Open Source Bandicam Alternatives

OBS Studio is software designed for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content, efficiently. Getting a camera, a screen, a game and a microphone into one live video usually means a hardware mixer or a paid studio suite. OBS does it on the machine you already own.

The work is organized as scenes built from sources. A scene combines window captures, images, text, browser sources, webcams and capture cards, and you can create an unlimited number of scenes you can switch between seamlessly via custom transitions. Adding a source, duplicating one and adjusting its properties all happen in the same panel.

The production tools reach past arranging pictures.

• Audio mixer: per-source filters for noise gate, noise suppression and gain, plus VST plugin support.
• Studio mode: a scene previewed and adjusted before it goes live.
• Multiview: eight scenes displayed at once for monitoring and single click transitions.
• Hotkeys: nearly every action bound to a key, from scene switching to recording control, muting and push to talk.
• Modular docks: interface panels rearranged or popped out into their own windows.

OBS Studio runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS 12 and later, and Linux, distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License or any later version. The repository holds the source, while guides, forums, build instructions and the developer API documentation live on the project's site and wiki. The project is community maintained and funded through Patreon, Open Collective and PayPal.

ShareX folds screen capture, screen recording, image editing, file uploading and a pile of small utilities into one Windows application, replacing the several tools those jobs are usually split between. It is free, carries no advertisements and needs no account.

The organizing idea is the workflow. A hotkey triggers a capture method, an after capture task decides what happens next, and an after upload task handles the result, so one key press can capture a region, open the editor, save locally, upload, shorten the link and leave the URL on the clipboard.

The pieces that make up those chains are many.

• Capture methods: fullscreen, active window, active monitor, region, scrolling, last region, custom region, screen recording, GIF recording and auto capture.
• Annotation: rectangles, arrows, text, speech balloons, step numbers, highlights, magnification and spotlight effects drawn during region capture.
• Redaction: blur, pixelate and a smart eraser for hiding sensitive details before a screenshot leaves your machine.
• Upload destinations: images, text, files, folders, clipboard content and URLs sent to many services, with custom uploaders and guides for Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Cloudflare R2.
• Utilities: OCR, QR codes, color picker, ruler, hash checker, image effects, video converter and more.

The project names developers, designers, support teams, content creators, technical writers and QA testers as its audience. Installers, a portable build and development builds are distributed through the website, GitHub releases, the Microsoft Store and Steam.

Screenity is a screen recorder and annotation tool that lives in Chrome. There is no time limit, no watermark and no sign in, which removes the usual reason people ration what they record.

Capture covers a tab, a selected area, the whole desktop, a single application or the camera alone, with microphone or internal audio and push to talk. Videos stay on your own machine, no data is collected, and the extension keeps working offline.

Most of the tool sits in what happens around the raw capture.

• Annotation: draw anywhere on the screen and add text, arrows and shapes as you record.
• Focus tools: smooth zoom, click and cursor highlighting, spotlight mode and blur over sensitive parts of a page.
• Editor: cut, trim and crop, remove or add audio, and set an alarm that stops the recording for you.
• Camera effects: AI-powered backgrounds or blur applied to the camera feed.
• Export: save as mp4, gif or webm, or send the video to Google Drive for a shareable link.

Install it from the Chrome Web Store, or load a release build yourself, in which case it runs local-only with no API calls, sign-in flows or platform features. A development version needs Node.js 14 or newer, and enabling Google Drive uploads means swapping in your own OAuth client id. The current MV3 releases are licensed GPLv3.