Loom made async video effortless: hit record, capture your screen and face, and a shareable link is ready before you finish talking. The detail worth pausing on is where those recordings live. Everything you capture sits on Loom's cloud, and a quick walkthrough often shows a staging environment, a customer's account, an unreleased feature, or a slice of internal chat you would rather not park in a third party's video library. The open source recorders here capture the same screen-and-webcam messages but keep the files where you put them. You self-host the storage, hand out share links on your own terms, and the recordings land in standard video formats you fully own, so nothing sensitive leaves your control by default.
OBS Studio is software for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content. It is used to make live streams and recorded videos from a single application, with support for high quality H264 / AAC encoding.
ShareX is a free and open source screen capture, screen recording, and file sharing app for Windows. It lets you capture or record any area of the screen with a single key press and then send screenshots, images, text, and other files to chosen destinations.
ScreenToGif records a selected area of your screen, live webcam feed, or live drawings from a sketchboard, then lets you edit and save the result as an animation or image file. It is aimed at turning short captures into shareable output without leaving the app.
Cap is an open source alternative to Loom for teams that want to own their screen recording workflow. It records screen, camera, and microphone, then lets you share a link, export a finished video, or keep recordings local.
Screenity is a privacy-friendly screen recorder and annotation tool for making demos, tutorials, presentations, and feedback videos. It records your tab, a selected area, the desktop, any application, or camera, and it can run offline.
Captura is a Windows screen recording tool for screenshots, screencasts, webcam capture, and recording audio, cursor activity, mouse clicks, and keystrokes. It covers common capture tasks in one app, including full screen, selected screens, windows, and specific regions.
Kooha is a screen recorder for Linux with an intuitive, distraction-free interface. It is meant for quickly starting a recording without configuring a lot of settings first.
vokoscreenNG is a screencast creator for Windows and Linux that records the screen, a selected area, or a window. It also supports audio from multiple sources and built-in camera support, so you can capture screen activity and webcam video in one recording.
The two cover different halves of Loom: an all-in-one video portal and a private local recorder.
Best all-in-one Loom replacement: Cap Cap is the closest full replacement: it records screen, camera, and microphone, with Instant Mode for share-as-you-record and Studio Mode for local editing with backgrounds, zooms, trimming, and captions. It layers on comments, reactions, transcripts, viewer analytics, team workspaces, custom domains, and passwords, and stores files on Cap Cloud, your own S3, or a Docker Compose self-host. Runs on macOS and Windows with a web dashboard.
Best privacy-first local recorder: Screenity Screenity is a browser-based recorder that keeps everything local and needs no sign-in. It captures a tab, area, desktop, app, or camera, annotates with drawings, text, arrows, and shapes, and edits with cut, trim, and crop before exporting MP4, GIF, or WebM. Self-hosting runs the extension in local-only mode with no API calls, which suits recordings too sensitive to upload anywhere.
What your team leans on in Loom is either the capture flow or the hosted conversation around each video, and open source replacements split that stack differently. Loom lets you record, upload, share a link, and collect reactions without thinking about files; some alternatives cover only local capture and editing, while others add a server for libraries, permissions, comments, and embeds. Cap spans both, recording screen, camera, and mic with an Instant Mode that uploads as you record and a Studio Mode for local editing, plus comments, transcripts, and viewer analytics. Screenity is capture-first, a privacy-friendly browser recorder that runs offline and exports plain MP4, GIF, or WebM.
Expect fewer conveniences at the edges, and decide which ones you truly need. Loom users often miss the polished extension workflow, webcam-bubble defaults, quick trimming, transcription, viewer analytics, and notification loops. Cap reproduces much of that, adding backgrounds, zooms, captions, custom domains, passwords, and S3-compatible or fully self-hosted storage, so it can act as an internal video portal. Screenity deliberately stays local: self-hosting runs the extension in local-only mode with no sign-in and no API calls, which is ideal for sensitive demos but means you supply any sharing and library layer yourself.
Migration is really a video-library cleanup project. Download the recordings you need from Loom, keep the original filenames or build a map from Loom URLs to new ones, and capture titles, descriptions, owners, folders, and dates while you still have access. The MP4 file usually survives cleanly; comments, reactions, watch history, transcript formatting, and link permissions generally have to be recreated or let go. Plan redirects or a searchable index for the old links already embedded in tickets, docs, and onboarding pages.
It depends on whether Loom is mainly a recorder or a whole video-communication system for you. Cap is the closest single-tool match: it records screen, camera, and mic, shares links, and adds comments, transcripts, viewer analytics, and team workspaces, with self-hosting via Docker Compose. If you only need capture and want to keep everything local, Screenity is a browser recorder with editing and no sign-in, and you provide the sharing layer.
No. A Loom share URL points to Loom-hosted content, so moving a video elsewhere gives it a new address. If those links are embedded in documentation, tickets, onboarding checklists, or customer replies, build a mapping table from old URLs to new ones. For important internal links, update the source documents directly rather than relying on people to search for the moved video later.
Some do, some expect discussion to happen elsewhere. Cap includes comments, reactions, transcripts, and viewer analytics directly, so it can stand in for Loom's feedback loop. Screenity focuses on recording and editing and leaves discussion to your existing tools. Decide whether comments must stay pinned to the video timeline, which suits design and bug reviews, or whether a linked thread in your tracker is enough.
The video file moves far more easily than the transcript. Where Loom exposes transcript text, copy it and store it beside the recording; otherwise plan to regenerate captions in the new tool. Cap can produce titles, summaries, chapters, and transcripts through Cap AI, so you can re-transcribe after import rather than salvage formatting. If captions matter for accessibility or search, confirm they are downloadable and searchable in your replacement.
Video changes the economics compared with documents. Screen recordings are large, and a popular onboarding clip can generate real bandwidth. Estimate from your current Loom library size, average recording length, and expected monthly views, then plan object storage, backups, and lifecycle rules. Cap supports custom S3-compatible storage, which lets you place files on infrastructure you already pay for and control retention. Decide whether raw and edited versions both need keeping.
Sometimes, but set expectations. Loom's extension is built around one-click capture and immediate upload. Screenity is itself a browser extension and records a tab, an area, the desktop, an app, or the camera, though sharing is more manual in local-only mode. Cap records from a desktop app with an Instant Mode that uploads while you record. Test your exact browser, OS, microphone, camera, and multi-monitor setup before committing.
It is worth it when recordings hold sensitive internal context, customer data, or engineering walkthroughs that should stay under your own retention and access rules, and it gives you a clean exit path. Cap self-hosts through Docker Compose with your own S3 storage; Screenity runs fully local with no API calls. The trade-off is real: someone must own storage, backups, updates, TLS, and capacity for large video files.
