Looking for a Zoom alternative for recording?
A recorded meeting looks like a recorded meeting: one distance, a rectangle in the corner, call-grade compression. Prequel records the screen and the camera as separate tracks, places the zooms, frames the camera and exports at 4K and 120 fps. $9 a month, or $29 once.
No credit card required
Zoom
Meetings, and the recorder most people already have.
- Price
- Free, 40-minute meetings; Pro $14.16/user/mo billed annually
- Free
- Free Basic, with a 40-minute cap on a group meeting
- Platforms
- macOS, Windows, Linux, web, iOS, Android
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 Zoom Workplace pricing, Local recording.
What is Zoom, and what is it good at?
Zoom is the meeting. It is also, for a lot of people, the screen recorder they already have: start a meeting with nobody in it, share your screen, press record, and you have an MP4 with your face in the corner and your voice over it. No install, no new tool, no explaining to anyone why there is another app on the expense form.
Basic is free with a forty-minute cap on group meetings. Pro is $14.16 a user a month billed annually and adds local and 10 GB of cloud recording, and Business is $18.33.
Why do people look for a Zoom alternative?
Because a recorded meeting looks like a recorded meeting.
The output is a call, not a demo. One fixed distance for the whole take, the camera in a rectangle in the corner, the compression a video call uses, and a cursor that is wherever your hand left it. Nothing zooms, nothing is framed, nothing is cut.
The recorder is a side effect. Settings that matter for a demo, like frame rate and what the camera layer is allowed to do, are meeting settings, and some of them are controlled by whoever administers the account rather than by you.
Is Prequel a good Zoom alternative?
For recording a demo, yes. For meeting anyone, no.
Prequel records the screen, the camera, the microphone and system audio as separate tracks, which is the difference the finished file shows: the camera can be reframed, reshaped and cut out of the room afterwards, and the audio can be balanced track by track. The editor opens with zooms already placed on every click and every burst of typing, tilted, with focus falling away from the subject, a background behind the window, and the cursor smoothed.
Export is one MP4 or HEVC file at up to 4K and 120 frames a second, at $9 a month or $29 once.
What do you give up by switching?
Other people. Zoom is a meeting platform with a recorder attached, and Prequel has no meetings, no participants, no screen sharing and no phone system. Keeping Zoom is not the same decision as keeping a screen recorder.
Zoom also runs everywhere. Prequel needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later.
How do the features compare?
| Feature | Prequel | Zoom |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic zoom on clicks | Included | Not included |
| Zoom on what you type | Included | Not included |
| Cursor smoothing and resizing | Included | Not included |
| Camera overlay, shaped and placed after | Included | Included |
| Backgrounds, padding and shadow | Included | Virtual backgrounds behind you |
| Layouts for the screen and camera | Fourteen, per clip | Speaker, gallery, or screen with a thumbnail |
| Camera cut out of its background | Included | Virtual background, with or without a green screen |
| Perspective tilt and focus falloff on zooms | Included | Not included |
| Captions transcribed on your Mac | Included | Live captions, and transcripts in the cloud |
| Timeline editing | Included | Not included |
| Separate audio tracks | Included | Per-speaker audio on a cloud recording |
| System audio without a virtual driver | Included | Included |
| Reframe to vertical without cropping | Included | Not included |
| Magnifying-glass loupe over the work | Included | Not included |
| Colour looks and filters | Included | Studio effects and filters |
| Microphone noise reduction | Included | Included |
| Import a video you already have | Included | Not included |
| Records and exports without uploading | Included | Local recording on paid plans; cloud recording uploads |
| Shareable links | Included | From a cloud recording |
| Team workspace | Included | Included |
| Records an iPhone or iPad | Not included | Not included |
| Maximum export | 4K, 120 fps | 1080p on a cloud recording |
| Download size | 104 MB | Not published |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon | macOS, Windows, Linux, web, iOS, Android |
| Licence | $9/month or $29 once, 7-day trial | Per-seat subscription, or a capped free plan |
What Zoom is good at
Everyone already has it, and it does the thing Prequel does not do at all: put other people in the room.
What does each one cost?
Zoom
- Basic$0 free, 40 minutes a group meeting
- Pro$14.16 per user, per month, billed annually
- Business$18.33 per user, per month, billed annually
Prequel
- Lifetime$29 once
- Pro$9 a month
Checked on 22 October 2026 against Zoom Workplace pricing, Local recording.
- 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
Is Zoom a good screen recorder?
It is a convenient one. Start a meeting with nobody in it, share your screen and press record, and you have a file. What you get is a meeting recording: one fixed distance, your camera in a corner rectangle, the compression a call uses, and no editing. For anything a customer will watch, that is the reason people look elsewhere.
How much does Zoom cost?
Basic is free with a forty-minute cap on group meetings. Pro is $14.16 per user per month billed annually and includes local recording and 10 GB of cloud recording, and Business is $18.33. Checked on 22 October 2026.
What resolution does a Zoom recording export at?
A cloud recording is 1080p. Prequel exports at up to 4K and 120 frames a second, encoded by the Mac's own media engine, because it is recording your screen rather than a video call.
Is Prequel a good Zoom alternative?
For recording a demo on a Mac, yes: it captures screen, camera, microphone and system audio as separate tracks, so the camera can be reframed and cut out of the room afterwards and each track can be balanced on its own, and it opens the editor with the zooms already placed. It is not a meeting platform, so Zoom stays on the Mac for talking to people.