Focal vs the recorders built into Windows

Windows 11 comes with two screen recorders: Xbox Game Bar, which starts with Win+Alt+R, and the Snipping Tool, which records with Win+Shift+R. Clipchamp, Microsoft’s video editor, can record your screen too. All three are free, and for a quick clip of a bug, a game or a setting you want to show someone, they are the right answer. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is for the recording other people will watch as a demo: it zooms on what you click, smooths the cursor, writes captions and exports for YouTube or Shorts. It is free to record and edit, with no time limit, and exporting needs a license, which costs $99 once.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, so this is a man who sells a screen recorder telling you about the free ones from Microsoft, which is either very honest or very bad marketing. I have aimed for the first. If you only want the steps for each built-in tool, the guide to recording your screen on Windows 11 has them.

Xbox Game Bar: a recorder for the game or app in front of you

Game Bar is part of Windows 10 and 11, and you switch it on in Settings > Gaming > Game bar. Go to the game or app you want to record, press Win+Alt+R to start, and press Win+Alt+R again to stop. The screen flashes at the start and at the end. Win+G opens the bar itself, where the Capture widget has the same start button and the Gallery lists what you have recorded. While you record, Win+Alt+M turns the microphone on and off, and if you want every sound your computer makes, you set the audio to All under Capturing in the bar’s settings. Clips are saved as MP4 in a folder called Captures inside Videos, named after the app and the date and time. Microsoft’s Game Bar help is upfront about the limits: it supports one monitor at a time, and some games switch recording off, so their clips come out blank.

Game Bar also does one thing Focal does not, and it is a genuinely good trick. With background recording on, Win+Alt+G saves the last 30 seconds, or whatever length you picked, after they happened. If you want the moment you did not plan to record, Game Bar is the tool. Focal, for its part, only records what you warn it about.

The Snipping Tool’s recorder: any rectangle, with sound if you want it

The Snipping Tool is the screenshot app in Windows 11, and its Record mode makes videos. It is Windows 11 only: on Windows 10 the Microsoft Store installs Snip & Sketch instead. Press Win+Shift+R, drag a rectangle over the part of the screen you want, select Start, and select Stop when you are done. The hardest decision in the whole process is where to put the corners. It can record your PC’s sound and your voice from a microphone, both optional, with defaults in the app’s settings and a choice of microphone if you have more than one. Recordings save themselves to a Screen Recordings folder inside Videos, which you can turn off in the settings. When you stop, Microsoft’s Snipping Tool help says you can keep the recording as it is or select Edit in Clipchamp to work on it there.

Clipchamp records in a browser or its app

Clipchamp records a browser tab, a window or the whole screen, with your webcam if you want it, from the Record & create tab of its editor, as Microsoft’s Clipchamp help describes. You sign up first, a recording runs up to 30 minutes, a WebM copy downloads to your computer, and the clip goes into the editor. Of the three it is the only one that is also an editor, and that matters more than it sounds, because recording is the easy half of a demo.

What the built-in recorders leave you with

Game Bar and the Snipping Tool hand you a video file of what the screen showed, at the size it showed it. For a bug report or a clip in a chat, that is exactly right. For a demo, it is where the work starts.

A button the size of a fingernail on a 27 inch monitor is a speck on a phone. If the pointer is in the clip, it is part of the picture, so its jumps and its wobble come along with it. Every pause and every “um” stays in. The file is the screen as it was: no background or frame around it, no chapters, and the shape of whatever you happened to record, which is rarely the 9:16 a Short needs.

Clipchamp takes you further, and the Snipping Tool sends you there with one button. Its pages describe trimming, splitting, changing speed and volume, and captions made automatically. What I did not find in them is anything that zooms to your clicks for you, so a zoom is something you find on the timeline and place by hand, one at a time, for every click that matters. In a demo, that tends to be all of them.

What Focal adds, in the same three steps

Focal records in the same three moves as the built-in tools: a shortcut, a choice of what to record, and stop. Then it does the editing a demo needs before you touch anything.

1. Press Print Screen. If another program already owns it, such as OneDrive or ShareX, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you, and you can set your own shortcut in Settings.
2. Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. A region can run across two monitors and records as one video. A countdown runs, then a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop, and Ctrl+Alt+M marks a moment.
3. Stop. The editor opens with zooms already made.

The real difference is in how it records. Focal leaves the cursor out of the picture and logs its position, its clicks and its shape a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Because of that, everything below can change after you record, as the note on why Focal records without the cursor explains:

• Zoom on what you click. Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms with a camera that eases in and out like a spring, and zooms close together join into one that pans. You choose what starts a zoom and can reshape any of them by hand. The zoom section of the home page shows it moving.
• A smooth cursor. The raw mouse path becomes a steady glide with a ripple on each click, drawn sharp at any zoom, in the size you pick, fading when you stop moving.
• Captions made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, in 26 languages, a phrase at a time. Correct any line, save an .srt, or export them as a track viewers can switch on.
• Cutting by the transcript. Select words to cut them from the video, or cut every “um” and “uh” in one click. There are always more than you remember saying.
• Sound that is ready to publish. Microphone and system audio are mixed, voice cleanup removes background noise and evens out loudness, and on Windows 11 system audio can leave out one app or record only one. The guide to recording system audio and your microphone covers the setup.
• A background and a frame. Gradients, an image, or the recording blurred behind itself, with padding, rounded corners, a shadow and an optional macOS or Windows title bar.
• Chapters from the moments you marked. Players can jump between them, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps.
• Exports shaped for where they go. 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 21:9, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each, as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps or as a GIF, with presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels. The guide to vertical video from a screen recording goes through the Shorts case.

What Focal does not do: it has no cloud and no share links, so like Game Bar you get a file, kept in Videos\Focal. It cannot save the last 30 seconds after the fact. It runs on Windows only.

Built-in recorders and Focal side by side

Every fact about Game Bar, the Snipping Tool and Clipchamp in this table comes from Microsoft’s and Clipchamp’s own pages, checked on 2026-11-02. “None documented” means I found no such feature in their help pages, not that I proved it missing. Proving a negative about someone else’s software would take their source code and a long weekend, and I have neither.

Which one should you use

Use Game Bar for games, for a clip of one app with its sound, and for the last 30 seconds you did not plan to record.

Use the Snipping Tool for a quick clip of part of the screen to drop into a bug report, an email or a chat. One shortcut, one rectangle, and the file is already in your Videos folder by the time you have opened the bug tracker.

Use Clipchamp if you want your webcam next to your screen and a general video editor at no cost, and you do not mind signing up or a 30 minute limit per recording.

Use Focal when the recording is a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video or a Short, where viewers need to see what you clicked and read what you said, and you would rather not build every zoom by hand. The free trial has every feature and no time limit, and needs 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. The price, the launch code and what a license covers are on the pricing page.