ScreenArt Pro vs Loom: a screen recorder that keeps the video on your PC

Why this comparison exists

Loom made “let me just record this” a normal thing to say at work. Press record, talk over your screen, and a link appears in the clipboard before the video has finished uploading. Atlassian bought it for that habit.

The habit has a cost that is easy to miss until it is a problem. Every Loom recording lives on Loom’s servers. Access is a link. The free plan stops at 25 videos of five minutes, and the plan that removes those limits is $18 per user per month. For a team of ten that is $2,160 a year, or $1,800 on annual billing, for video hosting.

ScreenArt Pro is a different kind of tool with a different answer to the same need. It records on your Windows PC, turns the raw take into a polished clip in a timeline editor, covers anything sensitive on its own, and writes a file. Where the file goes is up to you. This article compares the two honestly: what Loom is genuinely best at, what ScreenArt Pro does that Loom cannot, and why “the file stays on my PC” saves more than a subscription.

The short version in one table

	ScreenArt Pro	Loom
What it is	Screen recorder and screenshot editor for Windows; output is a file	Hosted video messaging; output is a link on Loom’s servers
Platform	Windows 10 and 11 (x64). Mac planned.	Mac, Windows, Chrome, iOS, Android
Price	€1.99 a month, or €24.99 once with two years of updates	Starter free (25 videos, 5 minutes, 720p); Business $18 a user a month; Business + AI $24; 17% off annually
Two years, one person	€24.99	About $360 (Business, annual)
Per-seat pricing	No	Yes
Where the video lives	Your disk	Loom’s servers
Account required	No	Yes
Recording caps	None	25 videos and 5 minutes on Starter; none on paid plans
Editing	Timeline: auto-zoom on clicks, smoothed cursor, captions, keystroke badges, intros, transitions, 3D card, GPU effects	Trim, stitch, filler-word and silence removal, CTAs; auto-zoom in recent versions
Subtitles	Generated on your PC; burn in or export SRT and VTT; transcript edit ripple-cuts the video	Cloud transcription, hosted captions, AI titles and summaries
Hiding secrets	Smart Redact: automatic, colour-matched, every frame a secret is visible; also in screenshots	None automatic
Screenshots	Full editor with physical-pixel capture, annotations, Beautify, brand kits	Basic capture and markup in the desktop app
Webcam	Shaped overlay	Bubble with background options, reactions
Viewer features	None; the viewer is whatever plays the file	Comments, emoji reactions, view counts, notifications
AI agent control	MCP server, 25 tools: record a scripted demo, replay a walkthrough, capture numbered screenshot sets	None
Export	MP4 (H.264), WebM with alpha, GIF; 16:9, 1:1, 4:5, 9:16 from one project	MP4 download; 720p on Starter, up to 4K paid
Offline	Everything on the PC	Needs the service to upload, host and play

Loom’s prices and plan limits were read from loom.com/pricing in October 2026. They change often; the date above will move when they do.

What Loom does well

• The async message. Record, talk, paste a link. The teammate watches at 1.5x, leaves an emoji at the moment they mean, and you get a notification. For “here is what I was thinking about the design”, nothing is faster.
• It works everywhere. Mac, Windows, a Chrome extension, phones. The viewer needs nothing but a browser.
• Viewer analytics and comments are built in, which matters for sales outreach and onboarding videos.
• The AI layer writes titles, summaries and chapters and strips filler words, and the hosted page is tidy.

If your recordings are messages, meant to be watched once by someone you work with, Loom is the right tool and the free tier may be all you need. The rest of this article is about recordings that are products: demos, tutorials, help-centre clips, release-note videos, things you publish and keep.

The privacy case, made plainly

Everything you record with Loom goes to Loom’s servers before anyone sees it. That is the design, not a flaw, and it creates a list of things to think about that simply do not exist when the video is a file on your disk:

• Who can open the link. Loom links default to anyone with the URL in many workspaces. A recording of your admin console, a customer’s account, a billing page or a terminal is one forwarded Slack message from a stranger.
• What is in the frame. Loom has no automatic redaction. If a customer’s email, an API key or a card number scrolled past, it is now hosted, indexed in the workspace, and in the transcript.
• Retention and deletion. A recording you want gone has to be deleted on a vendor’s system, with whatever copies, transcripts and CDN caches that implies. A file you want gone is a file you delete.
• Where the data sits. For teams with data-residency or customer-data rules, a video of a production dashboard on a third-party US cloud is a compliance question. A file in your own Drive or SharePoint is already covered by the rules you have.
• What happens when the vendor changes. Pricing, plan limits, retention policies and ownership have all changed at Loom in the last few years. Files on your disk do not change terms.

ScreenArt Pro removes the list. Capture, editing, text recognition, redaction, transcription and export run on your PC. Nothing is uploaded, no account is needed to run the app, and the output is an MP4 you share with the tools and permissions your organisation already trusts. Smart Redact finds emails, API keys, bearer tokens, JWTs, card numbers, IBANs, phone numbers and IP addresses in the recording and covers each one in the colour sampled from around it, for every frame it is visible, before the file exists. The headache of “did we leak something in that Loom” is not a smaller headache; it is gone.

Where ScreenArt Pro goes further

The take becomes a demo, not a message

Loom’s editor trims and stitches. ScreenArt Pro records the screen and opens the take in an editor where the polish is already on the timeline:

• a zoom that follows your clicks and bursts of typing, easing out when you pause, each zoom a clip you can move or delete
• a smoothed cursor you can scale up, give a glass look, or hide
• captions and keystroke badges placed where they happened
• a magnetic timeline where deleting a clip closes the gap
• sixteen intro styles, twelve transition kinds, a framed card on a backdrop with a 3D tilt and motion blur, grain, halation and colour looks, rendered on the GPU
• MP4, WebM with transparency and GIF, in 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 or 9:16 from one project

That is the look product teams pay Screen Studio $108 a year for on a Mac, on Windows, in the same app as the screenshot editor. The recording page walks through each piece.

Subtitles and voice cleanup without a cloud

Loom transcribes on its servers. ScreenArt Pro generates subtitles from your voice with a speech model that runs on your machine, lets you fix the words, and burns them in or exports SRT and VTT alongside. Editing the transcript ripple-cuts the video, so removing an “um” from the text removes it from the take. Clean up voice removes room noise from the mic track. None of it leaves the PC, and none of it is metered.

Screenshots in the same editor

Loom is a video tool with a basic screenshot. ScreenArt Pro’s screenshot editor captures at the physical pixels of the display, keeps counters, arrows, boxes and captions as editable layers, runs the same Smart Redact, and puts the capture on the same backdrop, corners, shadow, lighting and 3D tilt as the video, with Beautify doing all of it in one click. A brand kit carries one look across both.

An AI agent can record the demo

ScreenArt Pro runs as an MCP server, the open protocol Claude, Codex and most coding assistants use to call tools. Once it is added in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client, your agent can send a script of clicks, typing and key presses; ScreenArt Pro moves the real pointer on the live app, finds each target by its visible label, zooms to it, sketches a circle or arrow where the pointer lands, adds captions, and returns a finished MP4, GIF or WebM. Rehearse a task once and the agent can replay it as a clean recording when the UI changes. It can also take a numbered, cropped, annotated set of screenshots from one sentence. You approve each session, anything that moves the mouse asks again, and Esc stops everything. The automation page lists all 25 tools.

For the release-notes video that someone on the team records every two weeks, this is the difference between an afternoon and a sentence.

Where Loom is still the right choice

• The recording is a message, watched once, with a comment thread. Loom’s viewer, notifications and reactions are built for exactly that.
• You need a hosted page with analytics for sales outreach or onboarding, and the viewer must need nothing but a browser.
• You work on a Mac or a phone. ScreenArt Pro is Windows-only until the Mac app ships.
• You want the AI summary and chapters on a hosted page.

Price, in full

Loom’s Starter plan is free, with 25 videos per person, five minutes per recording and 720p. Business is $18 per user per month, Business + AI is $24, and annual billing takes 17% off, so about $15 and $20. Every plan is per seat.

ScreenArt Pro has two plans, and the whole app is in both:

• €1.99 a month. Every update for as long as you subscribe. Cancel from your account.
• €24.99 once. Two years of updates, then keep the last version you installed for as long as you like.

Two years of Loom Business for one person is about $360. Two years of ScreenArt Pro is €24.99, with no per-seat pricing, no video cap, no length cap, and no hosting bill because there is no hosting. Polar is the merchant of record, so there is a VAT-compliant invoice at checkout, and both plans have a 14-day refund.

It is cheaper for the same reason it is private: there is no cloud behind it. One person’s app, everything on your PC, nothing metered.

Who should pick which

• A product team making demos, tutorials and release-note videos: ScreenArt Pro. Auto-zoom, captions, a 3D card, secrets covered, and a file you publish where you like.
• A developer recording anything with real data on screen: ScreenArt Pro. Smart Redact covers it before the file exists, and nothing is uploaded.
• A team with data-residency or customer-data rules: ScreenArt Pro. The recording never leaves your controls.
• A documentation team that wants demos on demand: ScreenArt Pro, for the MCP server and walkthrough replay.
• Anyone sending a two-minute “here is what I mean” to a colleague: Loom, and the free tier is fine.

The bottom line

Loom is hosted video messaging, excellent at the quick async note, priced per seat, with every recording on its servers behind a link. ScreenArt Pro is a screen recorder and screenshot editor for Windows that keeps the file on your PC, makes the take look like a launch video, covers secrets on its own, and lets an AI agent record for you. €1.99 a month or €24.99 once, no seats, nothing hosted, nothing to leak.

Record a window, open it in the editor, and watch the zooms land where you clicked. If it is not the one, the refund takes 14 days.