Is Loom or Screen Studio cheaper?

Loom starts at $0 (Starter), then $18 per user per month billed monthly (Business) (free plan available). Screen Studio starts at $9 per month billed yearly ($108 per year), or $20 per month billed monthly (free trial).

Loom vs Screen Studio

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Screen Studio compared with Loom

Loom is the default for async messaging: instant hosted links, a shared team library, viewer analytics, comments, and integrations everywhere. Screen Studio has none of that and is not trying to. Use Loom for the daily internal video you send and forget, and Screen Studio for the small number of videos that go on a landing page, in a launch post, or in front of customers.

Choose Loom if

Distributed teams that want to replace status meetings, code walkthroughs, design feedback, and support explanations with recordings, especially teams already inside Atlassian tools, plus solo operators and small companies who can live inside the free 25-video allowance.

Choose Screen Studio if

Mac-based founders, developers, designers, and product marketers who need product demos, changelog clips, and tutorial videos to look produced without opening a real editor, and who value owning the exported file rather than renting a hosted link.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Loom	Screen Studio
Category	Video	Video
Starting price	$0 (Starter), then $18 per user per month billed monthly (Business) (free plan available)	$9 per month billed yearly ($108 per year), or $20 per month billed monthly (free trial)
Pricing model	Freemium per-seat subscription with three published tiers and a quote-only Enterprise tier, discounted roughly 17 percent for annual billing.	Subscription for the macOS app, billed monthly or annually per user. The one-time lifetime license was discontinued in September 2025.
Free plan	Starter includes 25 videos per person, a hard five-minute cap per recording, 720p, transcriptions, comments, and emoji reactions, for workspaces of up to 50 members.	No
Free trial	Free Starter plan serves as the evaluation path; paid tiers can be trialed from within the product	A free trial of the app is available before purchase; exports from the trial are limited
Best for	Distributed teams that want to replace status meetings, code walkthroughs, design feedback, and support explanations with recordings, especially teams already inside Atlassian tools, plus solo operators and small companies who can live inside the free 25-video allowance.	Mac-based founders, developers, designers, and product marketers who need product demos, changelog clips, and tutorial videos to look produced without opening a real editor, and who value owning the exported file rather than renting a hosted link.
Setup time	Under ten minutes. Install the Chrome extension or desktop app, sign in with Google or your work account, grant screen and microphone permissions, and record. There is nothing to configure before the first useful video.	Under ten minutes. Download the app, grant screen recording and microphone permissions in macOS System Settings, and record. There is no account provisioning, no workspace configuration, and no extension to install.
Learning curve	Near zero for recording. The part teams get wrong is cultural rather than technical: async video only replaces meetings if people agree to watch recordings instead of asking for a call, and that convention has to be set explicitly.	Very low for good output and moderate for great output. The defaults produce something presentable on the first recording. Learning where to nudge zoom timing, how much padding suits your brand, and when to override the automation takes a handful of videos.
Platforms	Chrome extension, macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, iOS, Android, Web	macOS (Ventura 13.1 or later recommended), iPhone and iPad capture over USB, No Windows version, No Linux version, No web app
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, Covered by Atlassian's enterprise security and compliance program	No SOC 2 or ISO certification published
Founded	2015	2022
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	Poland
Ownership	Owned by Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM)	Bootstrapped

Strengths and limitations

Loom

Strengths

The recording experience is still the best in the category: parallel upload means the link is ready instantly, and the extension and desktop app are both genuinely reliable under load.
Embedding is unmatched, with the player unfurling natively across more than 400 tools including the entire Atlassian suite, Notion, Slack, Figma, and GitHub.
Transcription and closed captions in more than 50 languages are included on the free tier rather than paywalled.
Atlassian ownership means real security engineering, SSO and SCIM, custom retention policies, and an uptime SLA, which is more compliance surface than any independent vendor in this category offers.

Limitations

Zero dynamic personalization: no per-prospect backgrounds, no animated GIF thumbnails generated per contact, no bulk generation from a CSV, and no per-prospect landing pages.
CRM logging is minimal, and the only first-party CRM connector is Salesforce on the quote-only Enterprise tier, so HubSpot users get nothing native.
The free tier's five-minute recording cap is much tighter than Vidyard's 30 minutes or Bubbles' unlimited screen recordings, and it stops most real use cases dead.
Editing is shallow: trim, stitch, text, arrows, and boxes. No multi-track timeline, no zoom and pan, no b-roll.

Screen Studio

Strengths

The automatic post-production is genuinely best in class. Zoom placement, cursor smoothing, and motion blur produce output that looks hand-edited from a first take, and no competitor matches the polish out of the box.
Native macOS app with local processing, so recording and rendering are fast and nothing is uploaded unless you choose to share a link.
You own the exported file at up to 4K 60fps with no watermark on any paid plan, so cancelling does not orphan your existing videos.
GIF export is a real feature rather than an afterthought, and GIF is the only format that reliably renders inline in issues, docs, and chat.

Limitations

macOS only, with no Windows or Linux version and no web fallback. For mixed-platform teams this is disqualifying regardless of how good the output is.
The $229 lifetime license was discontinued in September 2025, which removed the strongest reason many people bought it in the first place.
No meaningful team features: no shared library, no permissions model, no comment threads, no centralized billing tier published.
Viewer analytics are not a serious part of the product. If you need to know who watched, how far they got, and to route that to a CRM, this is the wrong tool.

Pricing compared

Loom

Freemium per-seat subscription with three published tiers and a quote-only Enterprise tier, discounted roughly 17 percent for annual billing.

Starter$0
Business$18
Business plus AI$24
EnterpriseCustom

Business at $18 monthly is priced as the category default rather than as a bargain, and after the Atlassian acquisition it stopped being cheap. What you get for it is the most reliable recorder in the category, the best embedding story anywhere, transcription in 50-plus languages, and no usage meter to model. For an internal communication use case that is good value, particularly if you already run Jira and Confluence and can use the bug report flow. For a sales use case it is poor value, because the personalization and CRM machinery that justifies a higher price elsewhere simply is not here, and the one CRM connector Loom does ship is locked behind a quote. Buy it for the team, not for the pipeline.

Screen Studio

Subscription for the macOS app, billed monthly or annually per user. The one-time lifetime license was discontinued in September 2025.

Monthly$20
Yearly$9
Legacy Lifetime$229

At $108 a year for unrestricted 4K 60fps export with no watermark, Screen Studio is the cheapest way to make screen recordings look professional, and it beats hiring anyone or learning a real editor by an enormous margin. The value judgement turns entirely on platform and ownership. If your team is all Mac and you want files rather than hosted links, nothing else in this category gets close on output quality per dollar. If you have Windows users, the price is irrelevant because they cannot run it, and if what you actually need is a shared library with viewer analytics, you are buying a beautiful tool for the wrong problem.

Editorial verdict on each

Loom

Category Leader

Loom is still the best pure recorder in async video, and the reason is unglamorous engineering: it uploads while you talk, so the link is always ready. Add transcription in 50-plus languages on the free tier, embedding across more than 400 tools, and Atlassian's security program behind it, and it remains the safe default for a team that wants to stop holding meetings. Buy it for internal communication, support explanations, and design and code review, ideally on Business plus AI where filler word removal quietly makes every recording watchable. Do not buy it for sales. There is no dynamic personalization, no per-prospect landing page, and the only CRM connector is Salesforce behind an Enterprise quote. The five-minute free cap and post-acquisition price increases also mean Loom is no longer the cheap option it once was, and buyers who care mainly about price should look hard at Bubbles.

Read the full Loom profile

Screen Studio

Momentum

Screen Studio is the best-looking screen recorder available and the automatic post-production is not a gimmick; it reliably turns a careless first take into something you would put on a landing page. At $108 a year with no watermark, unrestricted 4K 60fps export, and a file you own outright, it is excellent value for the specific job of polished video production. Two things should stop you. It is macOS only, which quietly disqualifies it for any team with Windows users no matter how good the output is, and the $229 lifetime license that made it famous is gone, so you are now renting a desktop app. Buy it if you are a Mac-based founder, developer, or product marketer who needs demos to look sharp. Do not buy it as your team's async messaging tool or as anything resembling a sales video platform, because it has neither the library nor the analytics to be either.

Read the full Screen Studio profile

Loom profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Screen Studio last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.