If you’re on the lookout for one of the best screen recorders for your Mac or PC, you’ll find yourself in a crowded market. One candidate, which happens to be cross-platform, is TechSmith’s Camtasia, and to entice you to give it a try, it comes with a free 7-day trial. 

We last reviewed the software in 2022, back when the free trial was a generous 60 days. That aside, how does Camtasia compare to rivals now? We put the screen recording software to the test.

Camtasia: Pricing & plans

• Premium pricing, premium product

We’ve taken a look at many apps which offer subscription-based services, some as low as $3 a month, like ScreenPal, and some of the best free screen recorders, albeit with limitations, such as Flashback Express.

Camtasia is a more expensive beast. If does offer different prices depending on the subscription tier you choose. For instance, Camtasia Essentials offers screen and webcam recording, video editing tools, and text-to-speech transcription, for $180 / £171 a year.

Camtasia Create brings in AI-generated scripts, text-based video editing, audio cleanup, and over 200 voices and styles, for $250 / £237 per year.

Whereas Camtasia Pro includes video reviews and collaboration, AI-translated captions, AI-generated chapters, titles and descriptions, AI-generated avatar videos, and millions of premium assets, for $500 / £474 a year.

If you’re looking for a perpetual licence, these are still available if you’re part of a business, in education or the government, and will cost a one-off $300, $213 or $270 per user respectively. Do be aware though that unlike subscriptions, future updates will not be included for that price.

So yes, it’s at the top end of the price range, but we’d recommend you do download the trial version to at least give it a go. Not only did we find it a breeze to set up, Camtasia also includes some of the best video editing software tools in its field, a feature lacking in many other competing software we’ve tested.

• Plans & pricing: 3/5

Camtasia: Setup

• Really simple authorisation process to enable all needed features

Like all other apps of this type, you’ll need to authorise it for recording your screen, webcam, along with any audio sources. 

Other software can make this process opaque and confusing, but Camtasia does an excellent job at simplifying the process as much as possible: click on your webcam, and it’ll ask you to authorise the process. The same for your microphone, computer’s audio, and of course, your screen.

Camtasia will also open up your computer’s settings at the right location for you to do all of this. You’ll have to restart the app for the preferences to take effect, but once done, you won’t have to do it again, and Camtasia is ready to record.

• Setup: 5/5

Camtasia: Capturing

• Easy to set up your many recording parameters

Setting up a recording session is as easy as can be: you’re presented with a simple welcome screen offering you access to your most recent recordings, the option to create a new project from scratch, one based on a template (a wealth of which are available through Camtasia’s Asset Store), open a project not in the list of recent ones, or start a new recording.

By default, when setting up a new recording, Camtasia will capture your entire Desktop, but there’s a drop down menu to let you select a specific size or region, with a green border appearing to show you what’s going to be in the shot, and what won’t be.

You also have the option of changing the frames per second value from 5 to 60 (the default is 30). If your webcam supports it, you can control its resolution. You get to choose which microphone to record the external audio from, and whether or not to capture the system audio as well.

Once you’re ready, click on the big red ‘Rec’ button. You’ll be given a 3-second countdown, and the controls will disappear, letting you capture with no windows or menus getting in the way.

Stopping the recording is done via a handy keyboard shortcut displayed during the countdown, or via the menu bar on your Mac. You’ll then be taken to the Workflow area.

• Capturing: 5/5

Camtasia: Workflow

• A series simplified list of templates you cannot customise, but could be more than enough to give your project a professional look with next to no effort

Think of the Workflow as a staging area for your recording. You might be very happy with what you achieved during the recording, and don’t need to do any editing, so you can use Workflow to pretty up your project. For instance, you have 16 different layout templates to choose from, placing the webcam and your screen recording in different areas of the screen, with different effects applied to each. Should you need one, you can add a coloured background, or select additional effects such as increasing the size of the cursor, changing its colour, adding a reflection to your screen recording, a white border, etc, and finally you’ve got a bunch of filters to play with.

This is a great midway option, letting you quickly create a style you might like as long as you’re happy with the inability to fine tune the results. Still, this could satisfy most users, helping them finish in next to no time. If however you’re more of a hands-on, sweat-the-details kind of person, then it’s time to take a trip to Camtasia’s Editor (by clicking on the green button, top right of the interface).

• Workflow: 4/5

Camtasia: Editing

Camtasia includes some of the best video editing software for its market. Of course, this is no Premiere Pro, but it really sets Camtasia apart from most of its competition. It’s essentially a fully fledged non-linear video editing suite.

To the left is a sidebar giving you access to your recorded media, as well as a library of effects, transitions and animations, to help you professionally edit and composite your project.

The lower part of the interface is devoted to the timeline. This is where you build your project, adding clip after clip on multiple layers. You’ll notice that your webcam footage has been saved separately to the screen capture. The same applies to your microphone and system audio (which is why it’s advisable to always record with headphones on, otherwise the sound from one will bleed onto the other, making it very hard, if not impossible, to separate).

The advantage of having all these layers is flexibility. You can move your webcam footage around the timeline, resize it, and even remove sections as you see fit. The same is true from your screen capture, and any other media you’d care to add to your project.

Essentially, you have full control over your clips. You can trim them, split them, move them to different layers, apply effects and transitions, etc. All the tools you find in the sidebar can be dragged onto a clip, and the properties parameters found on the right can be altered until you get the exact look you’re after. Any effects or filter you’ve added while in Workflow are preserved when you switch to the Editor, and are now fully customisable.

If you want to add additional media or effects, locate them from the left sidebar, and drag them to your project, or onto the clip you wish to alter. Some Assets are labelled as ‘Premium’ (their thumbnail has a little crown top left of them). From our understanding, they’re included with the Camtasia Pro subscription, but you can also subscribe to them separately, for $200 a year.

Once you’re happy with your project and are ready to share it with others, the Export button can save your work to your local drive or upload directly to services such as YouTube, Google Drive, and TechSmith’s own online offerings.

This last process is as simple as they can make it: simply choose your format (mp4 is the default), and click on Export. If you want to get more technical, click on Option to gain access to all changeable parameters. Bear in mind the trial version will watermark your output. Once you’ve paid, that hindrance will no longer be in effect.

• Editing: 4/5

Should I buy?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

For more creative tools, we've reviewed the best screenshot tools for Mac.

Why pay money when you could get a tool that does the same thing for free? That’s the idea behind open-source software, where knowledgeable fans of the software work in their spare time to improve a tool for the benefit of all.

Sounds great, right, but where’s the catch? More often than not, it lies with a complicated and unattractive interface, with little to no explanation of how the software actually works. But if you’re looking for one of the best free screen recorder apps we've tested on PC, ShareX easily fits the bill. We were big fans of this bit of kit when we last tried it out - but how does the latest version compare to competitors?

ShareX: Setup

• Sparse and uncluttered

Hop on over to getsharex.com to download the screen recording software, launch the installer, and after a few clicks, ShareX is ready for use.

The interface is as sparse as they come. You have a series of menus in a sidebar to the left, and this is pretty much where everything you need to control the interface resides. The bulk of the interface is devoted to thumbnails of the screenshots you’ve recently taken, organised from most recent onwards.

• Setup: 3.5/5

ShareX: Screenshots

• Multiple, very interesting tools are at your disposal

ShareX’s functionality is devoted to taking and manipulating screenshots, and you have various options open to you, such as grabbing just a specific section of your screen (referred to as a ‘region’), the entire screen, or just an open window.

When you choose a region, you’ll find a toolbar at the top of the screen. From there you can select the type of region you’re after, which even includes its shape, from a traditional rectangle to an ellipse or even a freehand shape. There’s a lot of freedom and flexibility there, even if some might find such choices odd or superfluous.

The Rectangle Region tool has a really cool feature: it’s usually selected by default. Mouse over your screen, and you’ll see it resize itself automatically as it tries to guess which part of the interface you’d like to screenshot.

The traditional Rectangle tool automatically creates a thick coloured border around your selection. Changing its shade is a simple matter, but what we liked best was the ability to resize it and even move it around to capture the perfect section.

The ‘Line’ and ‘Arrow’ tools are great to point to a specific section of your screenshot. There are even text box options to populate your screenshot with information. We quite liked the ‘Step’ tool, which adds sequentially increasing numbers as you click on the screen, and ‘Magnify’ which, as its name implies, increases the size of a selected section.

If there’s sensitive information on the screen you’d rather not share with others, you’ll find the ‘Blur’ and ‘Pixelate’ tools essential.

None of these alterations are set in stone, and they can be moved around, resized and edited thanks to the ‘Select and Move’ tool.

There is a lot to enjoy here, more than most other screenshot tools we’ve encountered. Essentially, you’ve got yourself a free image compositor with your screenshot app, saving you the trouble of having to go to one to do further work on your screenshot after the fact.

Since we last explored ShareX, some new options have appeared which could prove very useful to many users. ‘Region (Light)’ for instance, does not show an overlay with all the tools mentioned above, while freezing the screen, giving you time to frame the perfect screenshot, if you’re trying to capture a frame of a video for instance. ‘Region (Transparent)’ doesn’t freeze the screen, but the overlay is also absent, letting you focus on what you wish to capture, rather than the tools on offer.

• Screenshots: 5/5

ShareX: Screen Capture

• Easy to use, once the default settings have been personalized

Screen Capture is an advertised tool of ShareX, but if your system doesn’t have ‘ffmpeg.exe’ installed, you won’t be able to use it right away. Thankfully, ShareX makes it a cinch to get it and install. Once done, you’ll have no problems performing screen captures.

You might find though that the screen was being recorded with no audio. If this happens to you, go to ‘Task Settings’, and choose ‘Screen Recorder’. This is where you can control how many frames per second you’ll be recording in, even set a delay prior to the commencement, as well as limiting your recording to a fixed duration. 

You’ll find audio preferences in the ‘Screen Recording Options’ section. This is where settings for recording quality, and audio codec are located. There’s also ‘Audio Source’ which may be set to ‘None’ (it was in our installation). Set it to ‘virtual Audio desktop’ and it will record sound coming from your computer. Choosing your attached microphone will allow you to record any external sound, although we couldn’t find a way to record both on separate channels.

• Screen capture: 3.5/5

ShareX: Hotkeys

• A nice feature, well implemented and easy to use

ShareX hosts many additional features that are designed to complement its core functionality. One of these is the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. 

You’ll see at a glance which settings clash with those from other software packages, as they’ll have a bright red rectangle next to them. Those that work without issues are green instead.

To fix the offenders, select one, type a different keyboard combination, and once it turns green, you’re good to go. You’re also completely free to alter the green ones as well to create shortcuts to suit your workflow. Now all you have to do is remember them.

• Hotkeys: 5/5

ShareX: Saving & uploading

• Default options can be easily altered to suit your workflow

You will notice that by default, ShareX is designed to send your screenshots to image hosting website Imgur. This can be changed to other photo storage and sharing sites in the ‘Destinations’ settings, where you’ll find a host of other options, such as ImageShack, Flickr, Twitter (aka X), and Google Photos, among others.

If this doesn’t appeal, you have the option of simply saving the shots to your computer. To change this, pop over to ‘After capture tasks’, and click on ‘Upload image to host’ to disable it (all enabled options are displayed in bold). This is but a sample of the modifiable parameters available to you.

For an app with a very unassuming interface, ShareX possesses many impressive tools, which can put other competing paid-for services to shame. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with the available options, even customizing them to suit your needs. If you’re in the market for a powerful, PC-only, versatile screen recording and capture tool, you could do far worse than choose ShareX as your default.

• Saving & uploading: 4.5/5

Should I try?

Try it if...

Don't try it if...

Need more tools? We reviewed the best screen recorders and the best screenshot tools for Mac.

Figma is a free web development tool that you can use in your browser. Designers can easily create wireframes and prototypes before full development begins.

The importance of good UI and UX can’t be understated. It’s effectively the key to attracting new users - and retaining them for longer. Users expect refined, intuitive apps with friendly user interfaces. Mockup tools like Figma help businesses develop realistic prototypes and spend time developing apps people want to use. 

Launched in 2016, Figma was bought by Adobe in September 2022. You might consider it a blend of Photoshop and Canva for professional designers. It aims to be simple, and has a strong focus on online collaboration.

Figma: Plans & pricing

Figma is a free interface design app with premium monthly and annual subscriptions for power users. Four plans are available: free, Professional, Organization, and Enterprise.

The free version is limited, of course. Users can create three Figma files and work on unlimited drafts. That’s not bad for casual users and freelance designers.

Professional adds unlimited files, team libraries, and advanced prototyping. It also adds a Dev Mode with annotations and a some admin tools. These add unlimited version history and private project sharing. Costs are $15 / £14 / $24 AUD per full seat (or user/editor) per month. For annual subscriptions, the prices drop to $12 / £11 / $19AUD per editor per month.

Students and educators can use Professional free, with verification.

Organization offers everything included in Professional, alongside org-wide libraries, analytics, centralized file management, and branching and merging  projects. It also includes single sign-on and more admin tools like unified admin. Dev Mode adds the ability to build private plugins for use across all projects. Professional is only available on an annual subscription, with costs broken down to $45 / £41 / $71 AUD per full seat per month. Dev Mode only is also available, at $25 a month.

For larger operations, the annually-billed Enterprise option is available for $75 / / AUD per full seat per month. The Dev Mode only option is $35/month. With Enterprise, advanced theming is added to the package, alongside REST API support, and setting default libraries. Dev Mode gains default coding languages and plugins can be auto-run. Meanwhile, admin tools are enhanced with dedicated workspaces for teams, guest access, user management, and advanced link sharing.

Figma: Features

Figma offers all the design tools you need for advanced prototyping. These range from templates and device-specific frames to importing projects from the Mac-only design app Sketch (which Figma resembles). 

Once you begin creating your wireframe or mockup, each component or element is added to the left-hand Layers pane. It’s here where Figma most closely mirrors Adobe’s top photo editor. But by opting for the familiar layer-based system, it offers greater control over each element - and makes it much easier to adopt across the team.

Easing the design process further, you’ll find templates for different devices under the Prototype tab to the right. This covers Apple products, large and small Android screen sizes, Microsoft Surface Pro 8, and even TVs. Designs can be previewed on a virtual device matching the frame template.

You can share designs and the tool grants a good level of control over how (and what) you send to others. From there, users can write comments, leave feedback, and - on the Professional and Organization plans - even have audio conversations with colleagues for real-time collaboration.

If you rely on collaborating online, Figma’s sister product, FigJam, will play a large role in this. Like Figma, this whiteboarding tool is simple to master, but comes with its own price plan. Helpfully, design files work in both tools, to help boost productivity and the creative process.

Post-sign off, Figma lets you export to PNG, JPEG, SVG, and PDF. That’s not a huge variety, but they are accessible formats - and, again, it means everyone involved in the process can view the finished design. 

Alongside the browser app, Figma is available on macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Note that the mobile versions have reduced functionality and are instead optimized for testing and discussion.

Figma: Ease of use

If you know how to position and resize shapes and lines, then you can use Figma. Basic design-work relies on dropping shapes, images, and text boxes onto a blank frame, then tweaking the properties to achieve the desired result.

Don’t underestimate Figma, though. The prototyping tool is vastly more powerful than it first seems. You’ll find all major tools - from scaling tools and text to smart pen tools - housed at the top of the screen. Keyboard shortcuts are also fully supported, for increased efficiency and better creative workflows. 

Online collaboration is another strength. With hybrid and remote working now the norm, it’s a non-negotiable feature for most design teams. Figma makes it easier to work together, from initial concepts to final hand-over.

Elsewhere, the team library ensures style guides and branding is maintained across projects. That helps teams build more consistent designs and maintain branding across the entire workflow - and, hopefully, fewer issues or back-and-forths once the product goes to the developers.

There’s also support for free and paid-for stock design components, widgets, and plugins created by the wider Figma community. 

Figma: Customer support

A vast resource of answers can be found on the Figma support pages at help.figma.com. Here, you can find everything from guides and courses to direct help via a dedicated search box. If you can’t find the answers you need, communications can be opened. However, there is no indication of an expected response time, and our question was left unanswered.

Figma has garnered a Trustpilot score of 2.9, with opinion split on key matters. These include the tool’s often sluggish performance, and concerns over customer support.

Figma: The competition

A collection of rival prototyping tools are also vying for your attention. How does Figma compare?

While competing tools (such as Framer and Proto.io) offer a desktop-like interface in a browser environment, only Figma attempts to deliver a desktop Adobe app in a browser.

Feature-wise, Figma has everything you need for effective prototyping with attractive design. It’s affordable, too, and the free version is excellent. Unfortunately for Figma, competing tools offer superior performance and easier access to advanced features.

Figma: Final verdict

Figma delivers modern, intuitive UI and UX design that is accessible to all. On the face of it, Figma should be easy to use, but while it appears to do everything a designer needs, performance is an issue.

Trustpilot issues aside, our testing showed that Figma’s browser app suffered from performance issues that didn’t affect other tools. The interface was laggy, and often unresponsive, even with the demo materials. This may be due to the plan selection, or some remote issue. Either way, it is worth keeping in mind when selecting a new UX prototyping tool.

We list the best mockup software.

ScreenPal offers video-centric tools for businesses, education and personal use. The app is compatible with PCs, Macs, iPhone, Android and Chromebook devices. For the purposes of this review, we’ll be exploring the desktop versions.

We last reviewed ScreenPal back when its name was Screen-O-Matic - and were generally pleased with the results on offer. Having tested out the previous version, we re-reviewed the software to see, after its name change, how it compares with the best screen recorder and best free screen recorder apps around.

ScreenPal Screen Recorder: Plans & pricing

• Many features for free - many more when you pay

Before we get started, we need to add a caveat to this ‘free’ moniker. While it’s true you can use the service for free, it should come as no surprise that limitations have been imposed on that tier. 

For instance, you’re restricted to a maximum recording time of 15 minutes, and the output will be watermarked. You won’t be able to record the system audio, nor will you have access to the Speech to Text captioning tool, amongst others.

However, you’re able to record from your webcam at the same time, specify which area of your screen to record, and add freehand drawings, text boxes, shapes, and so on - all while recording.

The video editing side of this app has greatly improved since we last explored it, making its feature set much more attractive, even for the casual user. If you need additional tools though and no restrictions, then you need to venture into the paid tiers. 

Solo Deluxe includes additional editing tools, the ability to work with up to 300 audio tracks, the best audio editor tool for a screen recorder, and removes any time limit on your recording, all for $3 a month.

Solo Premier doubles that price, but adds 8 million stock media clips to the mix (both images and videos), the ability to add custom branding, and offers unlimited cloud hosting, among others. 

$10 a month gets you Solo Max, which offers the additional inclusion of video quizzes and polls, premium content from stock image library Shutterstock, auto titles, summaries, and captioning, and advanced analytics.

And finally, there’s Team Business for $8 per user per month. You’ll get online collaboration tools, including team management and the ability to transfer ownership of your recording, and includes live chat support, phone support and live training.

• Plans & pricing: 3.5/5

ScreenPal Screen Recorder: Setup

• Control app from the browser, as long as you grant security access

There was a time, back in the Screen-O-Matic days, when you needed to control the recording process, in part, via your web browser. No longer. The specialized app, which already existed back then, now takes care of everything.

As usual, you need to grant the service permission to access your screen, your webcam, and so on. This is nothing unexpected as all services that offer such functionality require access to potentially sensitive parts of your machine’s software, and your modern security-conscious operating system needs to make sure you know what you’re doing. Still, the process is incredibly straightforward, and the app guides you through it.

The app’s overall design is pretty simple. You have buttons top right, access to your file system top left, and the rest of the interface briefly explains to you what each function does.

• Setup: 4/5

ScreenPal Screen Recorder: Recording

• Easy as clicking on a button - many live manipulating tools

Like many screen recorders, ScreenPal is incredibly simple to get started. Once you’ve clicked on the ‘Record’ button, top right, you’ll see an overlay on your screen. This shows you which part will be recorded. You can of course resize it and move the selection around if you’re not going to tape the whole screen. The webcam overlay can be moved anywhere within the designated area by dragging it around, or removing it altogether.

We liked that you have the option of blurring its background, or replacing it with a still image. There are default images available, but you can also use your own, or pull more in directly from Shutterstock. We were also able to effortlessly connect to our iPhone, rather than use our computer’s built-in webcam. A nice option to grab better quality video.

The floating window lets you choose between recording the screen, your webcam or both. You can see the maximum recording time allowed (as long as you’re not paying), the recording quality (from 480p to 720p to the entire screen), which microphone to choose should you have more than one connected, and whether or not to record the system audio (not possible for free users).

When you’re ready, click on the big red ‘Rec’ button.

What we found interesting are the tools you can apply as the recording goes on. You have a pen, a marker tool and an eraser, text boxes for which you have various colour options to choose from for both the text and its background fill, access to shapes, and a magnifying tool.

This allows you to draw attention to various areas as you record your video. We did notice that if you’re recording while a video clip is playing, the visuals will pause as you’re doodling on the screen, even though you can still hear the video’s audio in the background.

Once you’re done, click on the blue Pause button, which replaces the red Rec one. You then have the option of saving your recording as is, or performing some editing.

• Recording: 4/5

ScreenPal Screen Recorder: Editing

• At last - a decent, comprehensive set of editing tools

The video editing capabilities of ScreenPal’s free service are head and shoulders above what was available before it changed its name. Back then, you were pretty much limited to trimming the footage.

Now, you have a wide range of options which will allow you to properly edit your screen capture. You have tools to copy a clip, hide your webcam, the cursor or any overlay you added during the recording process, even move the webcam footage around on the screen. You can insert a new recording, add a new voice over narration, or some additional overlays, freeze a frame, insert music or sound effects, alter a clip’s speed, choose from a large number of transitions, alter a clip’s volume… Essentially, you have a lot at your disposal to fine tune your edit without having to use the best video editing software. It’s a remarkable and most welcome improvement over the last time we explored this app.

Saving your work is fast and straightforward, and unlike the previous version, you can easily go back to your project to edit it further. ScreenPal now acts like a proper editor which makes this app definitely worth checking out. And the watermarking only appears as an outro, which you cannot edit out unless you pay (obviously), but also doesn’t distract from the work you’ve produced.

• Editing: 4/5

Should I buy?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

For more essential content creation tools, we reviewed the best video editing apps.

Finding software that allows you to record your screen while on a budget isn’t always easy. If you’ve got a Mac, you could use the Screen Recording feature of QuickTime Player, but that doesn’t include any system sounds, nor can you record from your Webcam or a microphone, and this advice is useless for those working on a Windows machine.

Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder - a name that literally does what it says on the tin - offers everyone, everywhere, the ability to capture their screens right from their browser. Well… that’s the claim at least.

Compared to many of the best free screen recorders, we weren’t impressed last time we reviewed this app, but has anything changed in this latest version? We put the tool to the test.

Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder: Set-up & interface

• Looks simple and promising, and works as expected - on a PC… on a Mac, it’s a different matter

You can access Apowersoft’s screen recording facilities in two ways. The most appealing is directly through your browser, by clicking here. There’s also an optional software download, should you have problems getting it to work, which we explore later in this review.

There’s not really any interface to speak of. Just a large ‘Start Recording’ button, to the left of a large ‘Download App’ button. Click on the former to be offered various options. It’s through this that you can choose to record your screen, connect to your webcam, record your system sound, and external microphone. In today’s security conscious world, you’ll need to approve each of these the first time you wish to make use of them. This is all standard fare for Macs and PCs.

On the PC side of things, everything works as expected: once you hit that window’s ‘Start Recording’ button, and agree not to exceed one hour of recording time due to browser memory limitations, it’s smooth sailing all the way. Speaking of limitations, if you’ve elected to record your webcam, you’ll get a little popup window with you in it as expected, but it’s tethered to the webpage. Switch to another app, or do something else that obscures that page, and it’ll also obscure your webcam footage. Far from ideal.

With your recording done, you’re then offered a series of editing options, each of which take you to various other sites. The AI captioning works well but appears to be limited to 30 seconds, another website takes care of trimming your footage, and so on.

But on the Mac side of things, it’s not as rosy. Apowersoft can’t record your system audio in Safari, but at least everything else works as expected. However, once your recording is done, you have no editing options. Those little popup icons you get on the right of the recording when using a PC just don’t appear. Using Firefox all the options appear to work, even the computer audio, but every time we tried to record something, we were advised to download the app instead. We couldn’t get around that.

From this we conclude that recording from a browser is a nice novelty which works well on the PC, but isn’t that seamless on the Mac, and if you need to perform even basic editing, Mac users appear to have been left out of the loop.

• Set-up & interface: 3/5

Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder: Recording

• When it works, it records well, but the file format causes headaches

Once we managed to get part of the options up and running, everything worked fine.

You get to decide whether you want to record the entire screen, or just focus on one of your currently open windows. This is great. You’re given a 3-second timer, and the page starts recording your chosen part of your interface.

When you’ve finished screen-capturing, stop the recording and it’ll appear on the page, ready for you to play it back.

There's none of the best video editing software available to you. Saving the file downloads it to your computer. You also have the option of uploading it to your Apowersoft account, although you’d need to login for that.

The resulting file caused us some concern though. Most computer users rely on their operating system to be able to read the files they’re sent. Very few would go out of their way to add additional functionality to their device, and perhaps more so for Mac users.

Except here, they’d have to: Free Online Screen Recorder saves your clip as a .webm file which Macs cannot read natively.

Yes, you can download the free VLC reader, and play it back from there. And yes, you could also use the excellent free Handbrake, one of the best free video converter tools we've tried, which lets you change the format to something more ubiquitous - .mp4.

But the question remains: why can’t Apowersoft save your video as the universally recognised .mp4 by default?

• Recording: 2.5/5

Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder: App

• Records well, but it records well, but little to no editing options on Mac

So using the app might be a better option than the browser version (they kept pushing us to download it anyway, on either platform!).

Having struggled so much on the Mac, we thought we’d try it first, and we came away very pleased with our recording. Everything worked, including the system audio, and you have the option of recording the entire screen, or limit the area Apowersoft will record. Whatever you do during the recording is saved permanently to your video, and that includes the various callouts you can use during your session, such as a spotlight view (dimming everything except a large circle around your cursor), and an annotation tool which lets you draw on the screen. There’s also a button to take screenshots of your recording. All this is good.

You have a few interesting options when it comes to your webcam, which offers you the ability to blur your background or replace it with a choice of other locations. Unfortunately, the video capture from the webcam slowed to an absolute crawl when we tried it, like, less than one frame every second, so we thought it best to stick to a default normal background. One other option which must’ve been included just for fun, is the ability to alter your look: you can smooth out your wrinkles, increase the size of your eyes, add lipstick and blush… none of this seemed to affect the frame rate, and if you fancy putting on some virtual makeup, who are we to stop you?

When it comes to editing… we appear to have next to nothing. We couldn’t find a way to trim our footage for instance, which should be the most basic aspect of any video editor (heck, it’s available on Apowersoft’s PC’s browser version after all!). Instead, we could extract the audio, speed up or slow down the footage, change the volume… and that’s pretty much it.

On the PC side of things, just like with the browser version, the app offers a range of editing tools. You can add AI subtitles, AI translations, you can split videos, merge them, crop and rotate clips, among others. The point being, the PC’s implementation is miles better than what Apowersoft offers for the Mac.

So it’s not very good news for Mac users, but PC users can have fun with Apowersoft’s software… for about a minute. That’s right: although you have a one-hour limit on your recordings with the browser version, the app limits any recording to a single minute. If you record for longer, it’ll keep that first one minute and discard the rest. You can’t even choose which part to save.

You can remove this utterly crippling limitation by opting for a ‘VIP Upgrade’. This can be done through a yearly subscription (around $40 as of this writing) or a lifetime purchase (around $80).

Now last time we checked Apowersoft, we were far from satisfied. We struggled getting it to work - on any machine - and the file format they’d elected to use was one Macs couldn’t read natively: .webm (they do appear to have a thing against Macs even though they claim their software works on these machines).

Thankfully all of this has been resolved. The file format is now the standard .mp4, and most of the headaches to get the system to work have been ironed out… on the PC. The browser and app versions on the PC side worked great, even despite some of their limitations, and we can happily recommend either to anyone looking for a free screen capture tool. Not so for the Mac. Yes, the flaws to get it to work have been resolved, but where are the editing tools that come as standard on the PC, either in the browser or the dedicated app? They pop up effortlessly on the PC; we just couldn’t find them on the Mac. And let’s not forget that one-minute recording limitation for the app for both platforms. You might actually be better off taking a look at our ScreenPal review for a free alternative instead.

• Screen recorder app: 3/5

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Having the ability to record your screen, be it to show something that’s glitching for tech support, explain a feature to someone, or just for fun, is becoming an increasingly useful and important thing to do. 

And no, using your phone to record your computer screen is far from ideal, which is why we’re taking a look at FlashBack Express from Blueberry. Is it one of the best free screen recorders around or are compromises still evident since our last review?

FlashBack Express: Pricing and plans

• Free screen recorder with no watermark, only some limitations

PC-only FlashBack Express is free - and you can check it out by clicking here. However, the tool has limitations that are only lifted once you grab a Pro license. 

The Pro version is a perpetual license - no on-going subscriptions here. You pay once and you own the software.

In addition to offering one of the best screen recorders, FlashBack Pro also includes a full video editing software suite. You can add text, images, sound and video effects to your project, you’re offered more exporting options than the 720p MP4 FlashBack Express can use, and your footage won’t be crippled with watermarks either.

You purchase Pro via licenses, and the more licenses you buy, the cheaper the price for each gets. For instance, one license is usually $49, but is discounted to $39 / £33 as of this writing. Get two for $59 / £50, three for $89 / £75, and so on. Academic discounts are also available.

If you’re looking for streaming software to broadcast and record your gaming experience, neither the company's best free screen recorder Express nor Pro might be up to that task. But the developers also offer FBX for that purpose, with Free and Pro versions available.

• Pricing: 4/5

FlashBack Express: Interface

• Simple parameters, in an easy to understand interface, with some limitations

Once you’ve launched FlashBack Express, you’re graced with a very small window containing a handful of options. This is where you get to set your parameters, and you’ll find that there are a surprisingly fair number of them, for a free service.

First of all, you’ve got ‘Screen’. By default, it’s set to ‘fullscreen’. Click on that menu to choose to focus on a region of your screen, or a specific window instead. Top left of your screen (not the window), you’ll also find a menu with different size options (depending on your computer screen’s own dimensions).

Look around the edge and you’ll notice a selectable border. Click and drag on any of its handles to resize the area you’ll be capturing. It’s a very simple and hands-on approach.

Your next parameter involves your webcam. Here it’s simple: whether you have it switched on or not. This is also true of your microphone, along with a choice of devices should you have more than one connected. 'PC Audio’ is set to ‘off’, but that’s because it’s there to lure you to upgrade to the more advanced ‘Pro’ version mentioned above: Express doesn’t record your computer’s audio, save through your external microphone.

Same goes for ‘Video quality’: Express is set to 720p, so that menu is only there to entice you to go ‘Pro’, which can record at up to 4K.

You’ll find a cog wheel at the top of that small window, where the software’s settings and preferences are located, and to its left, is the ability to schedule a recording (funny how updated versions just switch the order of buttons: it used to be to its right). This is an interesting concept, and you’re offered numerous parameters, such as when to start the recording, and for how long to record. Additional features include when to repeat your scheduled recording, what to record (video, audio, or both), and what to do once the recording is completed.

• Interface: 4/5

Blueberry FlashBack Express: Recording

• Lights, camera, action - everything has to be done live

With FlashBack Express, you have no post-editing capabilities. Everything you want to see happening, you need to do it live so to speak. This obviously involves performing the right action at the right time that you wish to record, but it also applies to your webcam footage.

By default, you’ll find that video as a picture-in-picture, lower right of the interface. You can move it anywhere on the screen, and as you do so, you’ll notice you have three size options, the largest one being full screen.

If you fancy doing a two camera setup, moving from yourself to your desktop, this is something you’ll have to do during the recording process.

Otherwise, just leave it where it is, perform your actions, and stop your recording. This is done either via a keyboard shortcut, or by using the onscreen controls to the left.

• Recording: 3/5

Blueberry FlashBack Express: Editing & exporting

• No real editing, can only trim, although direct upload to YouTube is a plus

Your recordings are stored within the app itself, and to access your editing tools, you simply double-click on the one you wish to work on.

Except, calling that editing is a pretty generous way of referring to trimming. That’s right: you can trim the start and end of your recording and that’s it. This is hardly the best free video editing software we've tried. These are the only options at your disposal. At this point, you can understand why FlashBack Pro might become a tempting alternative.

When it comes to exporting, you’re able to save the file to your computer, or directly via cloud storage through your Google Drive or DropBox. If you’re satisfied with your recording, you also have the option of uploading it straight to YouTube.

• Editing & exporting: 2/5

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O&ODiskImage is a backup software product of O&O Software GmbH, a German software company founded in 1997. The name “O&O” refers to the initials of its founders, Oliver Falkenthal and Olaf Kehrer. It develops Windows software for PC optimization, data imaging, disk cloning, backup & recovery, secure data deletion, and administration.

O&O serves individual and enterprise customers in over 140 countries, including 43% of those listed in the “Forbes 100 International”, and it’s got plenty of pedigree when it comes to disk imaging and backup tools – we’ve tested the nineteenth version of O&O DiskImage Professional here.

Plans & pricing

O&O DiskImage 19 Professional has no free version and, unusually, there’s no Home version, either – this is a purely professional piece of software and only available in Professional or Server versions.

That’s pleasingly straightforward, and that trend follows through to the pricing. Professional Edition for one PC costs $50 for a lifetime licence or $70 for five PCs – ideal for smaller businesses. Server Edition costs $299 for a single licence.

Additionally, DiskImage 19 Professional is available in the O&O PowerPack, which also includes O&O Defrag, O&O SafeErase 19 Pro and O&O AutoBackup 6. This bundle costs $60 for a one-PC licence and $100 for a five-PC version. It’s an excellent deal.

Features

As with most of its contemporaries, O&O DiskImage 19 Professional lets users back up entire computers, operating systems, partitions or drives alongside specific file or folder selections. Those backups can be restored, incremental backups are supported, and it has handy tools for one-click PC backups, drive or disk cloning and the option to create bootable recovery disks.

Elsewhere, O&O offers options to read and validate backup image files, check your drives, map or disconnect network drives, convert or merge backups and mount or unmount drives as local options for users to navigate.

Delve into the advanced options and you’ll uncover more functionality. Multiple compression and encryption options are available, along with password protection, and you can split your backups into units of smaller sizes – handy if you have to store backups across a few different external drives.

You can configure the app to email you when backups are completed and automatically check backups for errors.

When creating a backup job, you can schedule your operations and program the app to complete specific tasks before or after your backups.

It’s a solid slate of backup features, but we can’t help but notice that other tools, like Genie or EaseUS, have more extensive scheduling options, and Macrium’s tools are better for developing commands to use around your backups.

Interface and use

O&O DiskImage 19 Professional has a straightforward interface that makes backup operations easy. Large buttons on the home page signpost users to all critical operations. Start a backup, and a window on the left is used to select what you want to preserve. Then, a wizard-style window allows the backup to be personalized.

Along the top of each window you’ll find large icons pointing you towards frequently-used settings, and the tools at the end of the app are sensibly laid out. If you don’t want to open the full app, there’s an Express version that puts key options in a tiny window – a handy shortcut – and the Start Menu has a link to directly open the backup creation wizard.

There are certainly apps that look cleaner and more modern, but O&O’s interface is straightforward and easy to navigate.

We tested our latest slate of backup apps with a 42GB document folder, a 2.5GB spreadsheet folder, a 162GB folder of media and an 82GB file that mixes all of those file types. We backed them up to three different SSDs to weed out any inconsistency.

O&O’s app proved to be one of the fastest in our testing. In our Media test it averaged 10 minutes and 25 seconds, and it preserved a mixed folder of files in 13 minutes and 2 seconds. It whizzed through our Excel files in just over three minutes. All three averages are comfortably at the top of our results table.

Its 14-minute time working with Documents was a little slower, but it was still in the top half of our results and not something to be worried about. This, ultimately, is a very fast backup app.

O&O DiskImage: Support

O&O’s official website has many support resources – from FAQs, whitepapers and manuals to a busy forum. Support requests can be made via a form, with faster responses available for premium customers, and a direct email address is also available. Sadly, though, there are no phone options.

Competition

Some of O&O’s key rivals in the backup software space include apps from Macrium, EaseUS and Genie9, and they certainly have their strengths – EaseUS and Macrium’s tools offer similar speed to O&O’s apps and some better features when it comes to fine-tuning and scheduling your backups.

Macrium is more expensive, though, and EaseUS is no cheaper. And with a good core offering and generous pricing that includes lifetime options, O&O competes well with a great combination of speed and value.

Verdict

Indeed, those two attributes prove to be some of O&O DiskImage 19 Professional’s biggest strengths. It’s a very fast backup tool with a great set of core features, and its pricing is extremely fair and straightforward.

You’ll get a slicker interface and more features elsewhere, and those in large enterprises may want more advanced options, like SQL support – but for home users and those in small and medium businesses, O&O DiskImage 19 Professional is a great, affordable choice. 

Streaming is huge. There’s tons of equipment to help make sure you keep up with the best of them. And that means investment. Sometimes, quite large investments. If only one crucial part of the equation could be free...

Enter OBS Studio version 31. It’s open-source, and therefore free, streaming software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also features some of the best free screen recorder apps you can get. Could it really be that the best things in life are free, or do you truly get what you pay for?  

OBS Studio: Interface

• An empty canvas, but an interface that is easy to learn

Grabbing your copy of the software is incredibly straightforward: point your browser to obsproject.com, click on either ‘Windows’ (version 10 or 11), ‘macOS’ (version 11 onwards) or ‘Linux’, to download the latest version. MacOS also comes in two flavours, for Macs that have Intel processors and for those that run on Apple Silicon.

The first time you launch OBS Studio, you’ll be asked a series of questions to help the software optimize itself to your needs. These are simple queries, but if you’re not sure what you’re after just yet, or wish to get back to the process at a later date, you can activate it at any time by going to Tools > Auto-Configuration Wizard.

You’re then graced with an empty canvas. Literally. If you’re new to streaming, this could feel a little daunting. OBS Studio does provide a quick start guide and an overview on their website to help you get started. But to be honest, it isn’t that difficult to find your way around, and a few minutes of prodding will help you understand how everything works.

• Interface: 3.5/5

OBS Studio: Streaming setup

• Preparing for a stream is easy - once you understand the process

OBS Studio is set up around the notion of scenes. Just as you would cut from one scene to the next using any of the best video editing software (or rather, the best free video editing software, in this case), here, you can create as many scenes as you need prior to going live. Name them, organize them in the lower left section of the interface, ready to switch from one to the other at any time.

Adding Scenes in that tiny little corner is easy, but by default, there’s nothing in them. That’s where the Sources tab comes in most handy.

Click on its ‘+’ button, and you’ll see all the inputs you can include. Anything from audio, to a coloured background, an image or video, a webcam, and, of course, a way to broadcast your desktop. It’s all there. 

And, if you happen to find a dreaded black screen when trying to access your desktop, make sure you allow OBS to have screen recording privileges in your computer’s privacy settings. If this is your first time with OSB, it should launch with a list of permissions to allow, with a series of buttons to get to each quickly.

Those who are concerned about revealing how messy their work environment is, will heave a sigh of relief when they realize they can limit what is streamed, to a specific window for instance, or even just a webpage.

• Setup: 3.5/5

OBS Studio: Issues

• Confusing interface for newbies, and upside-down media

OBS Studio features a huge amount of flexibility, but the interface doesn’t feel that user-friendly. It’s a bit like having to wrestle with its way of working, until you capitulate and choose to work on its terms. It feels like there’s always one too many clicks to get the work done.

For instance, when adding text to a scene, you can click on it directly in the preview window to resize it and move it around, and it almost feels like a double-click would allow you to edit it - like you can with image compositors. 

But this isn’t the case: you need to double-click on its listing in the Source panel in order to do that. Of course this is also where you get to choose its font, style, color, and so on. But it feels overly time-consuming to have to go there just to change a word, or fix a typo.

Be that as it may, once you’ve familiarized yourself with such peculiarities, you will find OBS Studio is a supremely flexible tool  - apart from one issue that we’ve also encountered in some video editing packages in the past which never fails to frustrate: any photo or video shot on an iPhone will appear upside down when imported - even on a Mac. The issue can be fixed by selecting the offending article and going to Edit > Transform > Rotate 180 Degree, but imagine having to do this when setting up a slideshow with dozens of images… this glitch has been in existence since the iPhone came out, 18 years ago! This does show the importance of preparing your clips prior to going live, should an unexpected glitch occur (and don’t they always?)

OBS Studio: Tools

• Many tools to help you create great content

It must be stressed however that for what you’re getting for free, these are minor inconveniences - and no software is perfect, right?

We found the options offered by OBS Studio to be impressive: each scene can be filled with multiple sources. These sources, once applied, can be reordered, exactly like layers in an image editor or video editing app, with the one above obscuring those beneath it.

One thing we particularly liked was the ability to reuse the same object in multiple scenes. Create some text or add a watermark in one scene, and you’ll see them available when creating a new source in the ‘add existing’ section. Even better, if you make alterations to one, those changes will be passed on to other scenes that contain the same source. 

Better still, if you need an object placed in a specific location throughout your stream, you can simply copy it from one scene, and paste it choosing ‘Paste (Reference)’ to not only enable those editing possibilities mentioned above, but also make sure its size and position on the screen are preserved.

But this is just scratching the surface: you have so many other tools available to you, like setting up transitions when cutting from scene to scene - there are but a handful available but you can also bring in custom ones via the ‘Add : Stinger' option.

You can include up to six audio tracks, name them, and even add unique settings and filters to each. The ability to include custom filters is also a possibility.

If you’re keen on keyboard shortcuts, you can set them up and customize them to your heart’s content through OBS Studio’s Preferences window.

Another great tool is Studio Mode. This splits your screen in two, showing you what’s being broadcast on the right, and displaying a preview of what could come next on the left. This allows you to set us the next scene during broadcast, even making alterations to it before showing it to your audience. This also works while using OBS Studio as a recording device (i.e., when recording something but not broadcasting it live).

• Tools: 5/5

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For more tools, we've also reviewed the best screen recorders and the best screenshot tools for Mac.