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Kuaishou & Kwai explained

What Is Kuaishou? The Chinese Short-Video App, Explained

Kuaishou (快手) is a Chinese short-video app with 410 million daily users, run by HKEX-listed Kuaishou Technology. What it is, who owns it, and how Kwai fits.

Ishtiaq Turi Ishtiaq Turi Former Trust & Safety and data quality specialist at Kuaishou Technology
Updated 4 min read

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Kuaishou (快手) is a short-video app for mainland China, owned by Kuaishou Technology, a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It is the platform generally ranked second in China after Douyin, and in 2025 it averaged 410.2 million daily active users. Outside China the same company runs a separate app called Kwai.

I worked at Kuaishou Technology in Trust & Safety and data quality before building this site, so this page sticks to things I can point at a source for. Where a number comes from the company’s own results, I have said so.

What the name means

快手 is pronounced kuài shǒu and translates roughly as “quick hand”. You will also see it written Kuai Shou or Kwai Shou in English text. The app’s own English-language branding is simply Kuaishou.

The name predates the video app. The company began in March 2011 as GIF Kuaishou, a tool for making and sharing animated GIFs — a quick hand being what you needed to make one. You can still see that history in the plumbing: Kuaishou’s mobile share pages are served from domains like gifshow.com and chenzhongtech.com, which is why a Kuaishou link often does not have “kuaishou” in it at all. The link formats guide lists every variant.

Who owns it

Kuaishou Technology, with Cheng Yixiao and Su Hua named as its co-founders. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in February 2021 under ticker 1024, which means it publishes audited figures every quarter — a rarity among short-video platforms, and the reason the numbers below are checkable rather than estimates.

YearWhat happened
2011Founded as GIF Kuaishou, an app for making animated GIFs
2013Pivots to short video
2016Adds live streaming, later a major part of the business
Late 2010sGoes abroad, mainly as Kwai, and as Snack Video in India, Pakistan and Indonesia
June 2020Kwai is banned in India alongside 58 other Chinese apps
February 2021Lists on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

How big it is

From the company’s full-year 2025 results, published 25 March 2026:

Measure20252024
Average daily active users410.2 million399.4 million
Average monthly active users724.6 million709.7 million
Total revenueRMB 142.8 billionRMB 126.9 billion
Overseas revenueRMB 5.1 billionRMB 4.7 billion

Two things worth noticing. The user numbers are for the Kuaishou app in China — Kwai is counted separately, inside that much smaller overseas line. And daily users grew only 2.7% year on year, which is what a mature platform looks like rather than a growing one.

Kuaishou or Douyin?

Both are Chinese short-video apps. Douyin belongs to ByteDance, the company behind TikTok; Kuaishou belongs to Kuaishou Technology. They are competitors, not versions of each other.

The reputational split you will read about is that Kuaishou grew up around everyday creators, smaller cities and live-stream selling, while Douyin is seen as more polished and trend-led. Treat that as a reputation rather than a rule. Both apps are more than a decade old and both have changed enormously. The pairing that actually matters for most people reading this is the other one:

Made byFor
KuaishouKuaishou TechnologyMainland China
KwaiKuaishou TechnologyOutside China
DouyinByteDanceMainland China
TikTokByteDanceOutside China

Each company runs one app at home and a separate one abroad, with separate accounts and separate videos.

Can you use Kuaishou outside China?

You can watch public Kuaishou videos in a browser from anywhere — that is how this site’s tool reaches them. The app itself is built for a Chinese-language audience and a Chinese phone number, so most people outside China who arrive looking for “Kuaishou” are actually holding a Kwai link. The tell is simple: if your app’s menus are in Chinese, you are on Kuaishou. If they are in your own language, you are on Kwai.

What this means if you want to save a video

The videos are public, so a public video page can be read without an account. Paste the share link into the downloader and it works out which of the two apps the link came from.

What comes back differs by app. In my October 2026 tests, a Kuaishou post returned an MP4 in H.264, sometimes with a smaller H.265 copy alongside it, a JPG cover image, and — where the post listed one — the soundtrack as a separate M4A. Kwai returned one MP4 and a WebP cover, with no separate audio.

From here:

Sources