Looking for a Loom alternative?

What is Loom, and what is it good at?

Loom is async video messaging. You hit record, talk through something, stop, and a link is in your clipboard — already uploaded, already transcribed, ready to paste into a thread. Someone opens it without installing anything.

That loop is the product, and it is excellent. Loom genuinely replaced a category of meeting, and the surrounding pieces — the team library, viewer analytics, comments, permissions, the Atlassian integrations — are a whole product that a local recorder does not have and does not try to have.

If what you need is "watch this when you can", Loom is still the best answer and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Why do people look for a Loom alternative?

Two reasons, and it is worth separating them because a lot of comparison pages run them together.

The recording is raw. Loom captures what was on your screen at one distance for the whole take. There is trimming and transcript-based editing, but no automatic zoom on the thing you clicked, no cursor smoothing, no compositing onto a background. For an internal update that is completely fine. For anything customer-facing it is the difference between a screen recording and a video.

The account, not the recorder. Since Loom moved onto Atlassian accounts, their own community forum has filled with people locked out or unable to find their library — the board goes from roughly two access threads in twenty-five in late 2025 to around thirteen in twenty-five by early 2026, and Atlassian has published a dedicated article about logging in after migration. Business pricing also rose, to $18 per user per month and $24 with AI, with long-standing customers reporting jumps of sixty per cent or more off legacy rates.

One claim to ignore, because it is everywhere and it is false: the five-minute cap on the free plan is not something Atlassian did. Loom announced it in October 2020, three years before the acquisition.

Is Prequel a good Loom alternative?

It depends entirely on which half of Loom you use.

Prequel is the recorder and the editor, not the distribution. It records screen, webcam, microphone and system audio as separate tracks, places zooms from your clicks and typing, frames the camera afterwards, cleans up the cursor, and exports one MP4 at up to 4K 120 — all on your Mac, with no upload step and no cloud render.

So if you are sending polished video to customers, a prospect or a launch post, Prequel produces something Loom cannot. If you are sending "here's where I got stuck" to a colleague at four in the afternoon, Loom's link is faster and always will be.

What do you give up by switching?

The link. Everything that follows from it, too: the hosted player, viewer analytics, comments, the shared library, permissions and expiry controls. Prequel gives you a file. Where that file goes is your problem to solve, with whatever your team already uses.

There is also no importer. Loom videos live in Loom, and nothing here will pull them out. Download anything you care about before you cancel — that is worth doing whatever you switch to.

What you get instead is that the video is edited rather than raw, that it exists on your disk rather than on someone's servers, and that you are not paying per seat for people whose only job is to watch.