Loom is built for one-way async video: record your screen, your webcam, or both, narrate what you're doing, and send the link. It's the default tool for a support answer, a sales follow-up, a standup when half the team is in another time zone, or any explanation where your voice and the motion of your cursor carry real information. When the point is "watch me click through this," Loom is the right shape.
The free Starter plan covers 25 videos per person with a 5-minute cap on screen recordings, for up to 50 members. Business lifts both limits at $18 per user per month, and Business + AI, which adds transcription and AI-generated titles and summaries, runs $24. For a team of ten, Business alone is $180 a month before anyone asks for the AI tier. That line item is usually what sends people looking for alternatives in the first place.
The gap worth naming is the one between two different jobs, not two competing tools. Loom captures an action over time: you must watch it, at whatever pace you recorded it, to get the information out. MarkLayer captures a state: arrows, highlights, and pinned text on a live page, readable in the time it takes to glance at a screenshot, with no play button anywhere. A three-step signup flow with a confusing transition genuinely needs the recording. A headline that says the wrong thing, or a button sitting two pixels too far left, does not, and dressing it up as a 90-second video just adds a scrubber to a fact that fits in one sentence pinned to the exact pixel.
So look back at your last ten Looms before picking a tool. If most of them were you narrating a real sequence of steps, Tella or Vidyard will record that better than Loom does and without the seat fee creeping up. If half of them were one static screen with you describing what was wrong, those were never really videos, and MarkLayer replaces them for free.
If you need voice, motion, or a face on camera, pick Tella or Vidyard and keep recording. If most of your Looms are really one screen with an arrow on it, MarkLayer replaces those for free, and the recipient reads it in seconds instead of scrubbing a two-minute video.
| Option | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| MarkLayer | Free. No tiers, no seats | The Looms that are really one screen and two sentences: a layout bug, a copy change, a design note. |
| Tella | Not tracked | Videos someone outside your team will watch, where production quality matters. |
| Vidyard | Not tracked | Outbound and customer-facing video where you need view tracking. |
| Berrycast | Not tracked | A direct, cheaper swap when you just want to record and send. |
Free and open source, and a different shape entirely: instead of recording the page, you annotate it live. Draw arrows, highlight regions, and pin comments directly on a real URL, then share the link so the recipient opens it in any browser and sees exactly what you meant in seconds. Replies thread right on the page itself, and when more than one person is looking at once, cursors move in real time instead of everyone recording their own separate video.
Screen and camera recording with a stronger editing and presentation layer than Loom: trimming, layout templates, and calls-to-action built into the finished video. It's built for polished async updates and demo videos meant for people outside your team, not disposable clips a teammate watches once and forgets.
Screen recording built specifically for sales and marketing, with a free tier, built-in hosting, and viewer analytics that show who watched how much of the video and where they dropped off. That tracking is the reason to pick it over Loom for outbound: you can tell whether a prospect actually watched the demo or ignored it.
A simpler screen recorder than Loom, with a flatter feature set and flat pricing instead of Loom's per-seat tiers. Good fit if you just want to record your screen and send the link, and don't need Loom's AI summaries, viewer analytics, or team libraries.
Paste any URL at marklayer.app and annotate the live page in your browser. No install, no account, no sign-up. Recipients of your share links don't need to install anything either.
Annotate a page