Why people leave Loom

The five-minute cap on the free plan, first and foremost. It is short enough that most useful walkthroughs run over it.

Then the seat price. Business is $18 per user a month, or about $15 billed annually, which is $1,800 a year for a team of ten doing something OBS does free.

The third reason is subtler: a lot of Loom videos should have been a written guide. Video is slower to make, far slower to consume, and impossible to skim.

Loom alternatives compared

Cheapest paid plan and what the free tier allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 6 September 2026.

The best Loom alternatives, reviewed

1. Scribe

Scribe answers a question worth asking before you pay for any of these: does this need to be a video at all? It records your clicks and turns them into a written step-by-step guide with screenshots, which colleagues can skim in twenty seconds rather than watching for four minutes.

The free plan works with any web app and produces shareable guides. Pro Personal is $35 a seat monthly or $25 billed annually. Pro Team is $17 monthly or $13 annually with a five-seat minimum, and adds desktop capture and unlimited guides.

For process documentation it beats Loom outright. For anything where tone or explanation matters, it does not.

2. Tella

Tella is Loom with production values. Recordings get backgrounds, layouts, zooms and trimmed pauses automatically, so a rough take comes out looking deliberate.

Pro is $13 a month and Premium $19, with 50% off on annual billing. There is no permanent free tier, only a trial.

It is the right choice when the video is customer-facing — a product demo, an onboarding walkthrough, a launch video — rather than a quick internal message.

3. Vidyard

Vidyard is aimed at sales teams. The point is not the recording but what happens afterwards: who watched, how far they got, and whether that triggers a follow-up in your CRM.

The free plan allows 5 videos a month plus 15 AI videos and 3 custom AI avatars. Paid tiers are quoted rather than published, with a 14-day trial and a 30% discount on annual billing.

If nobody is measuring whether prospects watched your video, you are paying for machinery you will not use.

4. Descript

Descript records your screen and camera, then lets you fix the result by editing the transcript. Delete a sentence in the text and it disappears from the recording, along with every “um” if you want.

Free covers 60 minutes of media a month. Hobbyist is $16 a month billed annually, or $24 monthly, with 10 hours. Creator is $24 annually with 30 hours and 4K export.

It is the only tool here where a bad take is fixable rather than re-recordable. Our Descript tool page and Descript alternatives guide cover it in full.

5. OBS Studio

OBS is free, open source and has no limits of any kind: no video cap, no length cap, no watermark, no account. It records locally at whatever quality your machine can manage.

There is no paid tier and never has been.

What it does not do is share. There is no link, no viewer analytics and no cloud. You get a file, and where it goes next is your problem. For anyone recording long sessions that would blow through Loom’s limits, that is a fair trade.

Video or documentation?

Answer this before comparing prices, because it eliminates most of the list.

If you are showing someone how to do a repeatable task, a written guide wins. Scribe produces one automatically and readers can skim, search and copy from it.

If you are explaining a decision, giving feedback or demoing something to a customer, video wins. Then the question is only how polished it needs to be: Tella for customer-facing, Descript when takes need fixing, OBS when it just needs recording.

What a team of ten costs

Loom Business at $15 a user billed annually is $1,800 a year. Scribe Pro Team at $13 a seat annually is $1,560. OBS Studio is nothing.

Most teams do not need ten paid seats. Recording is usually concentrated in a few people, and everyone else only watches — which is free on every tool here.

How to choose

Start with the format question above. Then check who actually records: if it is three people out of thirty, buy three seats and stop.

For anything customer-facing, Tella. For sales, Vidyard. For fixing takes, Descript. For unlimited local recording at no cost, OBS. See the productivity and media hubs for the wider categories.

You are not replacing a recorder. You are replacing a link.

This is the thing that trips people up when they start comparing.

Recording your screen is free and always has been. Your operating system already does it. What Loom sells is everything after the recording stops: the upload, the hosted page, the link you paste into Slack, the viewer list, the comments, the transcript.

So the honest question is not “what records my screen” but “who hosts the video and who can see it”. Answer that first and the shortlist gets much shorter.

Free recorders you already have

If all you need is a file to attach or drop in a shared drive, stop here.

macOS records the screen with Shift-Command-5, including a selected region, with the microphone on if you choose it. QuickTime does the same and can trim.

Windows 11 records from the Snipping Tool, and the Xbox Game Bar records an application window with Windows-G. Both save an MP4 with no account and no time limit.

Chrome, Edge and Firefox can all capture a tab or a screen from a web page, because of the W3C Screen Capture standard. That is why browser-based recorders exist at all, and why they work without an install.

None of these gives you a shareable link with analytics. That is the line where paying starts to make sense.

Cap: the open-source option

Worth its own section because it now ranks alongside the commercial tools and most round-ups still miss it.

Cap is an open-source screen recorder for macOS and Windows that does the Loom job: record, get a link, share. The difference is where the file lives. You can use its hosted service, or point it at your own storage bucket and keep every recording under your own account.

Pick it if the sticking point is data residency, a company policy about third-party video hosting, or simply not wanting a library of internal walkthroughs on someone else’s servers. The trade is a smaller feature set around comments and reporting.

Loom or OBS? Not the same tool

This comparison comes up constantly and the two are barely in the same category.

OBS Studio is free, open source, and built for live production: multiple sources, scenes, overlays, live streaming to a platform. It will record higher quality video than Loom and give you complete control.

It will not upload anything, generate a link, transcribe your audio, or tell you who watched. It has a scene-based interface that takes an afternoon to learn.

Use OBS for tutorials, streams and anything where production quality matters. Use a Loom-style tool for a two-minute message you want someone to watch today. Many people run both and do not think of them as alternatives at all.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 6 September 2026, not copied from another round-up.

For async video the limits that matter are rarely on the front of the pricing page, so we check four: video length cap on the free plan, number of videos kept, export resolution, and whether transcripts and viewer analytics are included or sold up a tier. A free plan capped at five minutes is a different product from one capped at twenty-five.

We also record where recordings are stored and whether you can bring your own storage, because for a lot of teams that is the deciding factor rather than price. Current Reddit threads are read for each tool, so the complaints here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.