I’ve been a big fan of Loom for a long time now. Back when I started working remotely it quicklybecame a powerful tool for communicating asynchronously ( guidance on that ) and combined with Notion and Slack quickly became my go-to for recording screenshares, lessons and short headshot videos for those times when text messages don;t cut it.

Over the last 5-6 years Loom has added a host of features, most of which aren’t especially useful for me. I basically have two use cases:

1. Quickly record a short screenshare or headshot video, click stop and immediatly paste a working link into Slack/WhatsApp etc.
2. Longer, more polished recordings for embedding in Notion documents as tutorials, guides or presentations.

Loom was the first tool to make (1) possible because it streams and encodes your recording as you record, so the video is working as soon as you hit stop. It’s still great for that.

It’s not so good at (2) because it lacks the editing features required, and because recordingat a higher quality would slow down the streaming.

I’ve always kinda wanted Loom to have two seperate modes: one for quick recording which works like normal Loom, and another for more polished stuff which records locally with seperare high-quality tracks for screen and camera, and then allows me to edit in a simple interface similar to Screen Studio before uploading to the same place as the quick recordings.

I’ve also become increasingly annoyed that my many, many videos are all on a loom.com URL. I’d much rather have them under my own domain.

Enter Cap.so

Cap is an Open Source project which is almost what I’m looking for. I love that I can self-host it if I want, though I’m more than happy to pay for their SaaS. It’s still a little rough round the edges, but is under active development. Aside from the fact I have a load of historical Looms which I need to leave there for a while, the main thing that’s preventing me switching from Loom full time is the inability to record just my face for a quick recording session, but I’m told this is on the way.

If you’re a Loom user looking for an alternative, check out Cap !