Tape vs Loom: the honest comparison

Let's get the disclosure out of the way first: I build Tape. This is a comparison written by the competitor. I'm going to be fair anyway, partly because it's the right thing to do and partly because Loom is a genuinely good product that doesn't need me to lie about it.

What they both do

The core loop is the same: record your screen (with camera and mic if you want), get a link, send the link, someone watches it instead of sitting through a meeting. Both give you AI summaries and transcripts so the person on the other end can skim. If you've used one, you'll be at home in the other inside a minute.

Where Loom is better

Maturity and integrations, no contest. Loom has been at this since 2015, has SDKs, embeds everywhere, viewer analytics, comments and emoji reactions, and since the Atlassian acquisition it's being wired into Jira and Confluence properly. If your company runs on Atlassian and needs team workspaces, folders, and admin controls, Loom is built for exactly that and Tape simply isn't. Tape has no teams, no seats, no SSO (not yet, anyway!). That's not modesty, it's the product's actual shape: Tape is for individuals.

Where Tape is better

Price, by a lot. The Loom plan with the AI features (auto titles, summaries, chapters) is US$24/user/month. Tape Pro is A$8/month, which is about US$5.65, or A$79/year, and AI is included, not an upsell tier. That's roughly a quarter of the price, and it's flat: no per-seat maths, because there are no seats.

No 5 minute limit, ever. Loom's free plan cuts recordings at 5 minutes. Tape has no length cap on any plan, including free. I think cutting someone off mid-recording is about the worst thing a recording tool can do, so Tape just doesn't.

Your recordings are actually yours. On Loom's free plan you can't download your own videos. On Tape, recording happens locally in your browser, downloads are unlimited and free, and you can export to your own Google Drive or OneDrive on any plan. If Tape disappeared tomorrow (it won't, but humour me), you'd still have every file.

No install. Tape runs entirely in the browser. No desktop app, no extension, and you can record without an account.

Privacy. This one matters more than people give it credit for. Your recordings are your screen and your voice, which is about as personal as work data gets. Loom is cloud-first: everything you record lands on their servers, transcript text goes to OpenAI, and reviewers in regulated industries have been grumbling about it for a while. Tape flips the default. Recording happens locally in your browser and nothing leaves your machine until you decide to upload. When you do run AI, the audio goes to an enterprise-grade API purely for the transcript and summary, and it is never used to train models, not by the provider and not by us. Bad takes, half-finished rambles, that recording where you said the quiet part out loud: none of it touches a server unless you choose to. Full details in the privacy policy, which is short enough to actually read.

The free plans, honestly

Loom free: 25 videos lifetime, 5 minutes each, 720p, no downloads. Tape free: unlimited local recording and downloads at any length, 5 hosted share pages at a time, 5 AI summaries a month, and share pages carry a small "Get Tape" badge (Pro removes it). Loom gives you more hosted slots; Tape gives you unlimited length and the actual files. Different walls, pick your poison.

The verdict

If you're a team living in Atlassian with a budget per seat, buy Loom, sincerely. If you're an individual, a freelancer, or a developer who mostly needs "record, send link, move on" and would rather pay a flat A$8 than US$24 per person, that's the exact gap Tape exists to fill.

The numbers above age, so the maintained side-by-side (with a "last checked" date) lives on the pricing page. Or skip the reading and record something, it's free and you don't need an account.