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

TLDR

Zight (formerly CloudApp) is an async screen recording and screenshot tool that turns quick captures into shareable links with annotation and AI transcription baked in. It is fast, cross-platform, and built for support and product teams. Best for: support and product teams doing async communication. Price: From $9.95/user/mo (free plan: yes). Rating: 6.8/10

What is Zight?

Zight is a desktop and browser tool for capturing your screen as a video, screenshot, or GIF, then sharing it as a link in a couple of clicks. Instead of scheduling a call or typing a long paragraph of instructions, you record a quick walkthrough, drop arrows and text on a screenshot, or spin up a looping GIF, and hand someone a URL they can open on their own time. It runs on Mac, Windows, iOS, and as a Chrome extension, with recordings, screenshots, and files living in a searchable cloud workspace.

The product has real history. It launched as CloudApp back in 2011 and spent years as one of the go-to Mac utilities for quick screenshot sharing, before rebranding to Zight in 2023 as it leaned harder into video messaging and AI features. That heritage matters: this is a mature, battle-tested tool with a decade of polish behind the capture experience, not a fresh Loom clone. Zight, Inc. positions it squarely at support, customer success, and product teams that live in asynchronous communication.

What Are Zight’s Key Features?

Screen recording, screenshots, and GIFs in one app

The core of Zight is capture. You can record your screen, webcam, or both, grab a screenshot of a region or full window, or record a section of the screen and export it as a GIF. Recording quality goes up to 720p on the free plan and 4K on paid tiers, and free-plan recordings are capped at five minutes while paid plans lift that to unlimited. Having all three capture types plus editing in a single app is genuinely convenient versus juggling separate tools.

Annotation and lightweight editing

Screenshots and captures can be marked up with arrows, shapes, lines, text, a marker, and stickers, plus blur and redact for hiding sensitive content. On the video side you get trim and split (cutting out parts of a clip), so you can tidy a recording without opening a full editor. It is not a production video suite, but for support tickets and product walkthroughs the built-in tools cover what most people actually need.

AI transcription and Smart Actions

Zight layers AI on top of recordings: automatic transcription in 50+ languages, auto-generated titles, captions, and summaries, plus “Smart Actions” and Smart Chapters for turning a recording into structured, skimmable content. On the Create plan you get five Smart Actions per month; Collaborate unlocks unlimited AI. Zight also shipped an MCP server so you can connect Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants to your captures, which is a genuinely forward-looking touch.

Sharing, analytics, and integrations

Every capture becomes a link, and paid plans add analytics: view counts, viewer email visibility, watch percentage, and admin insights into views, clicks, and downloads. Standard integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams are included, while premium integrations for Zendesk, Jira, Confluence, and Lucid are paid add-ons or reserved for the top tier. There is also an embeddable Recording SDK for teams that want capture inside their own product.

How Much Does Zight Cost?

Zight starts at $9.95 per user per month on the Create plan (billed monthly), with a genuinely usable free plan called Share at $0 that includes 5-minute recordings, 15-second GIFs, and 1GB of storage. The Collaborate plan for teams of two or more runs $12 per user per month and adds unlimited AI, SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, and custom branding, while the Scale plan is custom-priced for organizations that need SSO/SCIM, HIPAA compliance, premium integrations, and custom data retention. Annual billing knocks roughly 23% off.

Against the competition, Zight is aggressively priced. Loom’s Business plan sits at $18 per user per month, so Zight’s Collaborate tier undercuts it by a third while offering comparable async video plus stronger screenshot tooling. Vidyard’s Starter plan is around $59 per user per month, which makes Zight look like a bargain unless you specifically need Vidyard’s sales-video analytics. If you only ever grab still screenshots, Snagit’s $39-a-year one-time-feel subscription is cheaper, but it does not do link sharing or async video.

Who Is Zight Best For?

Zight is at its best for support, customer success, and product teams that need to explain things visually without piling on meetings. The mix of fast screenshots, annotation, screen video, and instant links fits ticket resolution and onboarding workflows especially well.

Use Zight if you want one tool for screenshots, GIFs, and screen video with annotation built in, you value async communication over live calls, and you want SOC 2 or HIPAA compliance without paying Vidyard prices. Skip Zight if you need heavy video editing, an Android app (there is still no native Android client), or a sales-focused video platform with deep CRM analytics, where Vidyard remains the stronger pick.

Best Zight Alternatives

Zight competes in a crowded async-video and screen-capture market. Here are the three closest alternatives worth weighing.

Loom

Loom is the best-known async screen recorder, now owned by Atlassian, and it is the default comparison for Zight. It is polished and widely adopted, with a free tier and a Business plan at $18 per user per month. Loom leans more purely into video messaging, while Zight matches it on video and adds stronger screenshot and GIF tooling at a lower paid price.

Vidyard

Vidyard is the sales-team choice, built around video for prospecting and pipeline with deep analytics and CRM integrations. It is considerably pricier, with Starter around $59 per user per month. Choose Vidyard if outbound sales video and CRM-tied analytics are the priority; choose Zight for broader support and product use at a fraction of the cost.

Snagit

Snagit from TechSmith is the veteran screenshot-and-capture app, sold as an affordable annual subscription around $39 a year. It excels at detailed screen captures and image editing but lacks Zight’s cloud link sharing, async video hosting, and AI transcription. Pick Snagit if you mostly need powerful still-image capture on a single machine.

Final Verdict: Is Zight Worth It?

Zight is a genuinely solid, well-priced async communication tool that punches above its cost. The combination of screenshots, GIFs, screen video, annotation, and AI transcription in one app, backed by a decade of CloudApp heritage and undercutting Loom on price, makes it an easy recommendation for support and product teams. The free Share plan is generous enough to trial it seriously, and Collaborate at $12 per user per month is strong value for compliance-conscious teams.

The caveats are real, though. Some users report that meaningful feature updates have slowed, occasional crashes on long recordings, and uploads that can hang, and there is still no native Android app. If you need bulletproof reliability for hours-long captures or a mobile-first Android workflow, test carefully first. But for the everyday job of explaining something visually and sending a link, Zight is worth it, and at its price it is one of the better values in the category.