Looking for a Cursorful alternative?
Cursorful zooms when two clicks land inside three seconds, and free stops at non-commercial use. Prequel zooms on every click and every burst of typing, tilts the push-in, pulls focus off the subject and exports at 4K and 120 fps. $9 a month, or $29 once against their $79.
No credit card required
Cursorful
A browser recorder that adds zooms and pans automatically.
- Price
- Free for non-commercial use; $79 once
- Free
- Free for non-commercial use
- Platforms
- macOS, Windows, and a Chrome, Edge or Brave extension
Prequel
Cinematic screen recorder for Mac
- Price
- $9 a month, or $29 once
- Free
- 7-day trial, then paid
- Platforms
- macOS 14+, Apple Silicon
Checked on 22 October 2026 against Cursorful, Cursorful pricing.
What is Cursorful, and what is it good at?
Cursorful started as a Chrome extension that recorded a tab and zoomed it automatically, and it now has Mac and Windows apps as well. Zooms follow your clicks, the webcam docks in a corner in a circle or a rounded rectangle, the browser frame can be hidden with one click, captions are generated on your own machine, and rendering happens locally up to 4K.
Pro is $79 once per seat, listed at $119, and the free tier covers non-commercial use. For recording a web app in the browser you already have it open in, the extension is genuinely the shortest path there is.
Why do people look for a Cursorful alternative?
Free is non-commercial. Recording a demo for your own product is commercial use, so the licence is the price of the first real video.
The browser is the home ground. The desktop apps exist, and the product's shape, its crop-to-the-recorded-window, its hide-the-tab-strip, its extension install, is still built around recording a tab.
Zooms are triggered by a rule you do not set. Two or more clicks inside a three-second window is the documented trigger. Typing is not a trigger at all.
Is Prequel a good Cursorful alternative?
For a Mac recording of anything, in or out of a browser, yes.
Prequel captures a display, a window or a region through ScreenCaptureKit, with the camera, the microphone and system audio on separate tracks, and opens the editor with the pass made: zooms placed on every click and every burst of typing, tilted, with focus falling away from whatever the push-in is aimed at. The camera is framed, shaped and cut out of its background. A wallpaper sits behind the window with padding, a radius and a shadow. Captions are transcribed on your Mac.
Export is one file at up to 4K and 120 frames a second, for $9 a month or $29 once against their $79.
What do you give up by switching?
The browser extension, and with it the Chrome, Edge and Brave install on Windows and Linux. If what you record is always a tab and you want it recorded from inside the browser, Cursorful is built for exactly that and Prequel is not.
Cursorful's Pro licence is also a single payment with no subscription option, which some people prefer on principle.
How do the features compare?
| Feature | Prequel | Cursorful |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic zoom on clicks | Included | Included |
| Zoom on what you type | Included | Not included |
| Cursor smoothing and resizing | Included | Included |
| Camera overlay, shaped and placed after | Included | Included |
| Backgrounds, padding and shadow | Included | Included |
| Layouts for the screen and camera | Fourteen, per clip | A webcam docked in a corner, per scene |
| Camera cut out of its background | Included | Not included |
| Perspective tilt and focus falloff on zooms | Included | Not included |
| Captions transcribed on your Mac | Included | Included |
| Timeline editing | Included | Segments for zoom, speed, camera and blur |
| Separate audio tracks | Included | Not included |
| System audio without a virtual driver | Included | Tab audio from the extension |
| Reframe to vertical without cropping | Included | Ten aspect ratios, cropped |
| Magnifying-glass loupe over the work | Included | Not included |
| Colour looks and filters | Included | Not included |
| Microphone noise reduction | Included | Included |
| Import a video you already have | Included | Included |
| Records and exports without uploading | Included | Renders locally; sharing uploads |
| Shareable links | Included | Included |
| Team workspace | Included | Not included |
| Records an iPhone or iPad | Not included | Not included |
| Maximum export | 4K, 120 fps | 4K |
| Download size | 104 MB | Not published |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon | macOS, Windows, and a Chrome, Edge or Brave extension |
| Licence | $9/month or $29 once, 7-day trial | $79 once, per seat |
What Cursorful is good at
The shortest path from a browser tab to a zoomed recording: an extension in the browser the demo is already open in, with local rendering and a one-off price.
What does each one cost?
Cursorful
- Free$0 non-commercial use
- Pro$79 once, per seat, listed at $119
Prequel
- Lifetime$29 once
- Pro$9 a month
Checked on 22 October 2026 against Cursorful, Cursorful pricing.
- Record your screen and cameraPick a display, a window or an area you drag out, with your camera, microphone and system audio each on their own track.
- Zooms and layout are applied automaticallyPrequel reads where you clicked and typed, then places the zooms, frames your camera and sets a background behind it.
- Edit, export and shareMove a zoom, trim a clip or fix a caption, then export one MP4 at up to 4K or send a link that plays anywhere.
Zoom and pan
Zooms that follow the action
Prequel automatically zooms in when you click or type, then softens the rest of the window so viewers know where to look. Every zoom is added to the timeline, so you can move, retime or delete it at any time.
Layouts
Switch layouts clip by clip
Choose from fourteen layouts for the same take: camera in the corner, beside the screen, split with it or hidden entirely. Use one layout for the whole video, or change it clip by clip.
Subtitles
Subtitles you can edit like text
Prequel transcribes every word on your Mac when the editor opens. Fix captions by typing in the transcript, choose a subtitle style or delete a sentence to remove it from the video.
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thanks so much for jumping on this call
Iwanttoshowyousomethingcool
[pause here]
we’ve been building for the past few months
Teleprompter
A teleprompter that follows your voice
Prequel hangs your script from the notch, just under the camera, and follows your voice — the word you're saying lights up as you say it. Wander off script and it waits for you; skip ahead or fall behind and it catches up within a couple of words.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+
Native
Built for your Mac
Prequel is a native app for Apple Silicon. It records with the system’s own capture, encodes on the video hardware and draws every frame in Metal. Your recordings stay on your disk.
The editor
Everything you would have done by hand
It opens by itself when you stop recording, on the take you just made. Nothing to import, nothing to line up.
Guide attention automatically
Prequel zooms into the part of the screen that matters: the cursor, a region you draw, or whatever you are typing into. Set the level, the speed and how much the rest of the frame blurs.
Look present without taking over the video
Your camera stays framed and out of the way: circle, squircle, rounded, wide or portrait, in any corner and any size. It is never burned into the recording, so none of it is decided while you record.
Make recordings look designed
Add a background, padding and a shadow without editing any of it by hand. Your own wallpaper by default, seven bundled presets, gradients and solids.
Cut the parts nobody needs to see
Trim the pauses yourself, slice by slice, with a waveform under every clip. Layout, background and audio can all change mid-take.
Keep the pointer out of the way
Fifteen pointer styles, resized so the cursor survives a zoom. Smoothed while it travels, and hidden after a few seconds of stillness.
Export the frame you approved
The preview and the exporter draw the same plan, so the file matches what you signed off in the editor.
Quality
Videos stay sharp at 4K
Capture and export run on your Mac's own media engine. 1080p at 60 fps records without dropping frames, and 4K is a setting you pick.
- Resolution
- Up to 4K
- Frame rate
- Up to 120 fps
- Codecs
- H.264 · HEVC
- Encoding
- Hardware, VideoToolbox
- Compositing
- Metal
- Output
- Constant frame rate MP4
Formats
Export in any frame
Turn one recording into different formats without manually reframing every element. Switch from landscape to vertical and the layout stays intact.
- Landscape 16:9
- 4K
- Vertical 9:16
- Square 1:1
- Portrait 4:5
- YouTube
- Shorts
- TikTok
- Reels
- X
Record demos worth sharing
Free for 7 days. No watermark on anything you export.
No credit card required
Curious about the internals? Read the blog
FAQ
Zooms, exports and the rest
What is the best Cursorful alternative?
On a Mac, Prequel. It captures a display, a window or a region through ScreenCaptureKit rather than a browser tab, places zooms on every click and every burst of typing, tilts the push-in, pulls focus away from the subject and exports at up to 4K and 120 frames a second. It is $29 once against Cursorful's $79, or $9 a month.
Is Cursorful free?
For non-commercial use. Recording a demo for a product you sell is commercial, so that needs Pro at $79 once per seat, listed at $119. Checked on 22 October 2026.
Can Cursorful record anything outside the browser?
The Mac and Windows apps record the desktop, and the extension records a tab. Prequel is a native Mac app throughout: a display, a window or a region, with the camera, the microphone and system audio on separate tracks.
Is Prequel a good Cursorful alternative?
For a Mac, yes. The automatic pass covers more of the take, the camera can be reframed, reshaped and cut out of the room afterwards, captions are transcribed by Apple's own speech framework on device, and export runs at 120 frames a second. Cursorful keeps the browser extension and the Windows and Linux installs that come with it.