Focal vs Loom: recorded locally or shared from the cloud

Loom and Focal both record your screen on Windows, so they end up in the same searches, but they are hired for different jobs. Loom is video messaging: you record, the video lands in your Loom workspace, and you send a link your team can watch, comment on and react to. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, records to a file on your computer and makes it look edited, with zooms, a smooth cursor, captions and a frame. When a link to a quick explanation is the point, Loom is the right tool. When the recording is a demo or a tutorial, when you would rather it never left your computer, or when you do not want a subscription, Focal is.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, which means this comparison was written by one of the two products in it. I have tried to be fair anyway: where Loom is the better choice I say so plainly, and every fact about Loom below comes from Loom’s own pages.

What Loom is for

Loom’s home page describes it as a way to record and share AI-powered video messages with teammates and customers, and that is a fair summary. You record your screen, and the video becomes a page with a link. Viewers can leave comments and emoji reactions, the video can be embedded in other work tools, and Loom shows you who has watched it. The free Starter plan allows a workspace of up to 50 members.

And yes, Loom works on Windows. Its device compatibility page lists a desktop app for Windows 10 or above, with 8 GB of memory at minimum and 16 GB recommended, alongside a Mac app, a Chrome extension, and apps for iOS and Android. Loom has been part of Atlassian since October 2023, its help pages now live on Atlassian’s support site, and Jira and Confluence are among the tools it connects to.

Put together, that is hard to beat for a bug explained in two minutes rather than in a meeting where five people watch one person hunt for the right tab, or for a reply to a customer who needs to see where a setting is. A recording like that does not have to be pretty. It has to arrive, and Loom is very good at making it arrive.

What Focal is for

Focal is for the recording you publish or keep: a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video, a clip for a README or a pull request. You press Print Screen, pick a region, a window or the whole screen, and record. When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing. From there you set the cursor, captions, background and frame, or give the recording a saved style in one step, then export an MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or a GIF, to a folder on your computer.

What Focal does not do matters just as much, so here it is plainly. There is no cloud, no share link, no viewer analytics and no team workspace. If you need to know whether your manager watched the video, Focal cannot tell you. You will have to find out the old way, by asking and watching their face.

How the recording itself differs

The biggest difference is what gets saved when you press record. Focal records the screen without the cursor in it and logs the cursor’s position, clicks and shape as data, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Key timings are logged the same way. That is why the zooms, the cursor, the captions, the camera and the frame can all be changed after you record, instead of being settled for good the moment you press stop. Most recorders bake the cursor into the pixels. I wrote up why Focal records without the cursor if you want the longer reason.

In practice that means:

• Zooms follow your clicks and bursts of typing, easing in and out like a camera on a spring, and you can add, move, reshape or delete any of them on the zoom lane.
• The cursor glides instead of jittering, with a ripple on each click, and the standard cursors are drawn as vectors, sharp at any zoom.
• Captions are made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, in 26 languages, and you can correct any line, cut words from the video by selecting them in the captions list, or cut every “um” and “uh” in one click.
• A style saves the background, corners, shadow, camera bubble, captions and more by name, so every video in a series looks the same.

Loom’s features are aimed at the message rather than the picture. Its free plan lists transcriptions in more than 50 languages. Its Business + AI plan adds Loom AI: automatic titles, summaries and chapters, filler word removal and silence removal, and workflows that turn a video into a written document or fill in a Jira or Linear ticket from it. All of that makes a video quicker to send and quicker to understand, which is the whole job of a message. Loom’s AI page also says that OpenAI receives transcripts as text to write titles and summaries, but not the video or the audio.

Focal’s nearest equivalents, cutting filler words and tightening long pauses, happen on your computer with nothing sent anywhere. Focal does not write titles, summaries or tickets for you. The title is still yours to agonize over.

Where the files live, and why it matters

With Loom, the video lives in your Loom library on Loom’s service, and the link is the product. On the free Starter plan you cannot download your own videos: Loom’s help page on downloading says so directly. On Business and Business + AI, admins and creators can download a video as an MP4, up to 20 GB. Loom works through an account and a workspace, which is exactly what you want when a team shares videos, and exactly what you do not want for a recording that shows a client’s data, an unreleased product or your own inbox.

With Focal there is no account to make and nothing to sign in to. Recordings, edits and captions are made and kept on your computer, in Videos\Focal or a folder you pick, each recording a folder of its own. There is no telemetry and no crash reporting. Four things leave your computer and nothing else: the license check once you enter a key, the daily update check (which you can turn off in Settings), the speech model download the first time you make captions, and a Windows component the installer fetches if your computer lacks it. The privacy note lists each one. Because captions are made on your computer, what you say in a recording is never sent anywhere to be transcribed.

This is the reason I built Focal the way I did, and I wrote about it at more length in your screen recording should stay on your computer. A screen recording catches more than you meant to show: a notification from the group chat, a browser tab you forgot was open, a file name you would rather not explain. When the file is on your computer, you see it before anyone else does.

The trade-off is real, and it lands on you. Sharing a Focal recording is your job: you export an MP4 and put it on YouTube, your website, a pull request or a chat. If you want to hand the editable project to someone who also uses Focal, the Projects window packs a recording into a single .focalproj file they open with a double-click. None of that is a share link with view counts, and it is not trying to be.

What each one costs

Loom is a subscription billed per user. On its pricing page, Starter is free, with 25 videos per person, screen recordings up to 5 minutes and quality up to 720p. Business is $18 per user per month billed monthly, with unlimited videos and recording time, quality up to 4K, uploads and downloads, and no Loom branding. Business + AI is $24 per user per month and adds Loom AI. Enterprise is priced through sales. Loom’s FAQ says paying annually saves 17%.

Focal is $99 once, or $79 at launch with the code LAUNCH at checkout. That covers one person on up to 3 computers, with every update published in the following 12 months. After that, the version you have keeps working with no reminder and no lock, and an optional $49 renewal adds another year of updates. Commercial use is included, and you can get a refund within 14 days of buying. The details are on the pricing page, and my reasons are in why Focal costs $99 once and not $10 a month.

For one person, Loom’s Business plan at the monthly price passes Focal’s one-time price in the sixth month. I will admit that comparison is a little unfair to Loom, because a Loom subscription pays for hosting, links and viewer insights that Focal does not offer at all. It is a bit like comparing a gym membership with a set of dumbbells: only one of them comes with a building.

If you would rather try it before doing any arithmetic, Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor’s preview shows a “Made with Focal” watermark.

Focal and Loom side by side

Loom’s details were checked on 2026-11-02 on loom.com and Loom’s help pages. Plans change more often than comparison articles do, so look again before you buy.

Which one should you pick

Pick Loom when the link is the point

You explain things to a team that is not in the same room, you want to know who watched, you want comments under the video, or your company already lives in Jira and Confluence. Loom’s free plan is enough for short messages. Loom also runs on Macs and phones, and Focal only runs on Windows, so a team on mixed computers is covered by Loom and not by Focal. Focal has nothing like Loom’s sharing, and I would not pretend it does.

Pick Focal when the video is the point

You are recording a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video or a clip for a README, and you want it to look edited without the “quick” edit that somehow takes all evening. You would be uncomfortable seeing the recording on someone else’s server before you have watched it yourself. You want captions made without uploading anything. Or you would simply rather pay once than per user per month. The guide to recording a product demo video on Windows walks through a full recording, and adding captions to a screen recording without uploading it covers the captions.

Use both when you do both kinds of work

Plenty of people should. Loom for the two-minute reply to a teammate, Focal for the video that goes on the website. A Focal export is an ordinary MP4, so if you want it in your Loom library too, Loom’s pricing page lists uploading videos on Business and above.

If you are not sure which you need, download the Focal trial, record the next thing you would have sent as a Loom, and see whether what you made is a message or a video.