Recordly: record demo videos that look edited, for free

Raw demo footage usually looks like raw demo footage: a wandering cursor, long stretches of nothing, your messy desktop in the background. The polished version — auto-zooms, smooth cursor motion, a styled frame around it — normally means hiring a motion designer or subscribing to Screen Studio. Recordly open-sources that workflow (the README states AGPL-3.0; the repo had 32,822 stars as of October 8, 2026, with v1.4.0 shipped on September 8): after recording it suggests zooms based on cursor activity, smooths the cursor, and drops the finished composition into a frame with wallpapers, gradients, rounded corners and shadows, ready to export as MP4 or GIF.

Core features

• An open-source Screen Studio alternative: zoom suggestions driven by cursor activity, plus cursor smoothing, click bounce and motion blur; the webcam bubble can react to zooms so it stays balanced during motion.
• Timeline editing: drag-and-drop zooms, trims, speed regions, text and image annotations and extra audio tracks; projects save as .recordly files you can reopen.
• Frames and backgrounds: built-in wallpapers, solid colors, gradients, background blur, rounded corners, padding, drop shadows and aspect-ratio presets.
• Extension marketplace: a community extension system — click sounds, device frames, browser mockups and wallpapers install from the marketplace.
• Native capture on three platforms: macOS 14+ via ScreenCaptureKit, Windows 10 19041+ via Windows Graphics Capture with WASAPI audio, Linux through Electron’s capture APIs.

Typical use cases

• An indie developer cutting a product demo for Product Hunt or X.
• Embedding a cursor-polished walkthrough in docs or a bug report.
• Remote teams recording internal tool walkthroughs and sending them straight to the wiki.

Quick start

Download the installer for your platform from the releases page, record a clip, and start from the zoom suggestions it proposes — tweak and export. You can record a full display or a single app window with microphone and system audio together, pick a quality preset on export, and set GIF frame rate and looping separately. The site at recordly.dev has the feature tour; Arch users can install recordly-bin from the AUR.

Summary

If you want motion-designed demos without a subscription, Recordly is one of the few open-source answers; it handles the look, while LosslessCut handles lossless trims on the same footage. Two notes: the README states the license is AGPL-3.0, so read the terms before redistributing; and the Linux build neither hides the cursor nor matches the macOS build’s polish. The project accepts PRs, and you can track the pace of releases since v1.4.0 in the repo.