Loom vs Zight: What’s Your Best Bet for Screen Recording Videos

‍“I’ll send you a Loom for that”. 

That’s probably one of the most common phrases you’ll hear in your work life. 

Loom has become synonymous with video notes created for a variety of use cases, like explaining workflows, creating product tutorials, sharing updates, and much more. 

However, while Loom has earned its popularity as a screen recording tool, Zight (or CloudApp, as it was previously known) has been in the video communication market for a decade and a half. It offers more features and is often considered as a Loom alternative. 

So, which screen recording tool is best suited for your needs? 

We did the legwork to test both tools and answer all your Loom vs Zight questions. Before we dive into our comparison, let’s first understand our evaluating parameters. 

7 factors to consider when choosing a video creation tool

Here’s a list of factors we tested Loom and Zight against. Keep this list handy for evaluating multiple screen recording and video creation tools. 

1. Ease of use: Finding a tool that's simple to get the hang of means you can begin making videos right away. This is key for creating tutorials or pitches quickly. A user-friendly tool lets you make quality videos fast, even if you're not a video expert. 
2. Video editing: Being able to adjust your videos easily is important. For explainer videos, basic edits and text may be all you need to keep things clear. However, for more engaging sales pitches, having features like AI voiceovers and custom touches can really make your content stand out.
3. Branding: Using the same style in all your videos helps people recognize your brand. A good video tool should let you add your own logos and color schemes. This way, your videos can help people remember your brand.
4. Integrations: Being able to connect your video tool with other tools you use makes the video-making process smoother. This can make it easier to create and share videos, getting your message to the right people when you want.
5. Scalability: As your business gets bigger, you'll need to make more videos. A tool that can grow with you is important. It should offer more storage, let more people use it, and have advanced options. This means you're set whether you're making a few sales videos or a big set of tutorials.
6. Analytics: Seeing how your videos are doing helps you make better ones. Detailed reports can show you what's working and what's not. This way, you can tweak your videos to better meet your audience's needs, increasing engagement and conversions.
7. Pricing: Cost is always a big factor, especially for smaller businesses or startups. You'll want a tool that's clear about how much it costs so you can budget for making more videos or using fancier features as you grow.

Ready to review which one’s better for you between Loom and Zight? Let’s get down to it. 

Loom vs Zight: A head-to-head showdown

Whether you want to create how-to videos for your product or make compelling video pitches for prospects, a good video creation tool can produce stellar output without eating away hours from your daily routine. 

That’s why we did an honest evaluation of Loom vs Zight for creating videos to see which one is best-suited for your use cases.

🗒️TL;DR 

‍

🌊 Ease of use 

Loom gives you a super intuitive and neat interface to get started in seconds. Its editor is equally easy to use and you can quickly track/organize all your videos from the dashboard. 

You don’t need to look around or read help docs to get a lay of the land—just sign up, hit the browser extension, and your video is already rolling! 

Loom sits right within your browser to support different types of screen recording formats. And you can also download its desktop app to create videos for other apps or local files. 

However, Loom users often complain about its slow and glitchy functionality. When this user shared a similar concern on X, guess which Loom alternative came out in responses?

‍

Zight is just as lightweight as Loom and you can get started with a simple browser extension. 

You just need to record your screen and you’ll get a shareable URL within a second of completing your recording. 

Users love Zight primarily because it offers a combination of output: videos, GIFs, and screenshots. You can edit a video or screenshot instantly, put it in specific folders, or integrate with several tools.

However, a few users have also expressed concerns about Zight’s buggy and confusing interface. Here’s one use explaining this in more detail: 

But props to the Zight team for proactively handling queries and concerns on social media. Here’s a perfect example of how the Zight CEO personally reached out to a long-time user after seeing a complaint and chatted with the user about planned capabilities. Customer enablement at its best! 

🎨Video editing 

Loom offers a range of editing options. You have all the basic features to edit screen recordings, like trim, split, and add a clip. It automatically transcribes your video to add subtitles. You can make your videos more polish with these advanced features:

• Automatic title generation
• Summary and chapter creation
• Filter unwanted background noise
• Insert web or document links within video

Loom AI makes all this super easy and quick. Plus, you can adjust the audience settings to control who can view the video. You can also use drawing tools in the paid version to annotate anything in your videos.

However, the biggest downside for Loom is its repeated glitches. From our first-hand experience, we can second this user’s review that the Loom editor often struggles with technical issues and slows down the work. 

Zight is on par with Loom for its editing capabilities. You can trim your videos from anywhere and freely crop the screen. Zight also lets you add filters to your content with options to fine-tune the output. 

Some capabilities are only available for paid users, like blurring part of the recording or generating a transcript. However, unlike Loom, you can instantly download these videos for free.

Besides video editing, Zight also offers multiple features to edit screenshots with many annotation options, blurs, stickers, and more. 

Responding to a grievance for Loom, this user shared how they feel Zight > Loom for its pricing and overall user experience on desktop. 

🪙Branding 

One of Loom’s weak links is its branding capabilities. In the name of branding, the tool only lets you remove the Loom watermark and insert your own logo. You can’t customize the overall look and feel of your videos.

Technically, there’s only an option for you to minimize Loom’s branding and add your logo. Your video’s shareable URL will still be in the loom.com domain.  

That’s why Zight scores top marks with its white-label branding option. You can create a white-label video page to keep your brand top-of-mind for viewers. 

A video page lets you:

• Add your logo and desired link on this logo
• Create a company domain URL, like share.yourcompany.com
• Remove option to download, react, or comment based on your use case

Most Zight users prefer this tool over Loom for the branding options, especially when sharing videos with external stakeholders. For example, 

🔌Integrations

Both Loom and Zight offer strong integrations with some of the most widely used tools. On deeper analysis, we realized that Loom’s biggest use case is async messaging. So, the tool integrates well with almost every software used for internal communication or collaboration, like Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Gmail, Zoom, etc

You can also embed Loom videos on virtually any platform. It's compatible with desktop and mobile apps in addition to supporting browser-based sites.

Zight also integrates with all essential workplace tools, like MS Teams, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and more. Plus, you can also integrate the tool with these 20+ tools. 

⛰️Scalability 

If you’re looking to use Loom for a longer term as your business grows, you might want to reconsider your decision. Despite being an industry-leader, Loom has continuously received heat over its reliability issues. 

Users have posted multiple reviews and grievances complaining how the app is constantly crashing. They have to reboot their system or lose their recorded videos because the app broke down or ran into technical glitches. 

Here are two different reviewers highlighting the same concern:

Turns out, the crashing app problem is a fairly common one among Loom users and has become a big reason for churn. Here’s one ex-user sharing why they were looking for Loom alternatives because it caused a complete system crash:

Zight can be a good alternative for creating software documentation at scale with screenshots, videos, and GIFs. It also allows team collaboration for multiple users to work together. 

However, Zight users have the same complaint where the tool seems buggy and shows glitches sometimes. Here’s one long-time user sharing their thoughts on how the tool has become slow with a poor interface.

📊Analytics 

While Loom’s free plan only tells you the number of times a video has been played, its Business and Enterprise plans offer in-depth analytics. You can track:

• Average completion rate: how much of a video did viewers watch in a session
• CTA conversion rate: what percentage of viewers clicked on the CTA button
• Viewer details: name + email and watch time for every individual viewer

Zight also curates granular performance data for videos and screenshots. You can track the number of views, user-level data on who viewed the video, and each viewer’s completion rate. 

You can also track the click-through rate for all CTA buttons added to a video. While both tools offer similar analytics, one area where Zight takes an edge over Loom is the option to export all viewer data as a CSV file—to build your email list or add new leads to the CRM.

💲Pricing

Loom’s paid plan is cheaper than Zight. However, Zight offers 50 free videos while Loom limits it to 25 only. 

So, if you’re working with a tight budget and don’t have enough to invest, you can go for Zight. But if you want to create >5 minute videos, Loom would cost you $2/ less every month.

When we compared both tools’ free plans, we discovered that Loom offers a more generous free version. You’ll get a few essential features, like captions and blur, for free in Loom while these are gated in Zight. 

There’s a new player in town… have you met?

While both Loom and Zight are awesome screen recording tools, a big limitation for both is their limited output formats. Loom can only create videos, and Zight can create videos, GIFs, and screenshots. 

So, if you want to create a more interactive experience for your users, you likely to have to use a bunch of different tools—like this user.

What if you could combine Loom with Tango and Zight to create product showcases in multiple formats using one tool? 

That’s exactly why we built Floik. 

Purpose-built for product education, Floik is a versatile solution to create interactive product showcases in the form of explainer videos, step-by-step guides, self-serve demos, GIFs, and PDFs. 

You get the best of Zight and Loom with the added capabilities of tools like Tango, Scribe, Storylane, Arcade, and more.

Here’s everything you can do to create videos with Floik:

• Trim and crop: You can polish your videos by trimming out any part of the video. You can also crop your video to hide any unwanted tabs and browser details on your screen. Use the smart crop capability to resize videos for different dimensions. 
• Blur screen: Protect confidential details in your video and hide any part of your screen before you even start recording. That means, we’re not capturing those details even in our backend—they’re completely confidential, as they should be.
• Add AI voiceover: You can use the text-to-speech feature to generate audio in over 14 languages and multiple English accents. You just have to feed your script and Floik will create an audio. If your video has some voiceover already, the tool will use the same script to create an AI voiceover.
• Generate subtitles: Auto-generate subtitles for every video and edit them freely to give users better access to your video. You can put subtitles in multiple languages and generate audio in the same language + accent.
• Click marks: Unlike Loom and Vidyard where you’re not aware where exactly the mouse pointer is clicking, Floik captures all your click marks. This shows users exactly what you’re talking about. You can also move these mouse clicks while editing to ensure you’re pointing to the right place.
• Smart CTAs: Send off your videos with custom calls-to-action and tell users where they should go next. You can add more Flos as CTA buttons or redirect viewers to a specific site.
• Video library: Curate multiple videos in a single folder and publish your ready-made video library. This can best be used to create a knowledge base, a 1:1 sales room, a demo center, or more.

Once you’ve recorded + edited your videos, you have the option to download them as MP4 or share them as a link. You can also use the iFrame code to embed videos anywhere. 

Over to you!

That’s a wrap on our comparison of Loom vs Zight. Loom is excellent for making videos for internal team communication. On the other hand, Zight is ideal for taking screenshots and making GIFs along with videos. 

However, if you're looking to create more than just videos, you should check out Floik. 

Floik is a product education platform for showcasing your products, allowing you to highlight what your product can do through videos, guides, and demos. Discover its capabilities and get ready to be impressed—register for a free account now!