Recordly

Recordly is the open source take on Screen Studio. Record your screen, get auto-zooms on your cursor, polish the timeline, drop in a webcam overlay, and export to MP4 or GIF. The output looks like product marketing video, not a raw screencap.

Built with Electron and TypeScript, with native capture where it counts: ScreenCaptureKit on macOS, Windows Graphics Capture plus WASAPI audio on Windows. That matters because the lazy alternative is browser-style screen APIs that drop frames and look amateur. Linux is the weak spot, it records through Electron's own capture APIs and cannot hide the cursor. AGPL 3.0, with prebuilt releases for all three platforms and an AUR package for Arch.

Solo devs making demo videos, tutorial creators, and small teams shipping product walkthroughs get the biggest win here. Screen Studio, the closest commercial equivalent, is macOS only and now runs on a subscription: $20/mo billed monthly, or $9/mo billed yearly. Recordly is free on all three platforms, and the editor covers most of what you'd actually use.

The catch: AGPL is the strong copyleft license, and Recordly layers two more terms on top of it. You cannot use the Recordly name or branding for your own project, and if you build on the code you have to credit Recordly in your user-facing UI. Add the AGPL rule that offering a modified version as a service means publishing your changes, and anything you intend to ship needs a read of the license first. For recording your own demos, none of it applies.