Cap's free tier stops at five minutes, the same wall you left Loom over

68 out of 100 puts Cap in our Usable band, and it is not the top free plan score in its own category. OBS Studio scores 87 and ShareX 85, both of them free forever with nothing metered, while Cap holds rank 1 on our best free video recording tools list.

We are leaving that gap where it is rather than tuning it. Rank weighs the whole package, and Cap ranks first because it is the only tool here that reproduces Loom's record-and-send-a-link loop as software you can run yourself. The free plan score asks one narrower question, how far zero dollars gets you, and on that question a 5-minute cap loses to a recorder with no cap at all.

The shape of the number matters more than the number. Generosity is what drags it down, freedom is what holds it up, and the fourth pillar is a blank we would rather admit than fill: Cap has too few third-party reviews on file for us to report anything about how free users find it.

The cap you meet first is time, and it is enforced in two places (as of July 2026):

• 5 minutes per recording on the hosted free tier.
• 5 minutes per shareable link, so recording locally and trimming does not buy you a longer link.

Then comes the limit almost nobody reads, which is a licence rather than a counter. Cap's free tier is licensed for personal use only. A team cannot legitimately run on it however short the clips are, and commercial use starts at the $29 a year Desktop License. That restriction is unusual in this category, and it is the thing most likely to catch out a small business that thought it had found a free Loom.

What free keeps is unusually complete: the full Studio Mode editor with auto-zoom on clicks and background padding, 4K/60fps export, export to any format, and team workspaces. What it holds back is the hosted layer. AI titles, summaries, chapters and transcription, viewer analytics, a custom domain and password-protected shares all sit on Cap Pro at $12 per user per month.

Two structural limits close it out. The desktop recorder ships for macOS and Windows only, with no Linux build, so on Linux you are hosting Cap Web rather than recording with it. And the unlimited version of free means Docker Compose, object storage and somebody keeping it patched. "Free if you can run Docker" is a real sentence with a real cost inside it.

There is an odd step on this ladder worth understanding before you pay anything. The Desktop License at $29 a year buys unlimited local recording and editing plus commercial rights for one person, which is the cheapest way to make Cap legal for work. What it does not buy is longer links: it carries 20 cloud share links a month, still five minutes each. If your complaint is the length of your videos, $29 does not answer it.

The plan that does is Cap Pro at $12 per user per month, or $8.16 per user per month billed annually, where unlimited cloud storage and share links live alongside transcription, AI titles and chapters, viewer analytics, a custom domain and password-protected shares. Set that against Loom Business at $18 per user per month and you have the comparison Cap is built to win, which it does on price and loses on maturity.

Enterprise sits above with volume pricing, SLAs, SAML SSO and managed self-hosting, and carries no public figure.

The honest reading of this ladder is that its cheapest option is not on it. Self-hosting the open source stack costs nothing in licence fees and carries no recording limits, which makes every paid rung optional for anyone with a server. Among people who do pay, the upgrade trigger is the length cap first and the commercial-use licence second.

Free with limits, and the limit that decides the answer is not a number. The free tier is licensed for personal use, so anyone recording on behalf of a business is outside it on day one, whatever the length of their videos.

Who can genuinely live here: a person sending short personal clips, under five minutes, who wants the Studio Mode editor and 4K export at no cost. And separately, anyone who can stand up a Docker Compose stack, because self-hosted Cap has no recording cap, no commercial-use restriction and no bill beyond the server.

Who cannot: a two-person team on the hosted free tier, since that is outside the licence, and anyone whose walkthroughs run past five minutes, since trimming does not help when the link is capped too. For that second group, $29 a year is the wrong purchase and $12 a month is the right one.

If the five-minute wall is what brought you here, Kommodo's free plan removes it entirely and still hosts the video for you. Free Cap alternatives ranks the rest, and best free video recording tools puts the whole category side by side.