Focal vs OBS Studio for demo videos

If you stream, combine several sources in one picture, capture games, work on a Mac or Linux, or need something free, use OBS Studio. If you record software demos on Windows and want them to come out zoomed on your clicks, with a smooth cursor, captions and a frame, with no scene to set up beforehand and no editing session afterwards, use Focal, a screen recorder for Windows. OBS can make a good demo, but it asks for setup before you record and an editor after. Focal does that one job, and it costs $99 once where OBS is free.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, so you are watching a game refereed by someone who owns one of the teams, and you should weigh the calls with that in mind. OBS makes fairness easy: it is excellent software, and this is not a takedown. Everything here about OBS was checked on its own site and knowledge base on 2026-11-02.

What OBS Studio is built for

OBS Studio calls itself “free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.” It runs on Windows 10 and 11, macOS 13 or newer, and Linux, and its model is the broadcast. You build scenes out of sources (a display, a window, a game, a webcam, images, text, a browser page, a capture card) and switch between them while you stream or record. Around that sit an audio mixer with filters such as noise suppression, transitions, a Studio Mode that previews a scene before it goes live, hotkeys for almost everything, and plugins and scripts in Lua or Python. Add it all up and you have a television control room that costs nothing, which I still find slightly unreal.

That model is why OBS can do nearly anything. It is also why an OBS recording is exactly what the scene looked like while you recorded: OBS composes the picture live and writes it to a video file, and the file is what you get.

What a demo needs that OBS leaves to you

A demo watched on a laptop or a phone needs zooms so the viewer can read what you clicked, a cursor that is easy to follow, captions for people watching with the sound off, a frame, and often a second shape for Shorts. In OBS, each of these is a job for you. Here is how each one goes.

Zooming in on what you click

You can crop and resize a capture in the scene by hand, or reach for one of the community scripts listed on the OBS forum, such as Zoom to Mouse, which zooms a display capture toward the cursor when you press a hotkey. Either way the zoom happens while you record and lands in the picture. If it came late or framed the wrong thing, the fix is an editor or another take, and the take is always the one where everything else finally went right.

The cursor is in the pixels

Display, window and game capture in OBS each have a Capture Cursor setting, on by default. On, the cursor is captured into the picture. Off, it is left out. You make that choice before you press record, and from then on the cursor is pixels like everything else on screen: a video file does not let you make it larger, smooth its path or change its look. If you circled the Save button three times while you worked out what to say, the video will remember that for you. For a recording with no cursor at all, there is a guide on how to record your screen without the cursor on Windows.

Captions for viewers with the sound off

The OBS community has caption plugins. LocalVocal, listed on the OBS forum, runs a speech model on your computer and can save captions as an .srt file. The other route is a captioning tool once you have stopped recording. Either way, the setup is yours, and so is the job of putting the captions and the video together.

A frame around the recording

A frame in OBS is something you build into the scene: an image or color source behind the capture, with the capture resized to leave a margin. Once it is built, the scene is there for the next recording, which is one of the genuinely nice things about working in scenes.

Other shapes for Shorts and posts

OBS records at the canvas size in its video settings, and its own overview notes that changing that size means realigning or resizing your sources. So a vertical version for Shorts is a second layout and another take, or a crop in an editor, which keeps a tall, narrow strip of the picture and leaves you hoping the thing you clicked was inside it.

How Focal handles each

Focal records one window, region or monitor. Press Print Screen, then drag a region, click a window or press Enter for the whole screen. A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. There is no scene to build. A key press and a rectangle are about as much ceremony as a demo deserves.

The part that makes the rest possible: 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. Because the cursor and your clicks are data rather than pixels, everything that depends on them is made after you stop, and can be changed again later.

• Zooms. The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and bursts of typing. They ease in and out like a spring, zooms close together join into one that pans, and you choose what starts one. Press Z to add a zoom by hand, or K for a keyframe that moves the focus or changes the level. The zoom section of the home page shows one moving.
• The cursor. Raw mouse paths become a steady glide with a ripple on each click. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp at any zoom and any size, with an optional halo or spotlight.
• Captions. A speech model that runs on your computer (about 190 MB, downloaded the first time) writes them in 26 languages. Correct any line, save an .srt, export a track viewers can switch on, or draw them into the picture in one of six looks.
• The frame. A background, padding, corners, a shadow and an optional macOS or Windows title bar, saved as a Style that any recording takes in one step.
• Shapes. 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 or the source’s own, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each, exported as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps or as a GIF.

Your microphone and system audio are mixed in the same recording, with voice cleanup in the Audio tab. If that is the part you came for, there is a guide to recording system audio and your microphone at the same time.

What OBS does that Focal does not

If any of these is what you need, OBS is the better choice, plainly.

• Live streaming. Focal does not stream at all.
• Scenes made of many sources, switched with transitions. Focal records one window, region or monitor, with your camera in a corner.
• Game capture, through a Game Capture source on Windows. Focal has no game mode.
• Mac and Linux. Focal runs on Windows 10 (version 21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit, and nothing else.
• Plugins, and scripts in Lua or Python. Focal cannot be extended.
• Separate audio tracks in its advanced output mode, and a lossless recording preset.
• A price of nothing. Focal is paid, and no sentence I write here is going to beat free.

Recording quality and load on your computer

Both can record with your GPU’s video encoder, which is why recording your screen no longer has to slow the computer down. OBS’s hardware encoding guide recommends one for the best performance, because it takes the work off the CPU, and covers encoders from NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Apple. Focal records straight into the GPU’s encoder (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel) and falls back to the CPU when there is none. If you want the longer version, I wrote a note on what your GPU’s video encoder does for a screen recording.

The numbers I can give you are Focal’s own: an hour at 4K 60 fps with everything on used 4.8% of the CPU, 216,032 frames with none dropped, memory flat at 130 MB, measured on 2026-10-31 on an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Other machines differ. I have not measured OBS on that machine and its guide gives no figure, so there is none here. A blank is more honest than a guess.

What differs is when the work happens. OBS composes the whole scene as it records. Focal records only the screen and draws the zooms, cursor, captions and frame on the GPU when you export: a 4K recording exported to 1080p ran 8 times faster than real time on the same machine.

Both protect a recording from a crash. Focal has every frame on disk the moment it is written, so a power cut, whether it came from the grid or from a cat on the power strip, leaves you with what you had. OBS’s recording guide recommends MKV because a recording that does not stop cleanly does not ruin the whole file, and OBS can remux it to MP4 afterwards.

Focal and OBS Studio side by side

OBS facts checked on 2026-11-02 on obsproject.com and the OBS knowledge base.

Who should pick which

Pick OBS Studio if you stream, want several sources in one picture, capture games, are on a Mac or Linux, or have no budget. It is the right tool for those jobs and it costs nothing. And if you know OBS well and like editing, it will make a fine demo too, with the zooms and captions done in your editor.

Pick Focal if you record software on Windows for other people to watch: product demos, tutorials, bug reports, onboarding videos, the kind of video where a quick tidy-up in an editor has a way of turning into the whole weekend. The recording comes out zoomed, with a cursor viewers can follow and captions made on your own machine, and any of it can change later. It is not a streaming tool, and it is paid: $99 once (at launch, $79 with the code LAUNCH at checkout), for one person on up to 3 computers, with every update for 12 months, and the version you have keeps working after that. There is no subscription. The pricing page has the rest.

To see whether it fits the way you work, download Focal. Recording and editing are free with every feature, for as long as you like, with 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.