Launched this week
Capptivo is a free, open-source screen recorder and demo editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Record locally, add follow-cursor zooms, polish the look, burn on-device captions, and export, no account, no subscription. Give your demos the spotlight they deserve.
Pretty nice app, I'll take a look. One piece of advice, though: having it signed is very important, especially for MDM-managed macOS computers in companies. Unsigned commands for Gatekeeper can be blocked for users.
Capptivo
@nativlab Thank you! Yes, I'm planning to sign the app. I just have an issue with my Apple Developer account. I've contacted Apple Support and I'm still waiting for their response.
Loving the app so far! I did run into a bug on Windows 11 that might help.
When I try to export, the process fails with:
EncodingError: Decoding error.
Also, the custom background I selected isn't applied during export—it ends up rendering as a solid black background instead.
Not sure if the two issues are related, but hopefully this helps. Keep up the awesome work!
Capptivo
@alireza_moqadam Thank you for your feedback! I'm already working on the export error. I'll fix all the reported issues and optimize everything I can so Capptivo becomes the best free, open-source alternative on the market.
Capptivo
@zackdn Thanks so much! Really glad annotation stood out it’s my favorite part of Capptivo too.
Quick tip: you can use annotations on their own without recording, and also while you’re recording. Hope you enjoy it when you give it a try!
Since everything is local with no account, the thing I'd want to know before trusting it with a long demo: if the app crashes or the machine sleeps mid-recording, is there any autosave of what's already captured, or does a crash lose the whole take? That's usually the moment people switch tools permanently, right after losing twenty minutes of a good recording.
Capptivo
@raffay_sajjad Totally fair concern. Capptivo writes the recording to disk continuously as a crash-safe fragmented MP4, so a crash mid-take doesn’t wipe the whole thing. Most demos are a few minutes anyway, so you shouldn’t run into that, and under the hood there’s a lot of work (fallbacks, proxies, etc.) to keep editing smooth. Capptivo is still early, and a lot of improvements are coming soon.
I tried with my Mac. macOS 26.5.2. After donloading, I try to open and:
"Capptivo.app" Not Opened
Apple could not verify
"Capptivo.app" is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy."
I know Apple is very strict, perhaps too much? but I think it is important to polish this security issues first. We, the users, cannot know all those details, what is right and what is wrong and in case of doubt we trust Apple first. This is what we know is always in our side.
Capptivo
@narcismirandes The app isn't signed yet because I'm currently having some issues with my Apple Developer account. In the meantime, you can bypass the macOS warning by running this command:
This seems to be a bug. After selecting the recording area, the application became completely unresponsive—I couldn't start the recording or even close the window. I had to restart my computer twice to resolve the issue.
Capptivo
@mrbrjan Thanks for reporting this, and I'm sorry you ran into that. Could you let me know which platform you're using macOS or Windows? It seems to be working fine on macOS, so I'd like to narrow down the issue. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience. I'll investigate and fix this bug as soon as possible.
Congrats on the launch!
I switched from Screen Studio to Recordly. What sets this apart from Recordly?
Capptivo
@rwicqsi Thanks! Congrats appreciated. I tried Recordly too it’s a great product. Capptivo stands out because it’s built with Rust, so it’s lightweight, and it has features Recordly doesn’t, like annotations, word-follow-up captions, and deep customization. Use whatever fits your needs Recordly is a solid option too. If you give Capptivo a try, I’d love your feedback!
@idboussadel Cool! I'll give it a try when I record my next product demo!