Loom vs Vidyard vs Screen Studio: screen recording pricing for three different jobs

Ten people, one year: Loom Business runs about $1,800. Vidyard Plus, roughly $7,000. That's not a small gap, and it exists because these tools aren't actually competing for the same buyer.

Loom is built for **async team communication** — a quick screen recording instead of a meeting, a Slack message instead of an email. Business is $18/user/month monthly, $15 annually, and that price gets a whole team recording and sharing without much ceremony.

Vidyard is a **sales tool** wearing a screen-recorder's clothes. Starter is $59/seat/month billed annually ($89 month-to-month), and the price buys deep CRM integration, viewer-intent scoring — knowing exactly when a prospect rewatched the pricing slide — and prospecting features layered on top of the recording itself. A Video Agent add-on runs another $24/seat/month. None of that matters to an engineering team recording a bug report; all of it matters to an SDR trying to book a second meeting.

Screen Studio is neither — it's a one-time-purchase macOS app, not a subscription at all, built around a specific trick: it automatically zooms and smooths your cursor movements so a screen recording looks like a produced demo instead of a shaky screen-share. The license price climbed from $89 to $149 this year, with yearly software updates after the first year sold as a separate add-on.

| | Price | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| Loom | $18/user/mo | async team messages, quick recordings |
| Screen Studio | $149 one-time | polished demo videos, macOS only |
| Vidyard | $59/seat/mo (+$24 add-on) | sales prospecting, CRM-integrated video |

Pick based on the job, not the price tag: Loom for "record this instead of writing a paragraph," Screen Studio for "make this demo look intentional," Vidyard for "I need to know if the prospect actually watched it." Buying Vidyard for internal team updates is like buying a CRM to remember your own to-do list — technically it works, but you're paying sales-tooling prices for a communication problem.