Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover screen recording. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| CleanShot X | OBS Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $29 | Free |
| Pricing model | One-time purchase | Free |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Billing | One-time purchase | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | macOS | macOS, Windows, Linux |
| Covers | Screen Recording, Design & Graphics | Screen Recording, Live Streaming |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | YouTube, Twitch |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Mac screen capture that replaces the built-in
CleanShot X is the tool Mac users buy once and then cannot work without: scrolling captures, an annotation layer, a cursor you can hide, and a desktop it tidies before the shot. Recordings export as GIF or MP4 without a round trip through an editor. It is macOS only, and the cloud sharing that competes with Loom is a separate subscription.
Our note
Buy the $29 licence and ignore the cloud tier unless you are sharing captures with a team every day. Loom is the better answer for anything that needs to be watched rather than looked at.
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Free and open source streaming and recording
OBS is what most of the streams you watch are running, and it costs nothing because it is a volunteer project rather than a business with a free tier. Scenes, sources, filters and a real audio mixer are all there, along with plugin support. Nothing about it is friendly on the first evening, and the settings that decide whether your stream looks good are the ones with no explanation next to them.
Our note
Every paid streaming tool in this catalog is, in part, selling you an escape from OBS's settings panel. That is a real thing to buy if your time is worth more than the evening. If it is not, OBS does everything they do and costs nothing.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
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