ShareX gives you Loom's share link, served from a bucket you pay for

ShareX scores 85, the bottom edge of our Outstanding band, and it sits second in this category behind OBS Studio at 87. Both of them outscore Cap at 68, which holds rank 1 on our best free video recording tools list, and we have left that inversion alone on purpose: rank weighs the whole package, the score only asks how far zero dollars goes.

Where ShareX separates itself from OBS is the pillar about what is attached to the word free. It gets closer to the hosted tools' actual job than anything else that costs nothing, because links served from storage in your own name cannot be taken down by a vendor, capped by a plan, or made to expire when you stop paying somebody.

The pillar that keeps it below 90 is not a limitation of the free tier at all, since there is no paid tier. It is that we hold one third-party rating for it and nothing at all about the part people struggle with, which is the interface.

Nothing about ShareX is metered. No account, no ads, no watermark, no feature gates and no paid version, on a project that has shipped continuously since 2007 (verified July 2026). What it asks of you instead is work and a platform, and both are worth naming plainly.

• Windows only. There is no macOS or Linux build. Mac users looking for the quick-clip half of this should read Kap's free plan instead.
• Out of the box you get a file, not a link. The share link everyone praises exists only after you configure an upload destination. That is a one-time job of a few minutes, and it is a few minutes many people never do.
• You pay the storage provider. S3, Google Cloud Storage or R2 bills you directly, usually cents a month for a few hundred clips, but it is a bill in your name and a bucket you have to keep configured.
• The interface is dense. The main window is a wall of options and the first-run experience is intimidating rather than welcoming.
• No transcription, no captions, no viewer analytics, no comments. Everything Loom does after the upload is absent.
• Camera overlay is not its strength, so talking-head walkthroughs belong somewhere else.

Video editing stops at trimming, so anything more involved means a real editor.

There is no pricing ladder because there is no vendor selling anything. GPL-3.0, no paid edition, no ads, no upsell, and no plan to compare a free tier against.

What replaces the subscription is an infrastructure line item you control. Object storage for a few hundred screenshots and clips runs to cents a month on S3, Google Cloud Storage or R2, and the cost scales with what you actually store rather than with how many people on your team record. That is the structural difference worth understanding: Loom prices per creator at $18 per user per month, so ten occasional recorders is $180 a month, while ShareX costs the same whether one person uses it or forty, because the only meter is bytes.

The one genuine expense is your afternoon. Configuring a capture chain, an annotation step and an upload destination is not hard, but it is a task, and if nobody in your team wants to own it then a hosted tool is the cheaper answer despite the price. Where ShareX pays back is repetition: set it up once and the link keeps landing on your clipboard for years, with nothing to renew.

Yes, without qualification on the software. GPL-3.0, no account, no watermark, no tier, no expiry, and no way for anyone to change those terms retroactively on a copy you already have.

Who lives here happily: Windows users who take a lot of screenshots and want them annotated and uploaded automatically, developers filing bug reports where a GIF beats a paragraph, documentation teams who need scrolling capture and OCR, and anyone who wants share links that keep working because the storage is in their own account. The free plan does not run out for any of them.

Who should not: Mac and Linux users, since there is no build. Anyone who wants a face on camera with a transcript and a comment thread, since that is a different product. And anyone who will not spend the setup afternoon, because without an upload destination ShareX is a very good capture tool with the best part switched off.

For the talking-head version of this job, Cap's free plan is the closest free equivalent with hosting included. Free ShareX alternatives covers the cross-platform options, and best free video recording tools ranks the category.