Recordly

Overview

Recordly is an open-source desktop app for recording and editing screen captures with motion-driven presentation tools built in. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, combining platform-specific capture with a renderer-driven editor and export pipeline for demos, walkthroughs, and product videos.

Key Features

• Automatic zoom suggestions, smooth cursor movement, motion effects, and styled frames with wallpapers, colors, gradients, blur, padding, and shadows.
• Dynamic webcam bubble overlays with positioning, mirroring, shadow, roundness, and optional zoom-reactive scaling.
• Drag-and-drop timeline editing for zooms, trims, speed regions, annotations, audio regions, and crop-aware edits, with projects saved as .recordly files.
• Recording of an entire display or a single app window, with microphone and system audio capture and native capture backends where supported.
• MP4 and GIF export with quality, frame-rate, loop, size, aspect ratio, and output dimension controls.
• Community-driven extensions and a marketplace for cursor click sounds, device frames, browser mockups, wallpapers, render hooks, and settings panels.

Use Cases

• Creating product demos and walkthroughs.
• Recording tutorials and educational videos.
• Producing quick social posts as MP4 or looping GIF.
• Adding polish to raw screen captures without a motion designer.

Getting Started

• Download a prebuilt release for macOS, Windows, or Linux.
• On Arch Linux or Manjaro, install the recordly-bin package from the AUR with yay -S recordly-bin.
• To build from source, clone the repository, run npm install, then npm run dev; use npm run build for packaged builds.
• On macOS, if a locally built app is quarantined, remove the quarantine flag with xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Recordly.app.

Deployment & Requirements

• macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later.
• Windows 10 20H1 (Build 19041, May 2020) or later for the native Windows Graphics Capture helper and best cursor-hiding behavior.
• Linux on modern distros; system audio generally requires PipeWire.
• macOS build from source requires Xcode Command Line Tools.
• Linux Ubuntu/Debian build from source requires build-essential, cmake, libx11-dev, libxtst-dev, libxrandr-dev, and libxt-dev.

Before You Adopt

• License: Other. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• On Linux, cursor hiding is not currently supported through Electron desktop capture.
• On Linux, enabling the rendered cursor overlay while using Electron desktop capture may result in exports showing both the real cursor and the styled cursor.
• On Windows builds older than 19041, recording can fall back to Electron capture and the real OS cursor may remain visible in recordings.
• System audio support varies by platform, and Linux system audio generally requires PipeWire.
• Locally built macOS apps may be quarantined by macOS.