Recordly: A Free Alternative to Screen Studio You Can Self-Host
If you've ever needed to record a clean, professional-looking screen capture for a demo or tutorial, you've probably run into Screen Studio. It's beautiful, but it's also $99 one-time and Mac-only. For the rest of us, Recordly is a refreshing open-source alternative that works in the browser and costs exactly nothing.
I stumbled on this project while looking for a way to record short demos without the overhead of OBS or the price tag of premium tools. Recordly is still early, but it already does the one thing most developers need: record your screen and output a clean, shareable video.
What It Does
Recordly is a web-based screen recorder. You give it permission to capture your browser tab, a window, or your entire screen, and it records that feed as a video file you can download. That's the core loop.
Under the hood, it uses the MediaRecorder API available in modern browsers. No Electron app, no external dependencies you need to install. Just a static site you can either use hosted or self-host.
The project lives at github.com/webadderallorg/Recordly and is licensed under MIT.
Why It’s Cool
A few things make Recordly stand out for developers:
Zero setup. Open the page, click record, grant permissions, done. No configuration files, no scene setups, no output settings to forget. It’s designed for speed.
Self-hostable. Since it's a static HTML/JS app, you can toss it on GitHub Pages, Netlify, or any static host. That means you control your data. No recordings being uploaded to some third-party server.
Lightweight. The entire codebase is a handful of files. If you want to tweak the UI, change the output format, or add features, it's trivial. That's rare for recording tools.
Works cross-platform. Since it runs in the browser, it works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You only need a modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari 16.4+).
How to Try It
The easiest way to use Recordly is to just open the hosted version. The README in the repo doesn't have a direct live link yet, but you can clone it and serve it locally in two commands:
git clone https://github.com/webadderallorg/Recordly.git
cd Recordly
python3 -m http.server 8000
Then open http://localhost:8000 in your browser. Click the record button, choose what to share, and stop when done. You'll get a .webm file downloaded automatically.
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