Methodology
How we acquire tools
Every tool reviewed on this site is purchased with our own funds. We do not accept review copies, vendor-supplied accounts, or sponsored placements. The affiliate commissions we earn from some links are disclosed on every page. Those commissions never affect our scores or verdicts.
Test duration
Every review represents a minimum of 30 days of active use. We use each tool for real work — actual recordings sent to real colleagues, actual tutorials produced for real audiences — not synthetic benchmarks. Pricing is checked at the time of publication and marked with a "last tested" date.
Evaluation criteria
We score each tool on a 0-10 scale across five dimensions, weighted by the tool's primary use case:
- Speed to link (weight 30% for async tools): time from "stop recording" to "link copied."
- Output quality (weight 30% for production tools): visual clarity, audio fidelity, compression at export.
- Editing depth (weight 20% for production tools): zoom, callouts, multi-track, template library.
- Pricing honesty (weight 20% for all): what the free tier actually delivers vs what marketing claims.
- Platform reliability (weight 20% for all): crash rate, export failures, upload errors in our test period.
The published score is a weighted average across these dimensions. "Best for" and "skip if" verdicts are qualitative judgments based on the same test period.
Pricing
All prices are as published on the vendor's website at the time of the "last tested" date. We note when pricing changed between major reviews. We do not predict future price changes, but we note acquisition events (e.g., Atlassian's 2023 Loom acquisition) that historically precede price increases.
Realism floor
Every commercial page (review, comparison, use-case) includes a "what to actually expect" block. This is not a disclaimer — it's the most useful piece of information on the page. It tells you what the typical first month looks like in terms of time, money, and effort, based on our actual experience. Vendors never tell you this. We do.