Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Loom

Cap is a modern, open source alternative to Loom built for teams that want async video communication without the subscription cost. Record your screen with a click, get a shareable link instantly, and send it anywhere.

Built with Tauri and Rust for native performance, Cap is lightweight (~10MB) and snappy compared to Electron-based alternatives. It supports webcam overlay, custom backgrounds, and a clean viewer experience for recipients — no account required to watch.

Cap offers a free self-hosted option as well as a cloud-hosted tier, making it suitable for both privacy-conscious teams and those who want zero infrastructure to manage.

OpenScreen is a free, open-source desktop screen recorder and video editor for creating polished product demos, walkthroughs, documentation, and marketing videos. It records windows or entire screens with microphone, system audio, webcam overlays, cursor effects, zooms, captions, annotations, backgrounds, trimming, speed controls, and MP4 or GIF export.

This is the community-maintained continuation of the original OpenScreen project by Siddharth Vaddem, whose repository is archived. OpenScreen runs locally on macOS, Windows, and Linux, is free for personal and commercial use under the MIT license, and includes an optional on-device AI editing layer with local transcription, transcript-driven editing, and bring-your-own-key chat editing.

OpenScreen was a free, open-source screen recorder and demo creation tool positioned as an alternative to Screen Studio. It supported polished screen recordings with zooms, cursor effects, backgrounds, webcam overlays, and local export.

This original repository by Siddharth Vaddem is archived after v1.5.0 and is retained here as a historical record. Active development continues in the community-maintained OpenScreen continuation.

OBS Studio is the gold standard for open source screen recording and live streaming. It supports unlimited scenes with multiple sources — webcam, display, browser, audio, and more — making it equally suited for game streaming, tutorial recording, and professional presentations.

Unlike Camtasia or Loom, OBS gives you full control over your recording setup with no watermarks, no subscriptions, and no limits on output length or resolution. Advanced features include a built-in audio mixer, scene transitions, and a powerful plugin ecosystem.

OBS runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and integrates directly with Twitch, YouTube, and most RTMP-compatible streaming platforms.

Snapify is an open source, self-hostable alternative to Loom focused on making screen recording sharing accessible to everyone. Record your screen in the browser and get a shareable link to send to teammates, clients, or anyone else — no account required for viewers.

Built with TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0, Snapify can be deployed on your own infrastructure for teams that need full control over where their videos are stored. This makes it a strong choice for privacy-conscious organisations or those in regulated industries.

Compared to Loom, Snapify strips away the enterprise pricing and gives you a clean, minimal sharing experience with no per-seat costs.

Open Video Craft is a desktop screen studio that combines a floating recorder with a full timeline video editor. Record your screen, camera, microphone, and system audio as separate tracks, then cut, trim, split, add transitions, zoom effects, speed ramps, and multilingual AI-generated subtitles — all locally on your machine.

Built with Electron, React, and TypeScript, it uses bundled FFmpeg for export to MP4, WebM, or MOV. Projects are stored as plain folders with relative paths, making them portable and backup-friendly. The editor supports multi-lane timelines, copy/paste clips with undo/redo, camera layouts, background music, and dB-based audio mixing.

AI features include on-device Whisper transcription with automatic language detection and word-level karaoke highlighting, plus optional connections to Gemini or Claude Code for assisted editing through a bundled MCP server. No account or cloud upload is required for core recording and editing.