It's time to leave Loom

It's time to leave Loom. Not just because the product is deteriorating, but because screen recording itself is evolving.

Loom's decline

It's crashing, glitching, the prices are going up, your mates are leaving and worst of all, your videos are automatically added to a Jira kanban board.

Loom was acquired by Atlassian (maker of Jira) in October 2023. Since then it feels like customer dissatisfaction has spiked.

But this isn't an unusual thing to happen after an acquisition. It takes time to integrate two completely different products and cultures.

So don't worry, your current frustrations with Loom are only temporary.

Except they're not.

Origins

Screen recordings used to be what nerds made for coding tutorials. And making them was a long, complex process.

You had to use complicated recording software like OBS, professional editing software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro, and then exporting and publishing took forever.

But in 2015 Loom showed up.

They made screen recordings 10x easier. The 10x thing gets thrown around a lot these days, but Loom genuinely delivered on that.

Your screen and camera were captured at the same time. The recording was uploaded in the background. And as soon as you were done, you got a shareable webpage with your video.

Loom made it so much easier that screen recordings transformed into something much bigger than a way to teach coding. They became one of the most efficient ways to communicate anything. Sharing a video of your screen was much faster than explaining it in writing or arranging a video call.

Quick screen recordings were being used for reporting bugs, asking for feedback, giving feedback, pitching a prospect, helping a customer and loads more.

The video message was born.

Evolution

Throughout the 2010s most of the world's knowledge work moved on-screen. Software ate the world. Video messaging thrived in this new screen-based world, becoming de facto for everyone building and selling software. And then COVID happened.

Companies of all kinds — not just software companies — needed video messaging to operate remotely. It went mainstream.

But in video messaging's wake, other types of screen recordings started growing.

Short, eye-catching launch videos have flooded X and LinkedIn. Every feature at every startup is being announced with a screen recording. And for every launch video on X there are hundreds of screen recordings teasing work-in-progress.

It's not just short stuff either. Screen recordings are becoming the backbone of long-form content. Tutorials and courses now make up the bulk of many company YouTube channels (in between the podcast episodes).

Today the foundation of communication and content at work is just… a whole bunch of screen recordings?

The screen is the most important place in the world

Let's say you're a product manager at a tech company.

On a given day you might send two or three video messages. Updating your team on one project and asking for feedback on another.

Recording should only take a few clicks. It needs to be uploaded and rendered instantly so you don't have to wait around before sharing. And it helps if the person receiving your video can leave a comment or reaction. These videos are Loom's bread and butter.

Over the course of the week you might make a couple more polished product demos. You need to share these with your boss and the wider company to get them excited about your team's work.

These videos are all about capturing attention. So you need zoom effects, smooth transitions, and a nice background that elevates the demo. Screen Studio is a typical tool for these.

Then when your project goes live you'll make a tutorial for your help center and an announcement video for LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and the newsletter.

Here you need additional features like titles, background music, and captions. You also need more granular video editing to cut mistakes, arrange clips, or re-do parts. Descript is a popular choice for these longer videos.

Whether you build software or sell it, creating dozens of videos every month will sound fairly normal. To some of you though, this will sound a little extreme.

But it's not.

If you're currently maxed out at a couple Looms per week, consider this: a few years ago you probably weren't making videos at all. Things are changing fast.

What is extreme is using multiple completely different products to do the same thing.

A video message, a product demo, and even long-form content all start and end in the exact same way: you start with a screen recording and end up with a video published on the web.

So why do you need to pay for three (or more) different products?

Tella

Recording your first video with Tella should feel familiar.

It's two clicks to start recording, it's uploaded in the background in real-time, and when you're done the video is ready to share with its link copied to your clipboard. Viewers can comment, react, change playback speed and so on.

Video messages in Tella are ultra-fast, they look great, and viewers get an interactive playback experience. Then when you're ready, you can turn things up a notch.

Open up the editor and enable Auto Zoom.

Now your video will smoothly zoom in and follow the movement of your cursor. Add a nice background image and you have an eye-catching product demo that impresses customers and your boss. If you want, you can take things further.

For long videos that have a larger audience Tella has powerful editing tools, made simple with AI.

Automatically remove mistakes, silences and filler words; add additional clips from your library or record new ones; add background music and enhance the quality of your mic. You can also enable Auto Layouts which analyses your video then applies different layouts at different moments throughout the video.

In the not-too-distant future manual video editing will completely disappear. You just record and Tella will edit the video for you. Connect Claude Code or Codex to our MCP to get a glimpse of this.

We think you should just be able to sit down and record your ideas, your product, your story, your whatever, and then get a fully edited, shareable video as soon as you're done.

Anyway.

We've got all the regular SaaS stuff too: cloud storage, organisation, search, collaboration, analytics, etc. etc.

So whether you're videomessagemaxxing or trying to turn your team into an army of content creators, Tella was designed to be the only screen recorder you need.

You don't need three (or more) different screen recorders, you just need Tella.