Screen Studio vs Tella: $9 or $13 a month, billed yearly

For a solo Mac user paying yearly, Screen Studio is the pick at $9 a month billed yearly, against Tella Pro at $13 a month billed annually; the order flips to $29 against $26 on monthly billing, and only Tella has a Windows recorder. So a solo Mac user who exports polished demos and pays yearly saves with Screen Studio; anyone on Windows, paying month to month, or sending hosted videos to clients lands on Tella.

The split under those prices is about where the video ends up. On one side sits a Mac editor that ends in a file: it records the cursor separately from the screen, zooms on your clicks after the fact, and exports MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, GIF or ProRes. Tella ends in a hosted page: the video lives on Tella with comments, analytics and, on Premium, your own domain, and you download a file only when you want one.

Feature by feature

The cursor is what Screen Studio sells. Because it stores mouse movement as data and adds the cursor back at export, it can smooth the motion, resize the pointer or change its shape after you stop recording. It also processes transcripts with Whisper or Apple's speech recognition on the Mac, saves the take to disk every two seconds, and records a connected mobile device over a USB cable inside a device mockup. Its roadmap still lists multi-clip recordings, merging several recordings into one project, as in progress on 13 November 2026.

Tella's pitch is everything after the recording. The pricing page lists transcription in 106 languages, AI-generated titles and chapters, call-to-action buttons, password protection, and analytics down to the last 5 individual viewers on Pro. Its changelog shows the product moving weekly: the 13 November 2026 entry added workspace-wide viewer lists, a keystroke overlay that shows Mac and Windows keys together, and a face-centering option for every layout. The Pro plan also includes 4,500 credits per user each month for its AI editing agent, credits that recording, editing and exporting never consume.

What each one costs over 12 months

The yearly card on screen.studio says "save 69%" and shows only the monthly equivalent, so the $108 is a calculation, not a printed total. Tella prints its yearly totals on its help page ($156 for Pro, $228 for Premium), and its pricing page shows the annual state as 50% off. Screen Studio puts every feature in both plans, so the only choice there is the billing period. For five people the Screen Studio line assumes five separate subscriptions, since the pricing section shows no team plan and the roadmap lists team subscriptions as work in progress.

The gap is narrow at one seat and grows with people: five Tella Pro seats cost 780 - 540 = $240 more a year than five Screen Studio subscriptions. That difference buys a Windows recorder, hosting with analytics, and shared workspaces. If nobody needs those three, the yearly Screen Studio plan is the cheaper line in the table.

Who should pick which

• Solo, on a Mac, shipping product demos to a website or social feed, happy to pay yearly: Screen Studio, at $108 for 12 months. The video is a file you host anywhere.
• A team where at least one person records on Windows: Tella. Screen Studio's FAQ says there are no near-future plans for Windows.
• Paying month to month for a short project: Tella Pro, $3 a month below Screen Studio's monthly price.
• Videos sent to clients under your own name, with viewer tracking: Tella Premium, the plan that removes Tella branding and adds a custom domain.
• Videos longer than 30 minutes shared by link: Tella, which caps a clip at 6 hours, while Screen Studio's links stop at 30 minutes and anything longer goes out as an exported file.

How we record with Tella

Every video we keep goes through Tella: the YouTube channel, internal training and coaching recordings, per the Tella catalogue entry. We record alone in short takes, pausing and restarting so that a 10-minute video is about ten one-minute clips, switching between face and screen; an editor can download those raw takes one by one later. The person who edits our YouTube videos in Tella is our community manager, who had no editing background; that replaced a paid freelance editor, and one session produced five YouTube videos in about four hours. When a guest joins, we switch to Riverside and keep Tella for solo screen recordings.

After a recording, we download from Tella in 4K with the separate clips and the subtitle file alongside, so the subtitles can be uploaded again to YouTube, and we export a square cut for LinkedIn. We have not run a Screen Studio subscription, so everything about Screen Studio on this page comes from its own site.

Test both before paying

Tella's 7-day trial needs no card, and it is enough to judge the editor, with two limits: trial exports are HD at 30 fps, and trial clips stop at 2 hours. Raw-recording export and video uploads stay locked until you subscribe. Screen Studio's pricing section lists no trial, so the cheapest real test is one month on monthly billing, $29. Record the same three-minute demo in both during that week and compare the exports at the size your viewers will watch.

Three things decide the result, each with a number. Every machine that records in Screen Studio needs macOS 13.1 or later. Tella Pro caps 60 fps exports at 5 minutes, so a longer tutorial at 60 fps needs Premium. And when a Tella subscription ends, existing videos stay shareable but recording, editing and exporting stop, which matters if Tella is where your library lives.

For the wider field of Mac recorders, see our Mac Loom alternatives, and if the question is Tella against an async messaging tool instead, Tella vs Loom covers it. Tella's plans and our notes sit on its catalogue page.

Tella is an affiliate of this site: the link on its catalogue page earns us a commission and carries 20 percent off for three months. Screen Studio is not an affiliate.