Loom's free plan is 25 videos of five minutes, and the five minutes is the wall

47 puts Loom in our Limited band, which reads "works as a taste of the product, not as a way to get the job done". It is the lowest score of any tool with a free plan in this category, below Cap at 68 and a long way below OBS Studio at 87 and ShareX at 85.

That is not a verdict on the product. Loom invented this job and still does the end-to-end loop better than anything else here: record with a camera bubble, upload, transcribe and hand over a link with comments, reactions and watch tracking, all of which the free tier includes. Feature depth is comfortably its strongest pillar for that reason.

What drags the total down is the pair of counters and, more quietly, what happens to your library if you ever stop paying. The pillars below carry the detail, and the second one is the part people discover late.

The free Starter plan is defined by two numbers and one structural fact (verified July 2026).

• 5 minutes per recording. This is the limit people actually hit. Onboarding walkthroughs, bug reproductions and design reviews all run long, and the workaround is recording the same thing twice.
• 25 videos per person. Our data records the allowance as 25 videos per person and does not record a reset period, so we will not tell you it refreshes monthly. Treat the number as the allowance and check your own account before planning around it.
• Up to 50 members per workspace, which is generous and is not the constraint for anyone.

Then the part that is not a limit so much as a cost of entry. Your videos live on Loom's servers, and every link you have already shared points there. Downgrading or leaving means dealing with the 25-video ceiling and whatever sits above it, so the practical advice is to download the recordings that matter before you change plans rather than after.

Held back on free: custom branding, drawing tools, engagement insights, and everything AI, which starts at $24 per user per month. There is also no self-hosting and no local-only mode, which rules Loom out entirely for teams that cannot send customer screens to a third party.

The first paid step is Business at $18 per user per month, and what it buys is both limits at once: unlimited videos and unlimited recording length, plus custom branding, drawing tools and engagement insights. As an upgrade that is proportionate. As a bill it depends entirely on one word in the pricing model.

Loom prices per creator, not per viewer. That means cost scales with how many people record rather than how many people watch, which is the opposite of how async video actually spreads through a company. Ten occasional recorders is $180 a month, and each of them may only send two videos a week. Business plus AI is $24 per user per month for AI titles, summaries, chapters and task lists, and Enterprise is quote-based with advanced security and admin controls. Annual billing takes up to 17% off.

There is no small rung between free and $18, which is the gap this category's free tools live in. Cap Pro is $12 per user per month for a comparable hosted workflow, Cap's Desktop License is $29 a year for unlimited local recording with commercial rights, and Kommodo currently gives the recording and hosting away with no published price at all. The single feature people upgrade to Loom for is the length cap, and that is the one every free alternative here attacks first.

No, and our answer is taster. Twenty-five videos capped at five minutes each is a demonstration of the smoothest workflow in this category rather than a plan you can work on, which is exactly what a score of 47 describes.

Who can genuinely live on it: someone sending short clips occasionally, a manager who records one two-minute update a fortnight, or a team evaluating whether async video replaces a standing meeting before anyone signs off on a budget. The free tier is a good evaluation and includes transcription, comments and watch tracking, which is more than most free trials give away.

Who cannot: anyone recording daily, because both counters move fast; anyone whose explanations run past five minutes, which is most people explaining anything; and any team with more than a couple of recorders, because $18 per creator per month adds up before the value does.

If that is you, free Loom alternatives is the ranked list. Kommodo's free plan removes the length cap for nothing, and Cap's free plan keeps the same workflow with a self-hosting escape hatch. The category comparison is at best free video recording tools.