As I'm trying to reduce my monthly spend on SaaS, I've been searching for an LTD replacement for Loom for a looong time and have tried out SendSpark, Snagit, CleanShot, Storyxpress, Vidyard, Warm Welcome (to name just a few). None have yet been able to replace Loom but I think Vmaker makes a strong case from what I've seen so far. Performance/speed wise it comes pretty close to Loom, but there are a couple of things that mean it isn't a direct replacement yet (hopefully they'll fix or add these features?):
- my videos are playing back at the wrong resolution and show up as narrower than when recording
- the thumbnail previews aren't working (they show up entirely black for me)
- If you paste a vmaker video link in Slack, it doesn't play natively like Loom does, and instead shows that preview which doesn't work. I think at least showing a GIF would work really well in this use case
- You can't embed your vmaker videos into email (as you can with Loom)
- The branding on the video pages is pretty ugly. Not a great look when sending to clients.
- With Loom, once you record a video, you can automatically paste the url into Descript for editing. Whereas with vmaker, you need to download the video first and then upload to Descript. A much less efficient workflow, especially if you're creating a lot of videos that need to be edited. The vmaker video editor is ok, maybe better than Loom, but no way near as good as with Descript.
- when pasting a vmaker link in Notion, if you click on the embed option, the video doesn't embed. You have to use an embed block instead. Again, this may not seem like a big deal, but when you are recording a loooot of videos, every efficiency gain matters.

All in all though, vmaker looks like a solid option and alternative to Loom.
If they fix the issues mentioned I might even be able to finally ditch Loom once and for all!