Cap Screen Recorder 0.6.0

Cap is an open-source screen recorder built to do what Loom does - record, edit, hand you a link - without your footage living on someone else's servers by default.

Version 0.6.0, released in September 2026, rebuilds the editor around multi-track editing, camera moves and microphone noise reduction.

You can download Cap 0.6.0 here, and the desktop app is free to use for personal work.

What You Actually Get for Free

This is worth settling before anything else, because Cap is open source and freemium at the same time, and those are two different things.

Recording and editing on your own machine are free and unlimited, in 4K, at 60fps, exporting to whatever format you want. Two limits bite: sharing a recording through Cap's own link service caps the video at five minutes, and using the app for commercial work needs a paid desktop licence.

So if you are recording tutorials for yourself, or keeping everything local and sending files the normal way, the free version is genuinely the whole product. If you want the Loom experience - paste a link, they watch it in a browser - the five-minute ceiling is the number that decides whether this works for you.

Two Recording Modes, and Which One You Want

Instant Mode uploads while you record, so the moment you stop there is a link on your clipboard. It suits bug reports, quick answers and anything where speed matters more than polish - and it is the mode the five-minute cap applies to.

Studio Mode records to your machine at full quality with no upload at all, then opens the editor. Nothing leaves your computer unless you send it, there is no length limit, and this is where the 0.6.0 work landed.

Both modes capture the screen and the webcam as separate tracks, which is what makes the editing worthwhile afterwards - you can move the camera, resize it or drop it entirely without re-recording.

What Changed in 0.6.0

The editor is the release. It gained style tracks for changing the background, camera or cursor for part of a video, image tracks for dropping in a logo, and 3D tracks for camera moves with easing and focus blur.

Studio Sound is the other headline: microphone noise reduction at three strengths, with a default you can set for every new recording. Colour correction now treats the screen and the camera separately, and on macOS the camera background can be blurred or removed outright.

Smaller things that matter day to day: a right-click menu on clips for speed, volume, splitting and merging, animated text and full-screen cards, cursor styles with click ripples, freehand drawing on screenshots, and an export screen that estimates the file size and the time before you commit.

There is also an optional native app preview, tucked behind Settings and marked experimental, which you can switch in and out of without losing your recordings. Treat it as a preview - the shipping app is still the one to use for work that matters.

This release publishes Linux packages as well as Windows and macOS builds. The project's own documentation still describes Cap as a Mac and Windows app, so Linux support is real but newer than the marketing around it.

How It Compares to OBS Studio and ShareX

OBS Studio is the better tool the moment you need scenes, multiple sources mixed live, or streaming to a platform. It is also free with no tiers at all, and nothing here changes that.

ShareX owns the screenshot workflow - capture, annotate, upload, with more destinations than anyone needs. Cap now draws on screenshots too, but ShareX is still the deeper tool for still images.

What Cap has that neither offers is the link. A recording becomes a URL your team opens in a browser and comments on in a thread, without anyone installing anything, and that is the whole reason to pick it.

If you want that convenience without a subscription anywhere in the picture, Bandicam and Screenpresso sit between the two approaches, and both have free versions with their own limits.

Self-Hosting and Where Your Videos Live

Nothing is uploaded in Studio Mode, so the simplest privacy answer is to stay local and never touch the sharing side.

Beyond that, the whole web application is open source and the repository ships a Docker setup for running it yourself. For a team that cannot send screen content to a third-party service, that is the real argument for Cap over Loom, and it does not cost anything.

The hosted conveniences are the paid part. Pointing shares at your own S3 bucket, or serving them from your own domain, both sit behind Cap Pro.

When You Still Need Another Tool

Cap's editor covers far more than it did a year ago, so the honest list of what it does not do is short.

For cutting a long recording down without re-encoding it, LosslessCut does in seconds what a full editor makes you wait for.

For a multi-track project that mixes several recordings with other footage, Shotcut and Kdenlive are proper timeline editors.

For a quick re-encode to get a file under a size limit, HandBrake is the friendly route and FFmpeg is the precise one.

For turning a clip into a GIF for a bug report or a readme, the Screen to GIF Converter does it in a browser tab, and ScreenToGif is the desktop version with frame-by-frame editing.

Social-format captions are the other gap - CapCut is built for that, though be aware it is a different company and a different product entirely despite the name.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Here is the tell, and it takes ten seconds: time one of the recordings you actually send people.

If your normal video runs past five minutes and you need it as a link rather than a file, the free tier will not do that job and you are looking at a subscription - at which point Loom is a fair comparison on price rather than an obvious loss.

If you are recording for a client or an employer, the free licence does not cover it, so budget for the desktop licence before you build a workflow on it.

And if you want something that starts in one click with no account anywhere, Kalmuri runs from the system tray with nothing to install, and our step-by-step screen capture guide walks through it.

For everything else in this corner of the site, the Screen Capture category lists the alternatives, and our guide to recording your screen with VLC covers the tool you already have.

The roundup of free video editors without a watermark picks up where Cap's editor stops.

Quick questions

Download Cap 0.6.0 and see how the new editor handles your recordings, or tell us how it went if you have been using it already.