Top Loom Alternatives: Free and Paid

The last three years have seen significant growth in options within the screen recorder category, and a lot has changed in the realm of free and paid Loom alternatives.

If you’re deciding between Loom and alternatives for making and sharing quick screencasts, you’ve come to the right place. There are more options than ever, but not all of them are going to be a good fit for your particular needs.

Why look for a Loom alternative?

Loom is known for basic screen recording (not only your screen but voice and facecam, too), instant upload, and the ability to share your video via a link for others to view and comment. You may have heard of this video messaging. But in late 2023, Loom raised their prices more than 50% (to $150+ per year) before being acquired and folded into the Atlassian platform, alongside Jira. Then in September 2024, Loom announced that video editing features, like trimming and clip stitching, would move out of their free plans to behind the paywall. For a lot of people, this signaled a good time to take a fresh look at alternatives.

We’ll take a look at 5 free and 6 paid alternatives to Loom. If you’re short on time, we recommend Snagit as the best Loom alternative for all-around screen recording and team communication use cases.

Best free alternatives to Loom

Teams/Slack/Zoom vs Loom

If all you need is very basic screen recording with the ability to share a link to other team members, look no further than your video conferencing or workplace chat software—whether that’s Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Zoom. The classic hack is to record a meeting with yourself (sounds lonely, right?) and then share a link to that meeting. Or use built-in features like Zoom Clips or Slack Clips to record and share a short video.

This works great for short, simple video messages or super confident presenters who can deliver their message smoothly in one take. But if you stumble over a word or lose your train of thought while recording you’ll have to start over. And over. The big disadvantage of these tools is they lack features for trimming, combining, or replacing clips. So they’re a good solution for quick video messages with the basic screen recording features, but they really lack in basic video editing capabilities. 

And forget about adding anything fancy to your video, like eye-catching animations or dynamic captions. No-frills is the name of this game.

Pros	Cons
Built into your workplace communication software Good for short, no-frills videos	No editing of clips No way to dress up your video

PowerPoint/Google Slides vs Loom

This one may seem like a surprise, but hear me out. Both PowerPoint and Google Slides have built-in features if all you need to do is talk over your slide deck and send out a recording as video. With PowerPoint, your live inking will even be captured in your video. The slideshow video can be embedded in your slides or exported to OneDrive or Google Drive for easy video file sharing.

Similar to the tools listed above, however, there’s no way to fix a verbal flub-up or level up your video, for that matter. And when you send a shareable link to your video on OneDrive or Google Drive viewers can leave only basic comments on the video as a whole, which is much less clear and helpful than having comments anchored to a point-in-time in the video.

Pros	Cons
Built into your slideware Good for short, no-frills videos	No editing of clips No way to dress up your video No anchored comments

Best paid alternatives to Loom: general-purpose apps

Zight vs Loom

Formerly known as CloudApp, Zight is one of the most directly comparable products to Loom. Both are general-purpose, cloud-based applications for video messaging and more.

The free plan for both products is limited to recording 5-minute-long videos and caps the total number of videos: 25 videos for Loom; 50 videos for Zight. So if you use either product for longer than a few weeks or for anything beyond very basic use cases, you will need to pay. Zight distinguishes itself here by charging $95.40 per year, whereas Loom charges a hefty $150 per year. 

Note that if you want any of the AI-powered capabilities like auto-generated transcriptions, titles, summaries, and captions the cost for Zight jumps up to $155.40 per year (Loom has a similar fee for AI features that brings it closer to $200 per year). These days, video transcriptions and captioning tend to be table stakes so the premium up-charge for them is hard to justify.

Two other areas Zight stands out from Loom: Zight offers slightly more depth and ease of screenshot image editing tools (think: cropping, annotating with shapes and arrows, layering on text), though still not going far beyond the very basics. And Zight has held onto vestiges of its origins as a file-sharing platform (along the lines of Dropbox or WeTransfer). This means you can use Zight to upload and share all kinds of random files with whomever you want around the world, whether PDF, ZIP, CSV, DOCX, or even EXE files.

Pros	Cons
Cheaper than Loom Slightly better image annotation tools Wins if you need to upload and share large files	Expensive addon to get AI basics like transcription and captions Free plan is quite limited

Snagit vs Loom

Snagit’s main advantage compared to Loom is versatility: offering deep capabilities across capture, image editing, video and GIF creation, and even sharing. This makes it the strongest alternative to Loom for anyone who needs a lot of flexibility and creative potential in their everyday communication. Or who works in a more locked-down IT environment, like we’ll see later.

You might be surprised to learn that Loom’s screenshot editing tools are only available to a small group of private beta users. Snagit’s tools are included: from special capture modes, capture presets, brandable annotation, and markup tools. to advanced features like magic wand selection, auto-fill, multiple styles of redaction, and OCR (grab text from an image).

On the video creation side, Snagit matches Loom’s ability to trim and merge clips but stands out with its real-time drawing and screen annotation tools. Snagit also offers a unique, secure method of making a video from redacted screenshots and more fine-tuned control over GIF creation. 

For those who work in restricted IT environments, Snagit stands out because it can be integrated with almost any cloud platform you already use (like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box) rather than requiring additional IT permissions like Loom would. But for those free to choose their tech, TechSmith offers a cloud add-on that enables Snagit to function as a Loom-like video messaging platform, which takes Snagit’s price from $39 per year up to $138.99 per year (but does not charge extra for its AI-powered features like transcription, captioning, and summaries).

Pros	Cons
Most versatile for creation Flexible on cloud integration Most affordable of paid options	Advanced features are more than some users need Runs on desktop devices only (Windows and Mac)

Camtasia vs Loom

Both applications are used to create videos and both are multi-purpose, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Loom specializes in simple, fast, and casual video, Camtasia specializes in beautiful, layered, and polished video.

Loom videos can be trimmed at the ends and merged together as discrete chunks. One and done. But as a multi-track video editor with a high-end screen recorder built in, Camtasia is intended for creators to slice, dice, layer, animate, enhance, and more.

It can take a little more time to learn, though the company offers templates and loads of how-to guides (a video academy open to all, a certification course for subscribers, and product tutorials) to help users level up both the quality and quantity of videos created.

Camtasia’s entry price is $30 more than Loom’s, with plans ranging from $179.88 per year for the core editor up to $599 per year to add unlimited premium assets, unlimited use of AI features (a rarity!) for content generation and localization, and a cloud platform for gathering detailed feedback from your team.

If your job role involves a heavy dose of content creation–whether in the context of training, teaching, selling, designing, or marketing–Camtasia offers a broad set of video creation capabilities that you are not likely to outgrow.

Pros	Cons
Deep set of video creation tools that grow with you Unlimited use of premium assets and AI features	A moderate learning curve Runs on desktop devices only (Windows and Mac)

Best paid alternatives to Loom: specialized apps

Scribe vs Loom

With Loom, you can capture a series of technical steps (think: how to record your screen on Windows 11) and generate a video or a set of raw screenshots showing each step.

With Scribe, on the other hand, each step is automatically captured as you walk through the process and an online help article is generated. Each help article has the same format: a title and author name followed by a screenshot plus a text label to show and describe each step in the process. Videos created with other tools can be embedded into a Scribe guide. 

Scribe appeals to people creating barebones standard operating procedures (SOPs) and staff onboarding guides, since they can create a whole set of interlinked documents as a kind of searchable knowledge base (KB), and churn these guides out very quickly. 

The free version of Scribe can capture webpages, but not your desktop applications. It puts Scribe branding on your guides and doesn’t allow you to crop, annotate, or remove sensitive info from your screenshots. So you’ll need a paid plan, which starts at $276 per year for one individual; the team plan starts at $720 per year for 5 users, which is the minimum team size.

Worth noting: Snagit (reviewed above) can create both step-by-step guides and video how-tos at a much lower annual cost.

Pros	Cons
Speeds up a laborious, tedious process Can document 200-step processes and combine guides into larger guides	Simplistic, cookie-cutter templates Lackluster screenshot editing tools Very expensive for what it is

Synthesia vs Loom

Much as Scribe automates a lot of the work to crank out training manuals, Synthesia automates a lot of the work to crank out employee training videos.

These videos show an AI-generated talking head (pretty lifelike, actually!) reading a script, often alongside uploaded PowerPoint slides. Because Synthesia videos start with a typed-out script and some uploaded visuals, they can be generated, re-generated, updated, and localized into various languages without having to capture a single audio, video, or screen recording. Helpful for learning and development pros tasked with producing dozens of mandatory-viewing training videos per year.

Most of the criticism from Synthesia users is that the avatars can have an “uncanny valley” effect where they look and sound almost too flawless, lacking the quirks, mannerisms, and subtle intonations that help an actual human connect with their audience. Now if your job role requires high volumes of video content and quantity matters a bit more than quality, this might be a great tradeoff. But scaled video creation comes at a steep price, with Synthesia’s published plans starting at $216 per year for just 2 hours of generated video, then jumps to $768 per year for 6 hours of generated video. 

You could argue that Loom has tools for automatically removing human “defects” (like umms or ahhs) from a video you record but overall, screen recorders and video editors will preserve more authenticity and human connection than purely generative platforms like Synthesia.

Pros	Cons
Highly efficient way to scale up video production Generated videos are much easier to update and localize	Some audiences don’t care for synthetic presenters Very expensive per minute of video

Sendspark vs Loom

While Loom can be used for external communication (the Enterprise plan has a basic integration with Salesforce, for example), its primary use case is for internal communication. 

Sendspark, however, is 100% focused on recording personalized video messages for prospective clients and customers. A B2B sales executive might use Sendspark to send AI-personalized video pitches in their cold emails and LinkedIn DMs, then track viewer interactions with those videos in their CRM to know which leads are getting warm, which triggers the next outreach. 

Sendspark videos are typically a combination of an AI-generated chunk (think: a personal-looking greeting from a talking head saying “Hey Brandon, I made you this video”) followed by a “1:1 recorded” chunk (think: screen recording with camera bubble talking through your product pricing). The magic is that the AI-generated chunk can be automatically created and the finished video automatically emailed out whenever a client fills out your “contact us” form and enters their name (in this case, “Brandon”) and their email address. This could even happen while you’re sleeping. 

As you might expect from a product that is used to directly generate revenue, Sendspark charges a pretty penny for its platform. Plans range from $468 per year for 200 “dynamic video minutes” (the AI-generated chunks) up to $5,388 per year for 10,000 dynamic video minutes shared across your sales team.

Pros	Cons
Great for automating faux-personalized client or customer communication Many integrations to weave video generation into your sales stack	High price limits use cases

Conclusion

For everyday visual communication within your team or company, we recommend Snagit as the most versatile tool both for creation and for sharing. If you’re a content creator ready to dive deep into video, add one of the Camtasia plans that best fits your creation workflow and budget.