A free, open-source alternative to Screen Studio

Screen Studio made polished screen recordings mainstream on the Mac: record your screen, and the app adds smooth zooms and a nicer cursor without a video editor. It's a well-made commercial app, and for many people it's the right choice.

If you want something free, open source, or with a different look, Glideshot might be a better fit. This is an honest comparison. Both apps change over time, so check Screen Studio's own website for its current features and pricing.

What they have in common

• Both are native Mac apps that record your screen and make it look produced, automatically.
• A camera that zooms in on clicks and typing and follows your cursor.
• A larger, smoothed cursor and click effects.
• You can change the look after recording, and export in several aspect ratios.

What Glideshot does differently

It films your screen with a 3D camera

Glideshot treats your screen like a physical object in front of a camera. The screen is tilted in 3D (pitch, yaw and roll, with adjustable perspective), and the camera has a real depth of field: the area around the action stays sharp, while the rest of the screen, especially the parts leaning away from the lens, falls into blur. The result looks more like a product film than a zoomed-in screenshot. You can see it live on the home page.

It's free and open source

Glideshot costs nothing, and the source code is on GitHub. You can read exactly what it does, build it yourself and change it. There's no account and no analytics.

Every behavior is a switch

Dead zone, look ahead, zoom on clicks and typing, zoom out on fast moves, pull back when idle, handheld drift, intro and outro, depth of field, focus following the cursor, motion blur, cursor smoothing, click ripples, hiding the idle cursor and the vignette can each be turned off on their own. If all you want is a flat, steady recording with a nicer cursor, you can have that too.

The camera knows what happens next

Because Glideshot keeps the raw recording plus the mouse and keyboard activity, its camera can look ahead: it starts moving just before the cursor does and zooms out before a long move instead of during it. There's more about this in how auto-zoom works.

When Screen Studio is the better pick

• Narration and webcam. Glideshot doesn't record audio yet and has no webcam overlay. If you talk over your demos or want your face in the corner, Screen Studio can record your microphone and camera today.
• A full editor. Glideshot's editor is for styling a take, not for cutting it: there's no trimming, no text overlays and no hand-edited zoom timeline. For that, export from Glideshot and finish in a video editor.
• Maturity and support. Screen Studio is a commercial product with a team behind it. Glideshot is a young open-source project.
• Older Macs. Glideshot needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Which one should you use?

Pick Screen Studio if you need narration, a webcam or an all-in-one editor, and you're happy to pay for it. Pick Glideshot if you want a free and open-source tool, like the tilted, shallow-focus look, or want precise control over how the camera behaves.

Since Glideshot is free, the easiest way to decide is to try the camera in your browser, then install the app and record something real.