Recordly: Create Polished Screen-Recording Demo Videos

Overview

Recordly is an open-source desktop screen recorder and editor for creating polished walkthroughs, demos, and product videos on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Built with Electron and using PixiJS for scene composition, it combines capture and editing so users can add zooms, cursor effects, styled frames, and other presentation touches without a separate motion-design workflow.

It is aimed at people who need more than a raw screen recording, such as product teams, educators, and developers making demos. The editor supports timeline-based changes and saved .recordly projects, with MP4 and GIF export.

Key Features

• Record a display or app window, with microphone and platform-dependent system audio support.
• Edit trims, zoom regions, speed changes, annotations, crop, and extra audio on a timeline.
• Add cursor smoothing, motion blur, click effects, and automatic zoom suggestions from cursor activity.
• Overlay webcam footage with adjustable placement, styling, and optional zoom-reactive scaling.
• Style the composition with wallpapers, colors, gradients, blur, padding, corners, and shadows.
• Export MP4 or GIF, with format-specific quality, frame-rate, loop, and size settings.
• Save and reopen projects as .recordly files, and extend the app with community extensions.

Use Cases

• Product teams can make feature walkthroughs with zooms and branded-looking frames instead of sharing unedited captures.
• Developers can record reproducible demonstrations of application behavior and export them as MP4 or GIF.
• Educators can combine screen recordings, webcam footage, annotations, and speed changes for instructional clips.
• Support teams can create short visual explanations, using timeline trims and cursor emphasis to focus on a specific workflow.

Getting Started

Download a prebuilt release from the GitHub releases page, or run from source:

git clone https://github.com/webadderallorg/Recordly.git recordly
cd recordly
npm install
npm run dev

See the README for platform prerequisites, build commands, and usage details.

License in Plain Words

No standard license was detected. Without a license, the default copyright rules apply: you may read the code, but not reuse it. Check the repository or ask the authors.

Alternatives

• pear-rec: pear-rec combines screenshots, screen and audio recording, video capture, and GIF creation, while Recordly focuses on editing polished walkthroughs with timeline and scene tools.
• openscreen: OpenScreen offers demo-focused capture and editing features similar to Recordly, but is archived and no longer maintained.

Considerations

• The project is active, with regular commits and releases, and contributions from dozens of developers. Recent issue handling and pull-request merging are also reported, so it is not dependent on a single contributor.
• It requires Node.js for development. Native capture helpers and build prerequisites differ by platform, and Windows native capture requires Windows 10 build 19041 or newer.
• Linux recording uses Electron capture APIs. Cursor hiding is unavailable there, and system audio generally requires PipeWire. On older Windows builds, fallback capture may leave the real cursor visible.
• macOS capture features require macOS 14 or newer. Audio capture behavior is platform-dependent.
• The README identifies the project as AGPL 3.0. Teams should assess that license against their distribution and integration plans.