LiveDemo - Open-source alternative to Storylane, Navattic, and Arcade
by•
Create interactive product demos in minutes. Capture any workflow, add AI voiceovers and personalized text, then share it as a link, embed, GIF, or video while tracking engagement and collecting leads across your website, docs, and sales outreach.
Replies
LiveDemo
@gapostolov We moved off a hosted demo tool less because of price and more because the demo went stale every time the product shipped a UI change. Does self-hosting help there at all, or is a rebuild still manual? Also curious who ends up owning demo upkeep in your users' teams, marketing or sales eng?
LiveDemo
@artem_fedorovich
Hey Artem, good questions!
Self-hosting doesn't auto-fix staleness, but since demos are re-recorded from live product flows, updating after a UI change is usually a quick re-capture, not a rebuild.
Ownership varies, but we typically see marketing owning top-of-funnel demos, sales eng owning interactive demonstrations aimed at closing specific deals and solving prospect pain points.
Tracking live engagement metrics right inside the embed layer is a massive win, huge props to the engineering team🙌. qq does the media export system render the gifs and mp4 files directly on the local browser canvas or on the server side?
LiveDemo
@priya_kushwaha1
Thanks so much, Priya!
Really glad the live engagement tracking stood out.
Good question - the export rendering happens on the server-side by running a browser which auto-plays the demo while recording the screen.
And it is made available as mp4 and GIF formats.
Scarlett.
Excited to hunt LiveDemo today.
@LiveDemo helps teams turn product workflows into interactive demos that prospects and users can explore on their own.
Instead of relying on static screenshots, long videos, or repeated sales calls, LiveDemo lets you capture a workflow, add annotations, AI voiceovers, and personalization, then share it across your website, product, or documentation.
What stands out:
Capture any workflow in minutes
Add AI voiceovers and personalized text
Share demos through links, embeds, GIFs, or videos
Track engagement and viewer drop-offs
Capture leads directly from your demos
@byalexai Congrats on the launch. For teams that already use tooltips, walkthroughs, or video tours, what’s the recommended workflow for migrating existing demos into LiveDemo without losing SEO, analytics continuity, or user tracking? Any tips for keeping personalization effective at scale?
LiveDemo
@swati_paliwal
Thanks for the support!
Honestly, migrating is incredibly seamless because LiveDemo.ai functions as an embedded interactive layer rather than a standalone site.
That means there is zero impact on your SEO, you just swap out your old video or iframe player for our lightweight script on your existing pages.
For analytics continuity, we are working on building a feature for sending custom events directly from our tracking layer straight into your existing stack (like PostHog, Segment, or Mixpanel) to keep your historical data intact. It will be available soon.
As for personalization at scale, our API lets you dynamically pass user parameters like company names or first names right into the pre-defined variables of the captured walkthrough, so you can easily run personalized demos programmatically.
Since it's open source, can you self host the whole thing including the AI voiceover part, or does that piece still need a hosted API key from you guys?
LiveDemo
@talhakhalidmtk
You can absolutely self-host the entire core platform!
For the AI voiceover piece specifically, you need ElevenLabs API key and for the AI enchancing OpenAI API key
https://github.com/exploitx3/livedemo-deploy
RunEvr
@gapostolov Interactive demos can make a huge difference in product adoption.
How long does it typically take to create a polished interactive demo?
LiveDemo
@adana
Great question!
You can capture and build a core interactive flow in literally under 5 minutes.
If you want to deeply polish it - adding custom callouts, personalized steps, or matching it perfectly to a specific sales narrative coult take about 15 to 45 minutes.
It’s all about how customized you want the story to be!
RunEvr
@gapostolov Sounds great, will definitely give it a try!
Wishing you lots of success!
Congratulations on launch #5. How heavy is the embed on page load? We keep our landing page light for speed, so that's my main question before dropping a demo widget into the hero.
LiveDemo
@alieksia
Thank you! Great question.
The core embed script itself loads asynchronously, so it won’t block your main page layout or slow down your initial load time.
Once the main page is ready, the interactive steps and assets stream in seamlessly in the background.
Because it captures high-fidelity visuals, the asset payload can currently sit at a few megabytes, but since it's asynchronously loaded, your core site metrics stay safe.
That said, asset optimization and aggressive file-size reduction are actively on our immediate roadmap to make it even leaner!
@gapostolov Good to hear :) If it's async and the core metrics stay clean, the few MB matter much less to me. Thanks for the straight answer
Open-source + self-hostable is a smart wedge against Storylane/Navattic/Arcade — a lot of teams get nervous about product-demo data sitting on a third party's infra. I'm actually mid-way through recording my own product demo this week for a Product Hunt launch, doing it the old-fashioned way (screen recording + manual editing), so this caught my eye immediately. Curious how you're handling the "clickable" interactivity layer under the hood — is it recording real DOM interactions and replaying them, or more of a scripted overlay? Would genuinely consider something like this for the next one if it saves the manual editing grind.
LiveDemo
@abhineetarora
Appreciate the support!
Under the hood, we use a mix of screenshots and video capture to map out the walkthrough, rather than a live DOM replay.
It's built specifically to handle the flow smoothly and save you from that manual video editing grind.
That being said we are currently working on capturing DOM replay.
Good luck with the PH launch this week!
The answer you gave Ridhwik is more interesting than it looks. Advanced engagement analytics and lead capture sit behind a paid plan on cloud, but they are already in the repo for self hosting. That makes your free tier your most generous tier, and the people most able to run docker compose are exactly the founders and developers you say you built this for.
That is not necessarily wrong. Plenty of open core companies win by making the OSS version genuinely complete and charging for never having to think about infrastructure. But it seems worth saying out loud on the pricing page instead of leaving it to surface in a comment thread, because a developer comparing you to Storylane right now has no way to tell that the self hosted path hands them the tracking layer everyone else gates.
The staleness answer was the other thing that stood out. Refreshing after a UI change with a recapture rather than a rebuild is the actual reason these tools survive past month three.
LiveDemo
@abdullah_javaid3
Spot on, and thank you for the sharp feedback.
You're completely right, we want the open-source version to be genuinely complete for developers who run docker compose, not a stripped-down demo.
I will update the pricing page immediately to make this clear.
Also, glad you caught the recapture workflow, fixing that UI staleness is exactly why we built this!
@gapostolov A pricing page is a claim, and a developer comparing you to Storylane cannot check a claim. The repo is the thing they can check.
So the rule is worth more than the page. Every product feature lands in the repo, and cloud sells hosting only. Then the answer to whether the open source version is real is a commit log rather than a marketing line.
The pressure to break that rule does not arrive now. It arrives around version 3, when holding one feature back for cloud looks reasonable.
LiveDemo
@abdullah_javaid3
This is a brilliant take, and I appreciate the realism.
You are exactly right, a pricing page is just a promise, but the repo is the proof.
We are explicitly building this to counter the vendor lock-in of incumbents, so keeping the core platform fully functional in the repo is non-negotiable for us.
If we break that trust at v3, we lose the exact developer audience we built this for.
@gapostolov Non-negotiable is still a promise. The developers you want are the ones who have heard it before from people who meant it at the time.
What makes it structural is writing it where breaking it costs you something. A dated line in the README saying cloud sells hosting and nothing else is something people can hold you to in public. A license that makes gating awkward does the same job harder.
Took it for a quick spin and the recording flow felt surprisingly smooth, no awkward setup or lagging. Loved being able to share a live walkthrough link without juggling Loom tabs.
LiveDemo
@buketmdrp
Really appreciate you taking it for a spin, and I am glad to hear the capture setup felt completely seamless compared to the usual Loom workflow!
Finally a tool that makes product demos feel less like a slideshow and more like a real conversation. The Chrome app picked up my screen smoothly and sharing the live link with my team took seconds.
LiveDemo
@pelinm5wp
Thanks so much for the kind words!
Making the whole capture flow completely frictionless is exactly what we spent the most time tuning, so this is awesome to hear.