# Free Loom alternative: record a Chrome tab, share a link, done > Loom's free plan stops at 25 videos and 5 minutes each. What free screen recorders really give you, and where a $3 flat-rate option fits. - Published: 2026-08-21 - Reading time: 5 min (~1015 words) - Tags: comparison, loom, screen recording - Canonical: https://tautau.xyz/blog/free-loom-alternative ## Key takeaways - Loom's free Starter plan caps you at 25 videos per person and five minutes per recording, at 720p. That is a lifetime allowance, not a monthly one. - tautau's free tier renews every month: 25 recording minutes plus 500MB of storage, with a camera bubble and instant share links. - Paid plans are flat rate, $3 or $9 a month, not per seat. Loom Business starts at $18 per user per month. - Loom still wins on editing, transcriptions, team libraries, and viewer analytics. Pay for it when those matter. Most screen recordings are not content. Nobody colour grades them or publishes them anywhere. They are a bug report that would take three paragraphs to type, a walkthrough of a design file for a colleague in another timezone, a two-minute "this is what I meant" that replaces a meeting. For that job, the ideal tool is closer to a screenshot with sound than a video suite. That gap is why so many people search for a free Loom alternative, and it is worth being precise about what you actually need before you pick one. ## What you actually use a screen recorder for Look at the last few recordings you sent. They probably fall into three buckets: - Bug reports. "I click this, it does that, here is the console error." Thirty seconds of video beats a ticket full of reproduction steps, because the repro is the video. - Design and code feedback. Scrolling through a page or a diff while you talk through what feels off. Tone survives in your voice in a way it never does in a comment thread. - Quick walkthroughs. Onboarding a teammate to an internal tool, showing a client where a setting lives, answering "how do I do X" once instead of four times. Notice what is missing from that list. Nobody needs transitions, chapters, or engagement graphs for "the deploy button is greyed out". The requirements are: start fast, capture the tab with its audio, optionally show your face, get a link, paste it somewhere, move on with your day. ## What Loom's free tier really gives you Loom is the tool that made this workflow mainstream, and its free Starter plan is how most people meet it. Here is what that plan includes today, straight from [Loom's pricing page](https://www.loom.com/pricing): - 25 videos per person. That is a lifetime allowance, not a monthly one: video number 26 needs a paid seat or some deleting. - Five minutes per recording, at up to 720p. - Screen and camera bubble recording, comments and emoji reactions, transcriptions in 50+ languages, and basic viewer insights. It is a genuine product, and the link-first sharing model is as good as everyone says. But the shape of it is a funnel: generous enough to build the habit, capped tightly enough that sustained use pushes you to paid. And paid means per seat. Loom Business, which unlocks unlimited videos, trimming, and downloads, is $18 per user per month. Business + AI is $24. A ten-person team on Business is $180 a month, every month, whether everyone records or not. > Loom's free tier is a lifetime allowance of 25 videos. Once the habit forms, the meter runs out. ## A different shape: monthly minutes instead of a lifetime cap tautau takes the same record-and-share idea and strips it to the quick-share case. It is a Chrome extension: open the tab you want to show, hit "Record this tab" in the popup, and it captures that tab's video and audio, with your microphone mixed in so you can narrate. An optional camera bubble overlays your webcam in the corner, on by default, one toggle to switch off. When you stop, the recording lands on your dashboard with a tautau.xyz/r/ link that anyone can watch. No viewer account, no workspace invite, no "request access" screen. The quota works differently from Loom's, and the difference matters: - Free account: 25 recording minutes every month, plus 500MB of storage. The minutes reset monthly, so the free tier is a plan you can live on, not a countdown to a paywall. - Base, $3 a month: 300 minutes and 5GB. - Pro, $9 a month: 1,500 minutes and 25GB. Flat prices, not per seat. If three people on your team record, three people pay $3; the other seven pay nothing and can still watch every link. - **25 videos** Loom free — lifetime, five minutes each, at 720p - **$18** Loom Business — per user per month - **25 min** tautau free — every month, plus 500MB storage Deleting a recording revokes its link immediately, which doubles as the privacy control: share widely, kill the link when it has done its job. > **The honest trade-offs** (info): tautau does not edit. There is no trimming, stitching, or transcript-based editing. Recordings are transcribed automatically and the transcript sits under the video on the share page, but you cannot edit the video by deleting sentences the way Loom's AI tier can. tautau records one Chrome tab at a time, not your whole screen or desktop apps. If you need any of that, this is the wrong tool and the section below says what to buy instead. ## Where Loom still wins Fairness matters here, because Loom earns its price in real places: - Editing. Trim and stitch on Business, plus transcript-based editing and AI cleanup on Business + AI. If you re-record intros or cut dead air, that saves real time. - Team libraries and analytics. Shared workspaces, folders, engagement insights, password-protected videos. For sales outreach or company-wide async updates, knowing who watched what is the point. - Desktop capture. Loom's desktop app records your whole screen, a window, or any app. tautau records Chrome tabs, full stop. - Transcription depth. tautau auto-transcribes every recording (up to 24 MB) onto the share page; Loom adds on-video captions and transcripts in 50+ languages. If your workflow is "async video as a team sport", with a library people search and metrics you report on, Loom is the mature choice and the per-seat maths is defensible. ## Which one should you pick? If your recordings are quick shares that start in a browser tab, a bug, a walkthrough, a piece of feedback, the free tier question settles it: 25 videos ever, or 25 minutes every month. Install tautau from the [Chrome Web Store](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/onihffileombckmcfceokmcmenfnakke), sign in with a free account, and your first recording is about a minute away, no credit card. If you outgrow 25 minutes a month, $3 flat is a smaller decision than $18 a seat. And if you find yourself wishing the video were just text, that is the other half of the same extension: it dictates into any text field on the web, and transcribes YouTube and podcast links from a paste. Record when showing is faster; dictate when typing is the slow part. --- Markdown twin of https://tautau.xyz/blog/free-loom-alternative — provided for LLM/agent consumption. tautau is a speech-to-text Chrome extension and web app: https://tautau.xyz