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.
| Loom | OBS Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $18 | Free |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | macOS, Windows, Linux |
| Covers | Screen Recording, Video Hosting | 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 | 1 | None right now |
Screen recordings that go out as a link
Loom records your screen and your face together and hands you a link the moment you stop, so the thing you would have written three paragraphs about arrives as a two minute video instead. Viewers can reply on a timestamp rather than describing where they got confused. Editing is trimming and little else, so a cut that needs more than that belongs somewhere else.
Our note
Loom is for the video nobody would otherwise have made. Buy it for correspondence rather than publishing, and check the free plan's length limit against the way you actually explain things before paying for anything.
Only on this side
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.
Only on this side