OpenScreen: The Free Screen Studio Alternative for Mac, Windows and Linux
MIT-licensed, free for commercial use, and shipping about a dozen commits a day — with a homepage that says it isn’t production-grade yet.
OpenScreen - free, open-source screen recorder and demo editor
Alternative to: Screen Studio - $108/yr, macOS only
Licence: MIT - free for commercial use
Runs on: macOS, Windows, Linux
Traction: 1,400 stars - 774 commits - 29 open issues
Shipping: ~12 commits a day - 10 releases in the last 7 days
Maturity: v1.9.3-rc.1, and their own site says "not production-grade"Links: Repo - Site - Hacker News, 434 points
Figures as of 10 August 2026.
It shipped two releases the day I wrote this. Its own homepage says don't trust it yet.
I went looking for a screen recorder because we're in the process of re-recording the entire help library for Pictor, our photo booth software, ahead of a v2 launch. Dozens of short videos, each one showing somebody exactly which button to press.
OpenScreen is the one that stopped me. It's free, MIT licensed, runs on all three platforms, and it is being built at a pace I have rarely seen on a project this small - while telling you plainly on its own front page that it isn't finished.
What it does
You record your screen. Then it drops you into a real multi-track timeline where you trim, split and layer clips - and it automatically smooths your cursor and zooms in on whatever you're clicking. Captions, webcam picture-in-picture, and a local AI agent that will scan a track for silences and cut them.
That automatic zoom is the whole reason this category exists, and it's the thing OBS won't do for you:
"It's the automatic zooming animations. I've not found any OBS scripts that can do this?" - gargan
The appeal for anyone with a library to record is that there is nothing to learn:
"I am only interested in creating short demo videos in as little time as possible. OBS is an advanced software that requires me to learn to use it. I just downloaded this and had a zoom effect video from the first attempt. The learning curve is roughly zero." - csomar
What it replaces
Screen Studio - the tool OpenScreen is explicitly built against. $29/month billed monthly, or $9/month billed yearly, so $108 a year. macOS only. If you've seen conflicting figures online, both numbers are correct; they're different billing terms. OpenScreen does the same job for nothing, on three platforms.
One caveat on the saving, because it's the part I didn't expect. A screen recorder is only one slice of documenting software. Loom hosts and shares but won't polish - and its free tier caps you at 25 videos and five minutes, so it's out for a help library on day one; Business is $18/user/month, $216 a year. Cap does both jobs but charges for the good half. And the written step-by-step guides are a different tool again: we pay $40 a month for that, which is $480 a year.
Here is the actual arithmetic, because subtraction is the wrong operation.
Guideless on its own is $480 a year. Add Screen Studio and the documentation bill becomes $588. Add a Loom Business seat instead and it is $696. Add Cap’s desktop licence and it is $509. Add OpenScreen and it stays at $480.
OpenScreen does not reduce my bill. It stops the bill going up. I was never paying Screen Studio, so nothing leaves my account either way — what a free recorder buys is that the recorder line never appears. It is the one item in this stack I can take to zero, and taking it to zero still leaves $480, because the expensive part was never the recorder.
Is it actually live
1,400 stars. 774 commits. 29 open issues against 55 closed. MIT.
And then the number that actually matters. The last commit landed the day I wrote this, at 17:54 UTC. The thirty-five most recent commits span three days - nineteen that day, five the day before, eleven before that. Around a dozen commits a day. On releases: ten in seven days, with v1.9.2 and v1.9.3-rc.1 both shipping the same afternoon.
For a 1,400-star project that is a remarkable rate, and it is being maintained by more than one person - siddharthvaddem started it, EtienneLescot is cutting the releases.
The honest catch
Their own homepage says "Pre-release - work in progress" and "OpenScreen is not production-grade. Expect rough edges while we build in the open."
I'm quoting that rather than softening it. But read it next to the cadence, not instead of it: a dozen commits a day is not a project winding down, it's exactly what "building in the open" looks like from the outside. Pilot it in three weeks and it won't be the software it is today.
The dissent worth more than the warning comes from someone who tried this substitution and reversed it:
"I used ScreenStudio for a year. Then, when my annual subscription was up for renewal I tried cap.so and screensage.pro. After experiencing many bugs and UX oddities with both of those, I went back to ScreenStudio. ScreenStudio is reliable and produces the best results for my use case (educational content and client updates)." - canxerian
"Educational content and client updates" is my use case in his words. One report isn't a verdict, but it's the failure mode to design a pilot around.
The licence, which is refreshingly boring
OpenScreen is MIT, and its own description says "no subscriptions, no watermarks, and free for commercial use." One document, no tier, no asterisk. You can use it for company work without reading anything twice.
I'm flagging that as a feature because it isn't the norm. "Open source" and "free to do whatever you want" are different claims. Copyleft licences carry real conditions - the AGPL, for instance, obliges you to hand over source if you modify the code and let people use it over a network. And a project can be open source while its prebuilt app and hosted service run on separate tier rules: Cap's code is AGPLv3, which permits commercial use, while Cap's free plan says personal use only. Both true, two different documents, and skimming the words "open source" walks you past the second one.
The habit worth forming: check the licence and the pricing page, because they answer different questions. OpenScreen is the rare case where you only need to read one.
Would I install it
Yes, and it's already queued. Three Pictor help videos, timed end to end, record to embed - the same three I'll run through the paid options, so the comparison is real rather than theoretical.
What I expect to go wrong: the "not production-grade" warning is not decoration, and a fifty-video library is precisely the workload that finds rough edges. If it survives three videos it earns the next twenty.
If it survives that, there's a field report in it.
Credits
siddharthvaddem and EtienneLescot, on OpenScreen.
gargan, csomar and canxerian on Hacker News, whose thread is the only real community evidence on this tool, and whose dissent is the most useful part of it.
Pricing verified against Screen Studio, Loom and Cap.