Screencap Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

What is Screencap?

Screencap records your screen while you work, then an on-device model chops the recording into named tasks: payroll run, expense approvals, ticket triage. Every spoken word and on-screen moment gets indexed, so a workflow you recorded in July is searchable in November. Everything sits in a folder on your Mac at ~/.screencap until you decide otherwise. It launched on 31 July 2026 and finished ninth on Product Hunt with 136 upvotes, built by Rute Figueiredo and Yogesh Shahi under the proteus-computer-use organisation.

The category is crowded with tools that turn a recording into a step-by-step guide. Screencap is aiming somewhere slightly different. It is less interested in producing a polished SOP document and more interested in keeping a searchable record of real work, in a form that a human can learn from and a model can train on. That second use is not a footnote. The company runs an open dataset of donated recordings, on the argument that computer-use models today are trained largely on synthetic interactions and scraped captures, and that deliberately contributed real workflows are worth more. Donation is off by default and set per recording, which is the right default and worth checking they keep.

It is early software and does not hide it. The current build is v0.20.0, macOS only, Apple silicon only, macOS 14 or later, with Windows, a browser extension and Android listed as coming soon. The licence is PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, which means the source is public and auditable but commercial use still needs a paid licence. Contact runs through team@screencap.sh rather than a support desk. Read all of that as a signal about which stage of the product you are buying into.

What are Screencap’s key features?

Automatic task segmentation on device

Press Command Shift R and work normally. An on-device model splits the footage into labelled tasks afterwards, so you are not naming clips or trimming anything. The journal view groups recordings by day with durations attached, and each one is marked local or uploaded so you always know where a given recording lives. This is the feature that makes the product usable, because the failure mode of every screen-recording knowledge base is that nobody ever labels anything and the library becomes a graveyard within a month.

Blocking and masking that happens before the frame is written

Password managers and banking apps are cut before a frame hits disk. Email and chat are masked as they record, not redacted later. On export, names, secrets and PII are scrubbed from whatever you share. The distinction between blocked and masked is doing real work here: blocked content never exists, so it cannot leak from a backup, a bug, or a subpoena. Screencap publishes a threat model rather than a paragraph of assurances, which is a meaningfully higher standard than the category norm.

MCP context captured alongside the video

This is the genuinely novel part. While you record, Screencap queries your connected MCP servers for what is on screen, and stores that snapshot inside the recording. If you were doing payroll run number 214 in Gusto, the recording knows it, and a viewer months later can jump straight to the current live record rather than watching a video of stale data. It works with Gusto, Attio, Linear, Notion and any other MCP server. Nobody else in this category is doing this, and it fixes the thing that makes old process videos useless, which is that the video ages and the underlying record does not.

Source available, notarized and reproducible

The entire application is on GitHub: capture engine, encryption, agent, anonymizer. Builds are notarized and reproducible, and you can compile it yourself. For software with this level of system access, that is the correct posture, and it converts the privacy claims from promises into something a suspicious engineer can verify in an afternoon.

How much does Screencap cost?

Screencap starts at $9 per month for one Mac, which covers unlimited recording and search with everything staying on your own disk, and sharing by exported encrypted files. Personal cloud is $20 per month for one person and adds encrypted backup across your Macs plus shareable links. Team cloud is contact-sales and adds a shared end-to-end encrypted library, ordered onboarding collections, and keys that stay with your team. Personal, research and nonprofit use is free. Commercial use is free for seven days, then needs a licence.

That undercuts the documentation tools it competes with. Scribe Pro runs about $23 per user per month, with Pro Team from $13 per seat on a five-seat minimum, and Tango sits near $16 per month. Both are per-seat, both are cloud-first, and both get expensive as the team grows. At $9 for a fully local tier, Screencap is the cheapest way into this category by a wide margin, and it is the only one where the recordings never leave the building on the entry plan.

The seven day commercial trial is short for what the product asks of you. Screencap only becomes valuable once you have a few weeks of recordings to search, so a week is really a test of the capture and redaction behaviour rather than a test of the library. Budget for a month at $9 before deciding. The jump from $9 to $20 also buys less than it looks: the difference is encrypted backup across your own Macs and shareable links, which matters if you work across a laptop and a desktop and is dead weight if you do not.

Who is Screencap best for?

Use Screencap if you run a small team on Apple silicon and your onboarding is currently one senior person explaining the same six processes over and over. The MCP context feature makes it particularly good for operational work that lives inside tools like Gusto, Attio and Linear, where the video alone was never going to be enough.

Use it if compliance is why you have avoided screen recording so far. The block-before-write behaviour and the public source are answers to the specific objections that kill these deals, and being able to hand your security reviewer a threat model and a repository is a shortcut worth real money.

Skip Screencap if you are on Windows, on an Intel Mac, or on macOS 13 or older. It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, with Windows, a browser extension and Android all listed as coming soon. Skip it if you need polished customer-facing documentation, because Scribe and Tango produce a formatted guide with numbered screenshots and Screencap produces a searchable video. And skip it if you need a real team plan today, since that tier has no published price yet.

What are the best Screencap alternatives?

Scribe is the incumbent and the better tool if the output matters more than the recording. It captures a browser or desktop workflow and generates a formatted visual SOP with numbered steps and screenshots you can edit. Pro is around $23 per user per month, Pro Team from about $13 per seat with a five-seat minimum, and Enterprise adds SSO and data governance at custom pricing. It is cloud-based, so your workflows sit on their infrastructure, which is exactly the trade Screencap refuses to make.

Tango is the cheaper, lighter version of the same idea at roughly $16 per month, strongest as a browser extension for capturing web app processes. Faster to get a usable guide out of, weaker on desktop workflows, and per-seat like everything else in this category.

Loom is what most teams reach for by default, at around $15 per user per month for the paid tier with a limited free plan. It is a better recorder and a far better viewer, with transcripts, comments and a mature sharing model. It has no task segmentation, no automatic redaction and no local-only option, so it is the convenience choice rather than the private one.

Final verdict: is Screencap worth it?

Screencap gets the hard parts right. The MCP context capture is a real idea nobody else has shipped, the privacy design is specific where competitors are vague, and $9 a month for an unlimited local recorder is priced like the team wants people to actually use it. If you have been avoiding screen recording because you did not want your team’s work sitting on someone else’s servers, this is the first tool in the category built for you rather than around you.

It is also version 0.20.0, and it shows. Apple silicon on macOS 14 or later is a narrow beachhead, the team plan has no price, and source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial is not open source no matter how often the launch copy implies otherwise, since commercial use requires a licence. The pricing page also carries a strange line explaining that plans cover the signed build, its updates, support and cloud, but not the right to use the software, which is legally tidy and commercially confusing. And the open dataset, admirable as the goal is, means the vendor has a standing interest in your recordings that a normal screen recorder does not, so the off-by-default setting is one to re-check after every update.

Worth $9 a month if you are on a recent Apple silicon Mac and you value the local-first design. Wait for 1.0 and a published team price before you standardise a company on it.