Cap

Key features

• Full capture stack Record the full screen or a window with camera overlay, microphone, system audio, and computer sound in one pass, covering demos, walkthroughs, and bug reproductions without a second tool.[1]

• Featherweight desktop app The recorder is built with Rust and Tauri rather than Electron, so the download is roughly 30MB with no bundled Chromium and recording does not tax the machine it is recording.[1]

• Instant shareable links Stopping a recording produces a link you can paste into chat, email, or a ticket, with viewer comments and reactions so feedback lands on the video instead of in a separate thread.[1]

• Cap Studio editor Trim clips, hide sections, add custom backgrounds and title pages, and apply automatic zoom and cursor smoothing with export up to 1080p or 4K, which is what makes raw captures look deliberate.[1]

• Bring-your-own S3 storage Point Cap at your own S3-compatible bucket on the Pro plan, so recordings live in storage your company already controls rather than only on vendor infrastructure.[1][2]

• Self-hostable Cap Cloud Run the sharing backend on your own infrastructure with Docker and keep recordings local-first, with Frankfurt-based managed hosting under GDPR and CCPA when you do use Cap Cloud.[1]

• Honest open-source licensing The app is AGPLv3 with MIT-licensed Cap crates and a paid commercial-license alternative, so personal self-hosting is free and commercial use without full AGPLv3 compliance has a priced path at $8 per creator per month billed annually.[1][2]

• Provenance at scale The repository shows 25,000 stars and more than 400 contributors, including engineers from Vercel, Supabase, and Tailwind, with YC backing, which is unusual staying power for a young recorder.[1][2]

Who will love it

• Async-first teams Product and engineering teams doing weekly demos, code walkthroughs, and bug reproductions will love the record-to-link loop with comments and transcripts, which replaces meetings with videos people can watch at double speed.[1]

• Privacy-conscious teams Teams with legal or security review will love local-first recording, their own S3 bucket, Docker self-hosting, and Frankfurt-based managed hosting, which give reviewers concrete answers instead of promises.[1][2]

• Budget-sensitive teams Indie teams and creators will love the free tier for casual use and the $8 commercial self-hosted license, a fraction of a typical managed seat when every teammate records.[1]

Who should avoid it

• No Linux build Cap ships for macOS and Windows only, with Linux merely a contributors-welcome note, so a Linux team cannot adopt it today.[1][2]

• Plan-gated depth Advanced editor depth, AI subtitle and transcription minutes, watermark removal, and longer storage are plan-gated, and multi-track compositing still belongs in a dedicated editor.[1][2]

• Thin peer-review record No suitable original Reddit or G2 firsthand reports were found within the research budget, so risk-averse buyers should weigh the absence of an independent peer-review corpus against Loom's far larger public review history.[1]

Cap versus the alternatives