OBS Studio has no free plan, because it has never had a paid one
Asking what OBS Studio's free plan includes is asking the wrong question, and that is genuinely good news. There is no tier structure, no account, no watermark, no recording length limit and no paid version to be upsold to (verified July 2026). The project is funded by sponsorships from companies including YouTube, Twitch, NVIDIA and AMD, plus donations.
So this page is not about where the free plan stops. It is about the other cost, the one that does not appear on a pricing page: OBS ends at a video file on your disk, and getting it to another human being is entirely your problem.
Facts checked July 2026
OBS Studio free plan at a glance
- Free plan score
- 87/100Outstanding
- Is it really free?
- Yes, genuinely free
- Paid plans from
- No paid plans
87 out of 100, the highest score in this category and only rank 4
87 puts OBS Studio in our Outstanding band, which we define as being able to run real work on it for free, indefinitely. It is the highest free plan score in this category, ahead of ShareX at 85 and well ahead of Cap at 68, which holds the rank 1 badge on our best free video recording tools list.
That divergence is deliberate and we are not hiding it. Rank weighs the whole package for the job most people arrive with, which is recording a short walkthrough and sending someone a link, and OBS does not do the second half of that at all. The free plan score asks only how far zero dollars gets you, and nothing gets you further than software with no tiers, no telemetry gate and no feature you could unlock by paying.
Both readings are true at once. If your job is capture quality and length, OBS wins outright. If your job is a link in Slack, it is not really competing.
87/100
Outstanding
Free with no limits at all, and an hour of setup before your first recording.
- Free plan generosity35% of the score
97/100
There is no ceiling to hit. No account, no watermark, no recording length limit, no video count, and no paid tier to be upsold to, on Windows, macOS and Linux, funded by sponsorships and donations (verified July 2026). Almost nothing else on the internet at this capability level asks for nothing.
- Feature depth for the category25% of the score
80/100
On the local capture job, this is the deepest free tier in the category: scene mixing across screens, windows, cameras and audio devices, filters, plugins, hardware encoding, and live streaming to Twitch, YouTube or any RTMP endpoint. On the async video job it does nothing, because there is no cloud, no link, no transcript and no analytics, and it cannot even trim a mistake without a separate editor.
- Freedom and honesty20% of the score
98/100
GPL-2.0, no account, no card, no watermark, no telemetry gate and no feature you can unlock by paying, because there is nothing to pay for. The file is yours, on your disk, in a format you chose. The cost is not a string attached, it is an hour of your time configuring scenes, sources, encoders and bitrates before the first take.
- What free users report20% of the score
68/100
OBS has no paid tier, so the one score we hold, Capterra 4.7 (checked 24 July 2026), is a free-tier rating by definition. A single provider is not a pattern though, and we hold nothing about how people fare with the setup curve specifically, so it sits above the middle rather than high.
Scored July 2026. How we calculate the free plan score.
No usage limits at all, so the limitations are shape, not size
There is no cap to report, so read this section as what OBS is not rather than where it stops. All of these are current as of July 2026.
- No cloud, no share links, no transcript, no viewer analytics. OBS ends at a file. Everything Loom does after the recording stops, OBS leaves to you.
- No editing. Trimming a fumbled sentence means opening a separate video editor, because OBS is a capture and broadcast console, not a post-production tool.
- The setup curve is the real price. Scenes, sources, audio tracks, encoders, bitrates and output paths all want configuring before your first take. Budget about an hour, once.
- Defaults are tuned for streaming, so a first recording often comes out larger or lower quality than it should until you change the output settings.
- It is overspecified for a 90-second clip, which is most of what people actually record. Building a scene to explain a spreadsheet is absurd, and we say so.
Platform support is the one place there is nothing to caveat: Windows 10 and 11, macOS 12.0 or newer on both Intel and Apple Silicon, and Linux, where OBS is close to the only serious option in this category.
Nothing to buy, and the costs that show up anyway
There is no ladder to explain and no first paid step to weigh, which makes this the shortest pricing story on the site. OBS Studio is GPL-2.0-or-later, sustained by sponsorships and donations, and there has never been a paid edition to compare the free one against.
The costs are real, they are just not invoiced. The first is time, roughly an hour of configuration before your first usable recording, and then close to zero forever after. The second is storage and delivery: a 40-minute 1080p recording is a large file, and if you want somebody else to watch it you are paying for Google Drive, YouTube, a bucket, or the patience of whoever you send it to. The third is your own hardware, since recording quality is bounded by the encoder in your machine rather than by a plan tier.
Set against the alternatives, that is a favourable trade almost everywhere except convenience. Loom Business is $18 per user per month for unlimited length; OBS gives unlimited length free and unlimited quality on top, and takes away the link. Plenty of people keep OBS installed alongside a hosted recorder and use each for what it is good at, which is the honest recommendation rather than a compromise.
Free
Free
Every feature OBS has: unlimited recording, live streaming, scene mixing, filters, plugins, and hardware encoding
None
As of July 2026. Check current pricing on the OBS Studio pricing page.
Is OBS Studio really free? Yes, with no asterisk on the money
You can do the job this tool exists for, indefinitely, without paying.
Yes. Not a free tier, not a community edition with features held back, not open core with a commercial directory: the whole product, forever, with no account and no upsell. Among the tools on this site, that answer applies to a small handful, and OBS is the most capable member of it.
Who can live here permanently: anyone recording courses, webinars, long walkthroughs or gameplay, anyone streaming to Twitch, YouTube or an RTMP endpoint, anyone who needs control of encoder, bitrate and frame rate, and every Linux user in this category. None of those people will ever see a paywall.
Who should look elsewhere: someone who wants to record 90 seconds and paste a link. That is not a criticism of OBS, it is a different product category, and the honest advice is to install both.
If the link is what you need, Kommodo's free plan hosts unlimited-length recordings at no cost and Cap's free plan gives you the self-hostable version of the same idea. Free OBS Studio alternatives covers the lighter options, and best free video recording tools ranks them all.
Frequently asked questions about OBS Studio
Is OBS Studio really free with no catch?
Yes. It is GPL-2.0-or-later software funded by sponsorships and donations, with no account, no watermark, no recording cap and no paid version to upgrade to (verified July 2026). The only cost is the setup time and the file you end up hosting yourself.
Can OBS Studio replace Loom?
Only the recording half. OBS records at far higher quality than Loom and has no length limit, but there is no upload, no share link, no transcript and no viewer analytics, so you still need somewhere to put the file. For the link itself, Kommodo and Cap are the free options worth comparing.
How long does OBS Studio take to set up?
Expect about an hour before your first good recording, spent on scenes, sources, audio tracks, encoder and output settings. After that it is fast forever. It is the steepest learning curve in this category and the only real price the software asks.
Where to go next
If this free plan does not stretch far enough, these are the tools we would look at instead.