Loom made async video effortless: hit record, capture your screen and face, and a shareable link is ready before you've finished talking. For a quick walkthrough instead of another meeting, it's excellent. The thing worth pausing on is where those recordings live. Everything you capture is stored on Loom's cloud, and those clips routinely show a staging environment, a customer's account, an unreleased feature, or a window of internal Slack - data you may not want sitting in a third party's video library.
The open source recorders below 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.
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.
