We checked every price on this page against the vendor’s own live pricing page on 6 September 2026. Where a page would not show us a number, we say so rather than borrowing one from a comparison site.
Two findings up front, because they overturn advice you will still see everywhere: Screen Studio and Camtasia are no longer one-time purchases, and Loom’s free plan is now among the most restrictive in the category, not the most generous.
The prices, verified
| Tool | Free tier | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Loom | 25 videos, 5-minute cap per screen recording, 720p, Loom branding | $18/user/mo; $24 with AI. Annual saves “up to 17%” but the discounted figure is never shown |
| Screen Studio | None | $9/mo billed annually ($108/yr), or about $20.90 monthly |
| Descript | 60 min media/month total, 720p with watermark, 5GB | Hobbyist $16 annual / $24 monthly; Creator $24/$35; Business $50/$65 per person |
| CleanShot X | None | $35 one-time with 1 year of updates; Pro $10/user/mo annual |
| Camtasia | None | Starter $39/yr; Essentials $179.88/yr; Create $249/yr; Pro $599/yr |
| ScreenPal | 15-minute cap, 720p, 10 hosted videos, watermark | Solo Deluxe $3/mo annual; Solo Max $7.50/mo; Team Business $8/user/mo, min 3 seats |
| Zight (was CloudApp) | 5-minute cap, 5 requests/mo, 1GB, 720p | Create $9.95/user/mo annual; Collaborate $12/user/mo, min 2 seats |
| Guidde | Up to 25 videos, watermarked | Pro $19/creator/mo annual; Business $39/creator/mo |
| Vidyard | 5 videos/month, 30 min each | Starter price is not displayed on their pricing page |
| OBS Studio | Everything. No caps at all | $0 |
Three notes on that table that matter more than the numbers.
Loom’s annual rate is unknowable from their page. It displays $18 and $24 with a “save up to 17%” badge, and the discounted per-user figure never appears. We could do the arithmetic, but arithmetic is not a quoted price, so we are not publishing one.
Vidyard will not show you the Starter price. The tile has a currency label, a discount badge and a Buy Now button, but no dollar figure. Several comparison sites publish numbers for it and they disagree with each other. Treat Vidyard’s entry pricing as not public.
Descript’s two columns are the most commonly inverted prices in this category. To be explicit: the lower number is the annual-billed rate. Hobbyist is $16 per person per month billed annually, or $24 month-to-month.
Two tools quietly stopped being buy-once
Screen Studio
Screen Studio was the one-time-purchase screen recorder, and much of its reputation rested on that. It is now a subscription at $9 a month billed annually. Its own licence page confirms the split: existing one-time licences are honoured, described as “legacy one-time purchase licenses” — but you cannot buy one any more.
Camtasia
TechSmith’s own support documentation is unambiguous: “Customers will not be able to purchase a perpetual upgrade license to access 2025 versions. Snagit 2025 and Camtasia 2025 will only be offered as a subscription.” Perpetual upgrade sales ended 1 January 2025.
If you own a perpetual licence, you keep it. But there is a date you should have in your calendar: Camtasia 2024 support for non-maintenance customers ends 31 December 2026 — under four months from now. Customers who had active maintenance received Legacy License keys granting discounted subscription access through 2030.
That leaves CleanShot X as the only genuine buy-once tool in this comparison: $35 one-time, one year of updates included, and $19 a year afterwards which is optional. The app does not stop working if you let updates lapse.
The free tiers, ranked honestly
| Tool | Length cap | Count cap | Resolution | Watermark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OBS and OS built-ins | None | None | Native | None |
| Vidyard | 30 min | 5 per month | Not stated | Not stated |
| ScreenPal | 15 min | 10 hosted | 720p | Yes |
| Descript | 60 min per month total | — | 720p | Yes |
| Guidde | Not stated | 25 videos | — | Yes |
| Loom | 5 min | 25 videos | 720p | Loom branding |
| Zight | 5 min | 5 requests/mo | 720p | Not stated |
| Screen Studio, CleanShot X, Camtasia | No free tier | — | — | — |
Loom’s reputation was built on a generous free plan. That is no longer the situation. Twenty-five videos is a library cap, not a monthly allowance, and five minutes is short enough that a single walkthrough of a moderately complex screen will hit it mid-sentence. One asymmetry worth knowing: auto-recorded meetings have no length limit even on the free plan — the five-minute cap applies to manual screen recordings only.
Vidyard’s 30-minute free cap is six times Loom’s, though limited to five videos a month. ScreenPal’s 15 minutes is the best length-per-dollar among the hosted free tiers.
And the honest observation nobody selling these tools will make: if what you actually need is “record my screen and send someone the file,” every hosted free tier is worse than the recorder that shipped with your operating system.
What each tool is actually good at
Making a recording look professionally edited: Screen Studio
Screen Studio is the benchmark and nothing else is close. Automatic zoom onto click targets, cursor smoothing and resizing after the fact, motion blur, automatic hiding of a static cursor. You record once and the output looks like someone spent an hour in an editor. At $108 a year it is also cheaper than Loom Business. The catch is that it is macOS only, with no Windows version despite that being a standing question in its own FAQ.
Removing filler words and silences: Descript
Descript’s text-based editing model — delete a word in the transcript and the video cuts — makes filler removal and silence trimming close to effortless. Camtasia’s Essentials tier and above have text-based editing too, but Descript is deeper. Note the pricing model though: Descript meters on media hours and AI credits, not just seats, so a team that records heavily can exhaust Creator’s 30 hours long before it runs out of seats.
Viewer analytics: Vidyard
Vidyard is a sales tool that happens to record video, not a recorder with analytics bolted on. Full viewer analytics, CRM and marketing-automation integrations, calls to action, branded sharing pages. If you are sending video to prospects and need to know who watched what, this is the category answer. For internal async updates it is heavily over-instrumented.
Step-by-step documentation: Guidde
Guidde produces documentation-shaped output rather than video-shaped output — auto-generated steps, voiceover, and export to MP4, PowerPoint or PDF. It is priced per creator, not per viewer, which matters a lot for a documentation team where three people write and two hundred read. One real limitation: the desktop app is a Business-tier feature, so Free and Pro users are restricted to the browser extension and cannot easily record native desktop software.
Teaching and lectures: ScreenPal
Quizzing is built in, education pricing exists, and Team Business at $8 per user per month includes SSO and SAML — by a wide margin the cheapest single sign-on in this comparison. If you need SCORM export for an LMS, that sits in Guidde’s Enterprise tier instead.
Everything else: OBS Studio
Free, open source, currently at version 32.2.2 released 14 August 2026, and the only option here with real Linux support. No account, no cloud, no upload, and no caps on length, resolution or file size beyond your disk. It also has no editor whatsoever, no transcription, no sharing and no analytics — and the setup curve is genuinely steep.
What you already have, free
- macOS: Shift-Cmd-5 gives you the screenshot and recording toolbar — full screen or a selected region, microphone capture, no time limit, no watermark, saved as a .mov on your disk. The one real gap is that system audio is not captured natively without installing a virtual audio device.
- Windows: Win-G opens Game Bar, which records application windows to MP4. Historically it will not record the desktop or File Explorer, only apps. The Snipping Tool now records the screen on Windows 11 as well.
- Chrome: here is a correction worth making, because plenty of articles get it wrong. Chrome has no built-in screen video recorder. DevTools has a panel called Recorder, but it records and replays user-flow steps and exports them as scripts. It is an automation and performance tool. Do not go looking for video in it.
Privacy: where your recording actually goes
This matters if you record anything containing customer data, patient information, or an internal system.
Descript is the best documented, and the most honest about it. Media and transcripts sit on Amazon S3 or Google Cloud, it holds SOC 2 Type II, and it is aligned to GDPR and CCPA. It also states plainly that content is sent to third parties: Rev and Whisper for transcription (Rev deletes shortly after) and Hedra for avatar generation. Model training is opt-in and disabled by default — the clearest statement any vendor here makes.
Zight has the most concrete HIPAA claim. GDPR and SOC 2 Type II appear at the Collaborate tier; HIPAA compliance with a BAA sits at Scale, which needs 10+ seats and custom pricing, alongside SSO, SCIM, custom retention and customer-owned S3 storage. If HIPAA is a hard requirement, this is the most specific option in this set.
Loom is now the least transparent, which is a consequence of the Atlassian acquisition. Its security page redirects to Atlassian’s general security-measures page, which cites ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and infrastructure on Azure or AWS — but says nothing about Loom specifically. We could not verify Loom’s storage regions, data residency options, HIPAA availability, or whether Loom AI routes content to third-party model providers. If any of that matters to you, ask before you buy.
The only fully verifiable answer is local. OBS and your operating system’s built-in recorder upload nothing, because there is nothing to upload to.
So which one should you use?
| If you… | Use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Send short clips and do not need a hosted link | Shift-Cmd-5 or Win-G | Free |
| Want a link, on a budget | ScreenPal Solo Deluxe | $3/mo annual, but stays 720p |
| Make polished product demos on a Mac | Screen Studio | $9/mo annual |
| Need to cut filler words and silences | Descript Creator | $24/person/mo annual |
| Record tutorials with callouts and quizzes | Camtasia Essentials | $179.88/yr |
| Produce step-by-step documentation | Guidde Pro | $19/creator/mo annual |
| Track who watched your video | Vidyard | Price not published |
| Need HIPAA with a BAA | Zight Scale | Custom, 10+ seats |
| Are on Linux, or want zero cloud | OBS Studio | Free |
The blunt version: there are only three things worth paying for here — the hosted link, the viewer analytics, and Screen Studio’s automatic zoom. If you need none of those, the key combination you already have is the correct answer, and $18 per user per month buys you a URL.
What each tool is genuinely bad at
- Loom — free tier is now weak, video download is paywalled, no auto-zoom or cursor polish, shallow editing. You are paying for a link and Atlassian integration.
- Screen Studio — macOS only, no free tier, no team layer, no analytics, and it lost the one-time licence that was half its appeal.
- Descript — unpredictable cost because of media-hour and credit metering, and it sends content to third parties that some compliance regimes will not allow.
- CleanShot X — macOS only, screenshot-first, limited video editing, no meaningful team library.
- OBS — no editor, no transcription, no sharing, no analytics, steep setup. It does not produce a link, which is the whole reason most people buy something else.
- Zight — very tight free tier, monthly prices not published, AI actions metered at 5/month on Create, and HIPAA and SSO both require the 10-seat Scale tier.
- Camtasia — most expensive at the top, perpetual licences gone, Starter watermarks the editor, and 2024 support ends 31 December 2026.
- ScreenPal — 720p ceiling persists on the cheap tier, basic editing, and the headline prices are discounted rates whose duration we could not verify.
- Vidyard — will not show you its entry price, and is over-built for internal use.
- Guidde — desktop app is Business-only, so cheaper tiers cannot record native applications.
Questions people ask
Has Loom’s free plan really got worse?
Whether it is worse than what you remember depends on when you signed up, but the current live page shows 25 videos, a five-minute cap on screen recordings, 720p, and Loom branding. That is verifiably restrictive today. Auto-recorded meetings are the exception with no length limit.
Can I still buy Camtasia outright?
No. TechSmith stopped selling perpetual upgrades on 1 January 2025, and everything from the 2025 versions onward is subscription-only at $39 to $599 a year. If you already own a perpetual licence you keep it — but Camtasia 2024 support ends 31 December 2026 for non-maintenance customers.
Is Screen Studio still a one-time purchase?
No. It is now $9 a month billed annually, or about $20.90 month-to-month. Existing one-time licences still work; you cannot buy one any more.
What is the cheapest way to remove a watermark and a time limit?
ScreenPal Solo Deluxe at $3 a month billed annually, against a regular price of $4. It removes both — but stays at 720p. Solo Max at $7.50 is required for 4K.
Which tool needs the least editing work?
Screen Studio, via automatic zoom on clicks, cursor smoothing and motion blur. macOS only, $9 a month annual.
Which one is HIPAA compliant?
Zight, at the Scale tier, explicitly with a BAA — 10 or more users, custom pricing. Descript’s security page does not mention HIPAA at all. Loom’s status was not verifiable from Atlassian’s general security page. Do not assume any Enterprise tier includes a BAA without asking for it in writing.
Does my video get fed to AI companies?
Descript is explicit that it does: Rev and Whisper for transcription, Hedra for avatars, with model training opt-in and off by default. Other vendors were not specific enough for us to answer. If this genuinely matters, OBS or your OS built-in is the only fully verifiable answer, because nothing is uploaded.
Do I actually need any of this?
If you send short clips and do not need a hosted link, no. Shift-Cmd-5 on macOS and Win-G on Windows record unlimited length at native resolution with no watermark, free. Upgrade when you need the link, the analytics, or the auto-zoom.
What we could not verify
- Loom’s annual per-user rate. The page shows $18 and $24 with a savings badge and never displays the discounted number.
- Vidyard’s Starter price. Not displayed anywhere on the pricing page.
- Month-to-month prices for Zight Create and Collaborate, and for CleanShot Pro — only annual rendered.
- Whether ScreenPal’s 25% and 20% discounts are first-year promotions or standing prices, and its true month-to-month rates.
- Loom’s privacy specifics — storage region, residency, HIPAA availability, and whether Loom AI routes content to third-party models.
- Privacy documentation for Vidyard, ScreenPal, CleanShot Cloud and Camtasia.
- OBS Studio’s exact licence version. Historically GPLv2; the homepage says only “open source.”
- Guidde’s free-tier length cap — only the 25-video count is stated.
- The exact date Screen Studio switched to subscription. The change is confirmed by its own licence page, but no dated announcement was found.
- Windows built-in specifics on current 2026 builds — Game Bar’s desktop-capture restriction and Snipping Tool recording limits were not tested on a live machine.
The short version
- Only CleanShot X is still buy-once. Screen Studio and Camtasia both moved to subscription, and Camtasia 2024 support ends 31 December 2026.
- Loom free is 5 minutes and 25 videos. Vidyard free gives you 30 minutes; ScreenPal gives you 15.
- Descript’s lower price column is the annual one, and it meters media hours, not just seats.
- Screen Studio at $108 a year produces better-looking output than anything else here, and costs less than Loom Business.
- ScreenPal Team Business at $8/user includes SSO — the cheapest by a distance.
- Chrome has no built-in screen recorder. DevTools Recorder records user flows, not video.
- For a lot of people the right answer is Shift-Cmd-5 or Win-G. What the paid tools sell is the link, the analytics, and the auto-zoom.
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