The cheapest Loom alternative in 2026 (that still does AI)

Loom's pricing page is a confronting read. The plan with the AI features is US$24 per user per month, which is a lot of money for a screen recorder, and judging by how often "loom too expensive alternative" gets typed into Google, plenty of people agree. This isn't a feature matrix. It's the price maths on the cheaper options, with the catch for each one spelled out.

What Loom actually costs

The Loom plan people actually want is Business + AI at US$24/user/month, because that's where the AI lives: auto titles, summaries, chapters, the lot. Plain Business is US$18/user/month with no AI. And it's per seat, so a five person team on the AI plan is US$120 a month, US$1,440 a year. For screen recordings.

The free plan won't save you either: 25 videos lifetime, 5 minutes each, no downloading your own files. I wrote about those walls here.

The cheap seats, honestly compared

Disclosure before the sales pitch: I build Tape, one of the tools below. I've included the others anyway because they're good, and because if I only listed my own product you'd (rightly) close the tab.

Tape: A$8/month, about US$5.65, AI included. Or A$79/year, about US$55.79, which works out to roughly US$4.65 a month. Runs entirely in the browser (no install, no extension), records at any length on every plan including free, AI summaries and transcripts included on every tier, and your recordings are downloadable and exportable to your own Google Drive or OneDrive. Flat price, no seats.

Tella: about US$6.50/month billed annually. Beautiful, produced-looking output, works from a Chrome extension. Transcription included. The catch: it's built for polished content more than quick async messages, and branding removal sits on the US$19 Premium tier.

Cap: US$8.16/month billed annually. Open source, which is genuinely great, and Pro includes AI titles, summaries and transcription, with bring-your-own S3 storage if you're that way inclined. The catch: it's a desktop app for Mac and Windows, so there's an install, and the free plan caps recordings at 5 minutes (the same wall Loom free users are fleeing, funnily enough).

OBS: free forever. The honest budget answer if all you need is a recording on your disk. The catch: it's built for streaming, there's a learning curve, and there's no share link, no hosting, no AI. You're the whole pipeline.

The annual maths

One person on Loom Business + AI: about US$288 a year (US$240 if you catch annual billing). The same person on Tape: about US$55.79. That's roughly US$230 a year back in your pocket, per person, for the same core loop: record, get a link, send it, skip the meeting. Over a five person team it's four figures, and Tape doesn't even charge per person.

I keep a dated, maintained comparison table on the pricing page (prices in this niche change constantly, and a stale comparison is worse than none), so check there for the current numbers.

So which one?

If you need team workspaces and admin controls, none of the cheap options fit yet, pay Loom. If you want open source and don't mind a desktop app, Cap. If you're making polished product videos, Tella. If you want the Loom loop, in the browser, with AI, at the lowest price on this page, that's Tape, and it's no accident, it's the whole reason I built it.

You can test that claim in about thirty seconds: record something. Free, any length, no account needed until you want a share link.