transition options, stickers, over-the-top GIFs, animated texts, and story tapers as well. The layouts provided by this app are exclusive, and its simplistic approach to editing is high on demand.

Pros

  • A wide selection of pre-built templates
  • Simple and easy to use
  • Fresh and trending designs

Cons:

  • Available only for ios users
  • It may be expensive for casual use
  • Lack of customization in templates
9. Adobe Spark Post (Android/iOS)

Launched in 2016, Adobe Spark Post is a suite designed to attend to the need for media creation applications for mobiles. It comprises three separate design apps, Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video.

This family of applications allows users to add video clips or combine images to make up a spectacular Instagram story. You can also add sound, text, clips, images, filters, stickers with this application.

It is an easy-to-use app that does not require any design expertise. You can add sound or music from their collection or your device. You can also add effects to the images/videos from the huge filter collection available. This app also comes with a myriad of themes available for different types of stories and posts.

Key Features:

  • Millions of stock photo options
  • Creation of smooth animation video posts
  • Advanced typography options
  • Easy syncing through cloud backups

Functions: The spark page app makes attractive and functioning websites that are shareable and used to create compelling web stories. On the other hand, the spark post allows you to create engaging graphics within a few minutes. You can add these graphics to your images and directly export them to be used in your Instagram stories.

The Spark Video used for creating and editing videos for your stories works well with the other two apps so that the final content for your Instagram story is complete and polished.

The best part about this is you can layer as many filters, texts, and images as you like; moreover, the quality during export does not decrease or get compressed. This is one of the main reasons that Spark Post is categorized as a storytelling app.

Pros:

  • Highly advanced tools and features
  • High quality, uncompressed content
  • Versatile and compatible with all your mobile devices

Cons:

  • Usability is comparatively complex to other Instagram story apps
  • Text updates are less and tend to stay stagnant
  • Watermarks content in non-premium versions
Conclusion

It is no news that Instagram is the modern-day billboard. Therefore, people all over the globe are first likely to resort to this app for news updates, celebrity scandals, online shopping, advertising, basically any current happenings around the world.

For Instagram users looking to reach a wide audience but lack professional editing and photography skills, these Instagram story apps work as the best substitute. Not only are they easy to use, but they also have several other editing options that Instagram does not provide.

If you are looking to grow and maintain your audience engagement, the paid versions of these apps can be a great investment for creating Instagram stories.

However, even for general everyday use, these Instagram story maker apps fill the gaps that other Instagram tools may be unable to fill.

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