Loom
Collaboration · Freemium
Overview
A screen recording tool for short async videos. You record your screen and camera at the same time, then share a link so others can watch when they want, instead of writing a long message or booking a call. It was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco. Atlassian, the company behind Jira and Confluence, acquired Loom in 2023, and newer features tie into Atlassian tools. Loom runs as a desktop app, a Chrome extension, and mobile apps, and it automatically transcribes recordings and can generate a title, summary, and chapters.
What people use it for
People use Loom to explain something once on video rather than repeating it in writing or in meetings. Common uses include walking a teammate through a process, giving feedback on a design or document by talking over it, demonstrating a bug with the screen and console visible, and recording onboarding material that new hires watch on their own schedule. Product and design teams send Loom updates in place of status meetings. Sales and customer teams record personalized walkthroughs and product tours for prospects. Support teams answer complex questions with a quick recording instead of a wall of text. Engineers use Loom's bug capture to file a Jira issue with device, browser, and console details attached automatically.
Key capabilities
Loom records screen and camera together on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, through a desktop app or Chrome extension. Recordings are transcribed with closed captions in more than 50 languages. AI features generate titles, summaries, and chapters, remove filler words, and produce bug reports that populate a Jira work item with device, browser, operating system, console errors, and network activity. Basic editing lets you trim, stitch clips, and add text, arrows, and box overlays. Viewer analytics show who watched and how far they got, along with reactions and threaded comments. Videos embed across more than 100 tools including Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Figma, and Jira. Enterprise plans add SSO, SCIM, and custom data retention. The free Starter plan caps recordings at 5 minutes and 25 videos per member at up to 720p; the Business plan removes the length limit and adds 4K and branding, and Business plus AI adds the AI toolset.
Limitations
Recordings accumulate quickly and become hard to find later, since a video library is harder to skim than written notes. The free Starter plan is tight: 25 total videos per member, a 5-minute cap per recording, and 720p quality. Transcript-based editing, auto-summaries, chapters, and filler-word removal sit behind the Business plus AI tier. Pricing is per seat, and a viewer-only role that did not consume a seat is being removed for new users, so sharing widely costs more. Loom can also replace a two-sentence message with a three-minute video when writing would have been faster, and viewers cannot skim a video the way they scan text.
Insight
Loom's core idea is sound. Some things are genuinely faster to show than to describe, and a two-minute recording can replace a meeting that would have cost four people half an hour. It works best for exactly that: a screen walkthrough, feedback spoken over a design, a bug shown rather than typed out. The failure mode is overuse. A video feels like less effort to the sender and more to the receiver, who cannot scan it, search it, or read it at their own speed, and a message that needed one sentence should not be a recording. The other issue is the pile-up. Without naming and filing discipline, a workspace fills with unlabeled videos nobody can find in a month. Loom is a good tool used with restraint and a bad habit used without it.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30