CleanShot X vs Loom: $35 once, or free clips under 5 minutes

Pick CleanShot X when the capture leaves your machine seconds after it exists, and keep Loom when the video is a message a team has to watch, comment on and find again. The test is a week of tallying: count your captures, and for each one note whether it lived for one glance or whether someone had to return to it. We run CleanShot all day here on the Mac side of the desk, and we have never run a paid Loom seat, so everything on Loom's side below is read from Loom's own pages, not from our accounts. The full detail of what we do measure sits on the catalogue entry.

The pages already ranking for this comparison are affiliate roundups. The one that ranks highest is an affiliate directory carrying a "get 10 percent off" link for CleanShot X and pushing a third tool called Supercut in the same breath, which tells you whom the page serves. None of the pages I read did the year-cost arithmetic or stated Loom's caps plainly. Both are below, from the vendors' own pricing pages.

Check the platform before anything else

This question kills half the decisions before price even comes up. CleanShot X is Mac-only: its pricing page states the app requires macOS 13.0 or newer, and the page offers no other download. There is no Windows version of CleanShot X, so if your team is mixed or on Windows, this comparison is over and Loom is the answer by default.

Loom's own home page says its recorder is for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Its download page offers two recorders, a desktop app and a Chrome extension that records over any window, full screen or a specific area. The extension is the fastest path from a browser on a machine where you cannot install anything.

Beware the older reviews you will meet on this query, some of them dated years back. Limits they describe may no longer hold: Loom's download page today lists "record over any window, full screen, or specific area" and "highlight mouse clicks". Check the vendor's page before deciding on any complaint you read second-hand.

Do the arithmetic on a year, then on three

CleanShot Basic is 35 dollars, paid once, for the full Mac app with one year of updates and 1 GB of cloud storage. Update renewal after that year is optional, at 19 dollars per year. Now set that against Loom Business, which its pricing page lists at 18 dollars per user each month on monthly billing. Multiply by twelve and one seat costs more than six times the CleanShot licence in the first year alone; the licence never expires, the seat does. Loom's own FAQ states annual billing takes 17 percent off, so paying yearly softens but does not close the gap.

The honest counterweight: Loom's Starter plan is free, and for a lot of people it is genuinely enough. It is not a trial. It carries 25 videos per person, 5-minute recordings, transcriptions in more than 50 languages, comments and emoji reactions, and it admits up to 50 members to a workspace. If you record fewer than 25 videos between two cleanups and your takes stay under 5 minutes, the free plan answers the question "is Loom's free plan enough" with yes, and CleanShot's one-off purchase buys you nothing on that front.

CleanShot's subscription tier, Pro, is 10 dollars per seat each month billed annually, and it is what buys unlimited cloud storage, custom domain and branding, and SSO. That tier is the one to compare with Loom Business, not the one-off licence, if what you want is hosted links with team controls. The whole grid, including what each route includes, is on CleanShot's plans page as we recorded them.

Download and try before paying: free trial, or refund

Loom's pricing page answers the free trial question with a 14-day trial of its Business + AI plan, on top of the permanent free Starter tier, so you can download the recorder and test unlimited recording time for two weeks without a card. CleanShot's FAQ says plainly "we don't provide a trial", but both purchase routes carry a published 30-day money-back guarantee, which functions as the trial: buy, use for a working week, and claim the refund if the gesture does not stick. The test Louis runs, from the tool sheet: count for a week how many times you wanted an arrow, a blurred field or a scrolling capture and could not have one with the built-in shortcut. Zero answers means the built-in key is enough and neither tool earns the money.

Read the caps before the second month

This is where each tool breaks, and the figures are published. On Loom Starter, the break is double: the 25-video ceiling per person, and the 5-minute recording limit. A video of 5 minutes and 30 seconds is not a plan choice, it is a re-recording. Both limits lift on Business, which lists unlimited videos, unlimited recording time and unlimited members. On CleanShot Basic, the break is storage: 1 GB of cloud. Screenshots are light, but screen recordings at the 4K quality the page lists are not, and that gigabyte fills on a heavy month of clips. The page also notes cloud plans sit under a fair use policy, so "unlimited" on Pro means within CleanShot's published fair use, not without bound. And Basic stops receiving updates after year one; the app keeps working, it just stops moving.

Keep Loom when the team watches together

Do not switch to CleanShot X if your videos are watched by a team. This is the one case where staying put is right, and the affiliate roundups ranking for this query do not say it. Loom's paid tiers are built around the workspace: unlimited members, video comments, emoji reactions, transcriptions, closed captions, watch-later lists, and password-protected or workspace-restricted videos. CleanShot's sharing is a link to a file; its team features are administrative (centralized access management, SSO, SCIM on Pro), not collaborative. A viewer cannot comment inside a CleanShot link the way they can inside a Loom one.

Our own split on the desk follows the same line: CleanShot is the disposable half of capture, shoot it, send it, forget it. Anything meant to be kept is recorded elsewhere, and the case where the video is a deliverable rather than a message is Tella's job, not Loom's and not CleanShot's.

Put your own week in the table

CleanShot is an affiliate tool on this site: we earn a commission if you buy through the link on the fiche. Loom is not, and we earn nothing if you choose it.