If you're shopping for a screen recorder in 2026, the market has consolidated into four real choices: Loom (now owned by Atlassian), Vidyard (sales-first), Tella (creator-polish), and Clipy (free forever, no caps). Everything else is either a fork, a feature inside a bigger suite, or abandonware.
This isn't a listicle. It's a buyer's guide written by people who actually use these tools daily. Below: a real feature matrix, an annual pricing calculation for a normal usage pattern (30 videos/month, ~10 min each), pick-by-use-case recommendations, and an honest section on what you give up with each choice. We'll skip the marketing-page filler — you've already read that — and focus on the decisions that actually matter when you're deciding what to put on the company card.
One framing note before we start: the right screen recorder is the one your team will actually use. The fanciest editor in the world is worthless if recording takes more than 5 seconds of friction, and the cheapest tool in the world is worthless if it watermarks every clip your customer sees. Both of those failure modes are real and both are common. Keep them in mind as you read.
TL;DR
- Clipy — free forever, no caps, no watermark, no signup to watch. Wins on price and friction. clipy.online
- Loom — the default for big teams. Polished, but the free tier got squeezed hard after the Atlassian acquisition.
- Vidyard — built for outbound sales. Best CRM integrations, weakest as a general team tool.
- Tella — the prettiest output. Backgrounds, layouts, multi-clip editing. Pricier and slower workflow.
- Winner by use case: Sales → Vidyard. Support → Loom or Clipy. Engineering → Clipy. Solo creators → Tella. Async remote teams → Loom (if budget) or Clipy (if not).
The 4 contenders, in 30 seconds
Clipy is an indie product from Codersera. It runs as a Chrome extension and a web app. Record screen, tab, webcam, mic, get an instant shareable link, no account needed for viewers. There's no free-tier cap because there's no paid tier — the whole product is free. Honest gap: no AI summaries yet, no native team workspace, no CRM integrations. Try the Chrome recorder.
Loom is the category-definer, acquired by Atlassian in 2023 and now deeply integrated into Jira and Confluence. It has the smoothest recording UX, AI titles/summaries/chapters, and a real team workspace. The catch: the free plan is now 25 videos, 5 minutes each — tight enough that any serious user hits the paywall fast.
Vidyard is the sales-rep tool. Free Vidyard for Chrome is generous on length but the product is engineered around outbound: send-tracking, view notifications, Salesforce/HubSpot/Outreach/Salesloft integrations, animated GIF previews for cold email. Outside of sales contexts it feels heavy.
Tella is the design-led option. Recordings come out looking like a YouTube tutorial: gradient backgrounds, multiple layouts, zoom effects, multi-clip timelines. It's a creator tool first; team features are an afterthought. Plans start around $19/mo and there's no meaningful free tier for ongoing use.
Feature matrix
| Feature | Clipy | Loom | Vidyard | Tella |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recording length cap | None | 5 min (free), unlimited (paid) | 1 hour (free) | Unlimited (paid) |
| Storage / video count cap | None | 25 videos (free) | Unlimited videos, watermark on free | Unlimited (paid) |
| Watermark | None, ever | None on paid | Yes on free tier | None on paid |
| Signup required to watch | No | No | No | No |
| Webcam overlay | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (best-looking) |
| Trim / edit | Trim | Trim, fillers, silences (AI) | Trim, simple edits | Multi-clip timeline, layouts, zooms |
| Auto captions | Roadmap | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI summaries / chapters | No | Yes (paid) | Yes (paid) | Limited |
| Custom branding | No | Yes (Business+) | Yes (paid) | Yes |
| Integrations | Slack unfurls, link-anywhere | Jira, Confluence, Slack, Notion, Gmail | Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Gmail | Notion, Slack, basic embeds |
| Free tier reality | Genuinely free, full product | Demo-grade only | Usable for casual sales outreach | Trial-only, not a real free tier |
| Paid plans (entry) | None — free | ~$15/user/mo (Business) | ~$19/user/mo (Pro) | ~$19/user/mo |
| Standout strength | Zero friction, zero cost | Polish + Atlassian fit | Sales tooling depth | Visual output quality |
Pricing math: what 30 videos/month actually costs
Specs lie, invoices don't. Here's the real annualized cost for a single user recording 30 videos a month, 10 minutes average length — a normal pattern for an SDR, support agent, or PM doing async standups.
| Tool | Plan needed for this usage | Annual cost (1 user) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clipy | Free | $0 | No length or count caps. Pricing page |
| Loom | Business (free is 5 min/25 video cap) | ~$180 | $15/user/mo billed annually. Loom pricing |
| Vidyard | Pro (free has watermark + caps on advanced features) | ~$228 | $19/user/mo billed annually. Vidyard pricing |
| Tella | Pro | ~$228 | $19/user/mo billed annually. Tella pricing |
For a 5-person team, multiply by 5: Loom is ~$900/yr, Vidyard and Tella are ~$1,140/yr each. Clipy stays at $0. That's a real budget difference, especially for bootstrapped teams or solo founders. (Note: list prices change; verify on each vendor's site before procurement.)
The deeper point: Loom's free tier used to be the de-facto industry standard for casual users. After the Atlassian acquisition, the caps tightened. Anyone recording weekly hits the 25-video ceiling within a month. So the practical comparison isn't "free vs free" anymore — it's free Clipy vs paid Loom.
Pick-by-use-case
Best for sales reps & SDRs
Winner: Vidyard. If your day is cold outbound and your stack already includes Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, or Salesloft, Vidyard is built for you. The animated GIF previews in cold email actually move open and reply rates. View notifications tell you exactly when a prospect watched your video, for how long, and whether they forwarded it.
Runner-up: Clipy for individual reps or small startup sales teams that don't have a CRM integration budget. The friction-free shareable link works in any sequencer or LinkedIn DM. You lose the deep view tracking but you save $228/yr.
Best for customer support
Winner: tie between Loom and Clipy. Support is about turnaround time, not feature depth. Both let you record a fix-this-bug walkthrough and paste a link in Zendesk/Intercom/Help Scout in under 30 seconds. Loom's AI summaries are nice for ticket history searchability. Clipy's no-signup-to-watch matters when your customer is a non-technical end user who would otherwise abandon a Loom email-gate.
Choose Loom if you already pay for Atlassian and want one consolidated bill. Choose Clipy if you're a small support team and the budget for $15/user/mo across 8 agents ($1,440/yr) is real money.
Best for engineering / bug reports / code reviews
Winner: Clipy. Engineers don't need branded thumbnails, AI summaries, or CRM integrations. They need: record fast, share a link in a PR or Linear ticket, no friction for the reviewer. The 5-minute Loom cap is a real problem for any non-trivial code walkthrough — engineering videos routinely run 8–15 minutes. Clipy's no cap, no watermark, no signup-to-watch hits the engineering use case dead-on.
Loom Business is a fine choice if your company already pays for it via Jira/Confluence integration. But if engineering is procuring this on its own, Clipy is the obviously correct answer.
Best for solo creators / educators
Winner: Tella. If you're producing tutorials, course content, YouTube explainers, or personal-brand short-form video, Tella's output looks markedly better than anything else. Gradient backgrounds, layout templates, automatic zoom-on-click effects, multi-clip timeline editing — these are real production-value upgrades that make the difference between a homemade-looking screen rec and content people actually watch through.
Runner-up: Clipy for educators on a budget who post raw walkthroughs to a learning platform or LMS. You lose the polish but the price is right.
Best for async-first remote teams
Winner: Loom (with budget) or Clipy (without). Async-first cultures — GitLab-style, Buffer-style — live or die on how low the recording friction is. Loom's team workspace, comments, emoji reactions, and viewer analytics are genuinely useful for replacing meetings. If your company already pays for the Atlassian suite, Loom is the path of least resistance.
For startups where async-first is a value but the budget isn't there yet, Clipy gets you 90% of the way for $0. You give up the team library and viewer analytics. You keep the unlimited recording and zero-friction sharing, which is the actual core of async culture.
What you give up by choosing each
Choose Clipy and you give up: AI summaries and auto-chapters, a native team workspace with comments and reactions, native CRM integrations, custom branding on the share page, and team-level viewer analytics. We're shipping these — some are on the near roadmap — but if you need them today, Clipy isn't the answer. We'd rather be honest than oversell. See what's there today.
Choose Loom and you give up: ~$180/user/year minimum once you outgrow the free tier (which happens fast). You also accept that you're now part of the Atlassian universe — pricing decisions, feature direction, and integration priorities will increasingly favor Atlassian customers over standalone users. Loom-the-indie-product effectively no longer exists.
Choose Vidyard and you give up: Generality. Outside of a sales-outbound context, Vidyard's UI feels overweight — you're paying for and looking at features (campaign analytics, sales playbooks, prospect engagement scoring) that are dead weight for support, engineering, or internal comms use cases.
Choose Tella and you give up: Speed. The same features that make Tella's output gorgeous — layouts, backgrounds, multi-clip editing — mean every recording is a small editing project, not a 30-second hit-record-and-share. For polished tutorials this is exactly right. For "hey, here's the bug" it's massively over-engineered.
FAQ
Is Clipy actually free, or is there a catch?
Genuinely free. No watermark, no recording cap, no storage cap, no "upgrade for HD" gate. Clipy is built and maintained by Codersera as an indie product. The business model is brand reach, not video paywalls. See the pricing page — it's intentionally short.
Why did Loom's free tier shrink?
After Atlassian acquired Loom in 2023, the free tier was reduced to 25 videos at 5 minutes each. The strategic logic is clear: push standalone free users either to paid plans or to the bundled Atlassian offering. It's a defensible business decision; it also means Loom is no longer the no-brainer free option it was in 2020–2022.
Can I switch from Loom to Clipy without losing old videos?
Loom lets you download your videos as MP4. There's no automated migration tool yet for transferring a Loom library into Clipy — you'd download from Loom and re-upload (or just re-record) the videos that still matter. In practice, most teams find that 80% of old async videos are stale within 90 days and don't need migrating at all.
Does Clipy work on Safari or Firefox?
The Chrome extension is the most polished surface today. The web app works in any modern browser for recording and viewing, but the extension experience — one-click record from any tab — is Chrome-first. A Firefox extension is on the roadmap.
What about Slack previews — do Clipy links unfurl nicely?
Yes. Clipy links unfurl in Slack with the video thumbnail and metadata as a classic Slack preview. A native Slack app with in-message playable unfurls (Loom-style) is in development — the metadata-only path can't force Slack to render an inline player, that requires a dedicated Slack app with link-unfurl scopes.
Bottom line
If you have budget and need polish, Loom or Tella. If you live in a sales CRM, Vidyard. If you want a serious screen recorder for $0/year and you're okay trading a few enterprise features for that, Clipy is the honest pick. Try it on a real recording today — that's the only test that matters.