The best screen recorders for Windows and Linux in 2026

You can record your screen on Windows or Linux with a free tool in under a minute, but the right recorder depends on what happens after you press stop. The best screen recorders in 2026 fall into three groups: studio tools that give you full control (OBS Studio), quick recorders that get one clip out fast (ShareX, the Windows Snipping Tool, Kooha), and recorders built around the next step, whether that is sharing a link with your team (Loom), editing a tutorial (Camtasia) or keeping the recording with your notes (Barside).

This guide compares nine screen recorders on what matters day to day: what they can record, the limits of the free version, where your files go, and what they cost as of September 2026. On a Mac? Five of the nine already run on macOS (see the Platforms column).

The best screen recorders at a glance

1. OBS Studio: the best free screen recorder overall, on Windows, macOS and Linux.
2. Barside: the best for recording into your notes, with a webcam bubble and share links, on Windows, Linux and Mac.
3. ShareX: the best free all-in-one capture tool for Windows, with region recording and GIFs.
4. Loom: the best for short video messages that a team watches from a link.
5. Camtasia: the best for edited tutorials, courses and training videos.
6. Snagit: the best for screenshots with the occasional short video.
7. Snipping Tool: the best built-in option, with nothing to install on Windows 11.
8. Kooha: the best simple recorder for Linux desktops.
9. Bandicam: a long-standing pick for recording games on Windows.

How we chose

We looked at screen recorders that run on Windows, Linux or both, and compared them on five things:

• What you can record: a whole screen, one window, a region you draw, your webcam, your microphone and the computer's own sound.
• The free version: time limits, watermarks and caps on the number of videos.
• What happens after you stop: editing, sharing, and where the file is stored.
• Ease of use: how many settings stand between you and your first recording.
• Price: taken from each product's official pages in September 2026. Prices are in US dollars, before sales tax.

Barside is our product. We include it where it fits, and say where others are better. For screen recording it fits one job very well (recordings you keep next to your notes), and it is not the most powerful recorder on this list. OBS Studio is.

Comparison table

The Loom price is for monthly billing; paying yearly saves up to 17%. Camtasia Starter still puts a watermark on videos from the Camtasia editor; Camtasia Essentials, at US$179.88 a year (as of September 2026), is the first plan without one. The Bandicam price was a sale price on its store when we checked.

The best screen recorders, reviewed

1. OBS Studio

OBS Studio is free, open-source software for video recording and live streaming, and it is the most flexible free recorder on this list. It runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on macOS 13 and newer, and on Linux its project publishes a Flatpak and a PPA for Ubuntu 24.04 and newer.

Best for: anyone who wants full control, from tutorials with several sources on screen to gameplay and live streams.

Strengths:

• Scenes built from sources: window captures, images, text, browser windows, webcams and capture cards. Switch between scenes with custom transitions.
• An audio mixer with per-source filters such as noise gate, noise suppression and gain, plus support for VST plugins.
• Studio Mode, to preview a scene before it goes live, and hotkeys for scene switching, recording, streaming and audio.
• Plugins, and Lua and Python scripts, for anything the app does not do on its own.

Limits: the power comes with a learning curve. You set up a scene and its sources before your first recording, and the options take time to learn. OBS Studio has no timeline editor, so trimming, captions and sharing happen in other apps.

Price: free.

2. Barside

Barside is a free desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac. It keeps your notes, tasks, reading, meetings and recordings in one library on your computer. Its screen recorder saves each recording into a note, where it plays, trims and shares without another app. For every detail, read the guide to recording your screen into a note.

Best for: tutorials, bug reports, walkthroughs and lectures that you want to keep next to the notes they belong to.

Strengths:

• Screen + audio records a whole monitor or one window, and Audio only records sound alone. Add your Microphone, the Computer audio, or both.
• A round Webcam bubble in three sizes, with Mirror, a Background (None, Blur, Remove (only you), or one of five ready-made backgrounds) and a Filter such as Touch up, Warm or Mono. The bubble appears on the chosen screen before you record, so you can drag it into place first. Barside finds you in the picture on your computer, and camera frames are not uploaded.
• Pause and resume, then Stop & save from the floating recorder or from the tray.
• Trim under the player cuts the start and end without re-encoding, so it is quick and loses no quality (a video's new start snaps to the nearest keyframe). The trimmed clip is a new file, and Ctrl+Z brings the original back.
• Share link uploads the file and copies a link that anyone who has it can watch on barside.space. It needs a free Spaces sign-in. Free links play for 7 days and take files up to 50 MB. With Barside Plus, files can be up to 2 GB and a link can stay until you remove it.
• Make clips turns a recording into short vertical clips with captions, made on your computer. See turn long videos into short clips.

There are two quality settings. Standard records up to 1920×1080 at 30 frames per second. Share-friendly fits the picture within 1280×720 at 24 frames per second, about 45 MB for five minutes, which keeps share links quick to upload.

Limits: Barside records a whole screen, part of a screen or one window, and the webcam bubble is only in screen recordings (keep it inside the part you record). There is no timeline editor beyond Trim and the clip maker, the frame rate tops out at 30 frames per second, and recordings export as WebM (the clip maker makes MP4 files). Each recording can be up to 1 GB. In Barside for Mac, Computer audio needs macOS 14.2 or later.

Price: free. Barside Plus is optional (US$20 a month or US$200 a year, plus sales tax) and adds bigger share links that can stay until you remove them, encrypted cloud backup and sync between your computers.

3. ShareX

ShareX is a free, open-source capture tool for Windows, with no advertisements. It records the screen as a video or as a GIF, takes screenshots of a region, a window, the full screen or a scrolling page, and runs tasks after each capture, such as annotating the image, reading its text or uploading it.

Best for: Windows power users who capture all day and want region recording, GIFs and uploads in one tool.

Strengths:

• Region capture with drawing and annotation tools, including blur and pixelate.
• A customizable workflow system, with tasks that run after each capture and after each upload.
• Uploads to a wide range of destinations, with support for custom uploaders.

Limits: Windows only. The number of settings is large, and ShareX is built for captures and quick shares rather than long, edited videos.

Price: free.

4. Loom

Loom, now part of Atlassian, records your screen and camera and turns each recording into a link your team can watch, comment on and react to. It has desktop apps for Windows 10 and later and macOS 12.3 and later, a Chrome extension, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. Loom has no desktop app for Linux or ChromeOS.

Best for: teams that swap some meetings for short video messages.

Strengths:

• Each video is a link you can share or embed, and viewers can leave comments, emoji reactions and tasks.
• Transcripts and captions in more than 50 languages.
• An editor that trims, stitches clips together and adds text, arrows and boxes.
• Business + AI adds AI titles, summaries and chapters, and removes filler words and silences.

Limits: the free Starter plan allows 25 videos per person, each up to 5 minutes, at up to 720p, and removing Loom branding needs the Business plan. Your videos are stored on Loom's servers.

Price: Starter is free. Business is US$18 per user a month and Business + AI is US$24 per user a month, billed monthly, and yearly billing saves up to 17% (as of September 2026). To compare it with a recorder that keeps files on your computer, read our Loom alternative guide.

5. Camtasia

Camtasia, from TechSmith, is a screen recorder and a full video editor for Windows and macOS, with nearly identical features on both. It records your screen, camera, computer sound and microphone on separate tracks, then lets you edit on a timeline or edit the video like a text document.

Best for: training videos, online courses and product tutorials that need a polished edit.

Strengths: cursor effects and annotations that show each step, captions, text-based editing, and, in the higher plans, AI voices, avatars and translation.

Limits: it is a yearly subscription (TechSmith offers no monthly payment) and the most expensive tool on this list. The free download of the editor includes every editing feature, but exported videos carry a watermark until you upgrade to Essentials or higher. There is no Linux version.

Price: billed yearly as of September 2026: Camtasia Starter US$39 (Snagit plus the Camtasia editor, whose exports keep the watermark), Camtasia Essentials US$179.88, Camtasia Create US$249 and Camtasia Pro US$599 a year.

6. Snagit

Snagit, also from TechSmith, is a screenshot tool first, with a capable screen recorder. One license covers the Windows (10 and 11) and macOS (14 and later) versions.

Best for: people who mostly take and mark up screenshots, and sometimes need a short video.

Strengths: scrolling captures of long pages, screen recordings with your voice and your webcam as picture-in-picture, and Grab Text, which copies the text out of a capture.

Limits: no Linux version, and its video editing is basic next to Camtasia's.

Price: US$39 a year for an individual subscription, with a 15-day free trial (as of September 2026).

7. Snipping Tool (Windows 11)

The Snipping Tool that comes with Windows 11 records video as well as screenshots. Press Win+Shift+R, drag a rectangle over any part of the screen, and record. Since version 11.2307.44.0 it can also record your PC audio and a voice-over from your microphone.

Best for: one quick clip, with nothing to install.

Strengths: it is already on your computer, it records any rectangle you choose, and the same app takes screenshots and copies text out of them.

Limits: no webcam overlay and no editor of its own: Edit in Clipchamp opens the clip in Microsoft's Clipchamp editor to add captions or audio. It is a quick tool, not a studio.

Price: free with Windows.

8. Kooha

Kooha is a free, open-source screen recorder for Linux with a minimal interface: you click the record button without first configuring a pile of settings. It records through PipeWire and your desktop's portal (xdg-desktop-portal), and it installs from Flathub.

Best for: Linux users who want a simple recorder that just works.

Strengths: it records a monitor or a portion of the screen, with your microphone, the desktop audio or both; it saves WebM, MP4, GIF or Matroska files; and it lets you set a delay, the frame rate and whether the pointer shows.

Limits: Linux only, with no webcam overlay and no editor. Recording a single window is an experimental feature that is off by default. If Kooha does not start, its README points to a list of which desktops support its screen capture portal.

Price: free.

9. Bandicam

Bandicam is a long-standing recorder for 64-bit Windows 7 to 11, with a separate macOS version, and it is popular for gameplay. It records the screen, DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan games, a webcam, consoles and other external devices, and audio, and it has scheduled recording, drawing on the screen while you record, and trimming.

Best for: recording games on Windows.

Limits: the free version of Bandicam 2027 stops each recording at 5 minutes. Its recordings have no watermark, but videos you edit and export in the free version do. Bandicam requires a business license for work or commercial use.

Price: a personal license for one PC was US$33.26 a year, or US$53.90 once for Bandicam 2027, and a business license started at US$49.46 a year, all shown as sale prices on Bandicam's store in September 2026.

How to choose a screen recorder

Start with the job, not the feature list.

Then check four questions before you commit:

1. Region or whole screen? If you need to record a rectangle you draw, choose the Snipping Tool, ShareX or Kooha. Barside records a whole screen or one window, and window recording is often the cleaner choice anyway, because nothing else on your desktop shows.
2. Will your face be on screen? OBS Studio, Barside, Loom, Snagit, Camtasia and Bandicam record a webcam. Barside's bubble shows before you start, with background blur or replacement, so you can check how you look first.
3. Where should the file live? OBS Studio, ShareX, the Snipping Tool, Kooha, Bandicam and Barside save on your computer. Loom stores your videos on its servers. Barside uploads a recording only when you choose Share link, or when you turn on Barside Plus cloud sync or cloud backup.
4. Do you use Linux? On this list, your choices are OBS Studio, Kooha and Barside. Loom, Camtasia, Snagit, ShareX and Bandicam have no Linux desktop app.

Tips for better screen recordings

A few habits make any recorder look better:

• Record one window when you can. It keeps private tabs, messages and notifications out of the video, and viewers see a larger picture.
• Silence notifications first. Turn on your system's do-not-disturb setting before you record, so a chat message does not appear in the middle of a demo.
• Test your sound for ten seconds. Record a short test, play it back, and check that your microphone is not too quiet next to the computer's sound.
• Choose the size for where the video goes. A 1080p recording is right for a tutorial you edit, but it makes a big file to share. Barside's Share-friendly quality, for example, fits five minutes in about 45 MB.
• Tell people before you record a call. Computer audio records everything that plays on your computer, including other people's voices.
• Trim the start and end. Viewers skip long intros. A quick trim of the first and last seconds makes a recording feel finished.

What to do with a recording after you stop

A recording is raw material. In most tools you now open an editor, a sharing service or a transcription app. In Barside the next steps sit under the player in the same note: Trim, Share link and Make clips, which cuts a long recording into vertical clips with animated captions by editing its words.

To keep a walkthrough in front of your team, post its share link in the chat of a Barside Space for your team or community and pin the message. Owners and moderators can pin up to 50 messages in a Space, and a "Pinned" bar at the top of the chat opens the list.

If you record calls rather than your screen, Barside can also transcribe calls on your computer, with each line labeled You or Others. You can draw a diagram with Excalidraw in the same note and record your screen while you explain it. And because recordings live in notes, the search bar finds them from any app.

For more ways to turn recordings into something people watch, read our guides to the best AI clip makers and the best transcription apps. If you are moving away from a cloud recorder, the Loom alternative and OpusClip alternative guides compare the details side by side.

Works well with a screen recorder