Cap
Open-source screen recording with instant share links — a Loom alternative you can self-host
Cap is an open-source screen recorder — the repository calls it the open source alternative to Loom — that captures your screen, camera and microphone and turns the result into a share link, a polished export, or a file that never leaves your machine. It is a TypeScript and Rust monorepo with desktop apps for macOS and Windows, 20,367 stars as of July 2026, and the option to point it at your own S3-compatible storage or self-host the whole platform. For a founder it makes the videos that actually sell a product — the demo, the setup walkthrough, the bug report, the async update — cheap enough to stop deliberating about.
What Cap is
Cap (github.com/CapSoftware/Cap) describes itself as the open source alternative to Loom: beautiful, shareable screen recordings, built for teams that want to own their data. It ships desktop apps for macOS and Windows plus a web dashboard for viewing, sharing and managing what you record, and the repository lists product demos, bug reports, onboarding, tutorials, design reviews, engineering walkthroughs, async standups and client updates as the moments it is built for. The codebase is a Turborepo monorepo — a SolidStart and Tauri desktop app, a Next.js web app, and Rust crates handling capture, encoding, rendering and export.
The design decision worth understanding before you install it is the two recording modes, because they map onto two genuinely different jobs. Instant Mode uploads while you record and hands you a share link the moment you stop, which is what you want for a bug report or an async reply. Studio Mode records locally and opens an editor with backgrounds, zooms, trimming, captions and export controls, which is what a landing-page demo needs. Reaching for the polished mode when a colleague asked a one-line question is the most common way people make recording feel expensive.
What the repository ships
Taken from the project's own README rather than a feature wish-list:
- Record, edit, share — screen, camera and microphone capture, then a share link or an exported file.
- Instant and Studio modes — upload-while-recording for speed, or local recording with an editor for polish.
- Your own storage — Cap Cloud, or any S3-compatible provider such as AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO or Wasabi, or keep recordings local.
- Self-hosting — the web app, API, database, media server and object storage run under Docker Compose, with the desktop app pointed at your server URL.
- Async collaboration — comments, reactions, transcripts, viewer analytics and team workspaces, with share pages servable from your own domain.
- Cap AI — automatic titles, summaries, chapters, captions and transcripts.
- Loom import — existing Loom videos can be brought across so the library stays in one place.
Licensing deserves a sentence, because "open source" covers more than one arrangement. Cap's LICENSE splits the repository: the `cap-camera` and `scap-` Rust crate families are MIT, third-party components keep their own terms, and everything else is AGPLv3. For recording your own demos that distinction never surfaces. If you plan to build a product on top of it or offer it as a service, AGPL is a real constraint and worth reading properly before you start rather than after.
Where a screen recorder fits a founder's growth stack
The value of a tool like this is not that it produces content. It is that it removes the production step from four jobs you already need done:
- The landing-page demo — 60 to 90 seconds of the product doing its actual job, for visitors who will not read three paragraphs to find out what it is. That is the same conversion work the rest of the page is doing: turning visitors into signups.
- The onboarding walkthrough — the path from signup to first useful result, recorded once and dropped into the welcome email and the docs, which is the cheapest available way to shorten time to value. See improving user onboarding.
- The support and sales reply — a two-minute recording answering the exact question asked, in place of a long email that will be misread. This is where Instant Mode earns its keep, and where founders notice the tool paying for itself first.
- The feature clip — fifteen seconds of one thing working, cut from a recording and reused in changelogs, launch posts and social. Distribution of those clips is a separate problem, handled by tools like brightbean-studio.
Whether any of that adds up to a reason to start a channel is a different question, and mostly the answer is no — the assets are worth making long before the habit is. That decision is worked through in should I make videos to market my startup. If the clips need trimming or assembling beyond what the built-in editor covers, OpenCut is the open-source editor to pair with it.
The honest boundary
A recorder makes production cheap and decides nothing about distribution. A demo nobody is sent is worth exactly as much as a demo nobody made, and the reason founders end up with an unused folder of recordings is almost never the tooling — it is that no one decided which page the video lives on, which email it goes in, or which question it answers. Pick the job before you press record.
First-party note from building AgentCeres — the AI Growth Officer at agentceres.com: the demonstration on our own homepage is deliberately not a recording. It is a scripted chat animation rendered by the page, with the script in a source file next to the component and a test that fails the build if the mockup shows something the product cannot do. The reason is maintenance — when the interface changes, editing a script line takes a minute, while a recorded demo has to be re-recorded, re-edited and re-uploaded, so it drifts and starts advertising a product you no longer ship. Recordings are the right tool for the four jobs above, all of which answer a question at a specific moment. The always-on demo is the one worth building in a medium you can keep current.
FAQ
- Is Cap free?
- The source is open and self-hosting it costs only the infrastructure you run it on: the LICENSE puts most of the repository under AGPLv3, with the cap-camera and scap Rust crate families under MIT. The maintainers also operate Cap Cloud as a hosted option with its own paid plans, and the desktop apps can point at either. Check the project's own pricing and license files for the version you install, since both change independently of any write-up.
- How is Cap different from Loom for a founder?
- The functional overlap is large — record, get a link, collect comments — so the real difference is where the recordings live and who controls them. Cap lets you connect your own S3-compatible bucket, serve share pages from your own domain, or self-host the entire platform, which matters when recordings contain a customer's data or an unreleased product. Loom is the more frictionless hosted product with no infrastructure to think about. The repository also advertises Loom import, so trying Cap does not mean abandoning an existing library.
- Can I self-host Cap?
- Yes — the README documents Docker Compose as the fastest path, bringing up the web app, API, database, media server and object storage, after which you point Cap Desktop at your server URL in settings. It also lists a Railway template for one-click managed hosting and a Coolify compose file for self-hosted PaaS deployments. The project's self-hosting guide covers email, SSL, storage and production hardening, and the README is explicit that default secrets must be replaced before exposing a deployment to the internet.
- Do I actually need a screen recorder to market my product?
- You need a way to show the product working to someone who is deciding, and for software a screen recording is usually the cheapest form of that. What you do not need is a video strategy, a channel or a production process. One good demo, one setup walkthrough and the habit of replying with a two-minute recording instead of a long email will cover most of the value, and a free tool is enough to produce all three.
You built it. Now grow it.
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